Look, the electorate is simply not going to get very jazzed about the Democratic Party. I say that, not as some disinterested skeptic, but as a member of my county’s Dem committee who knocks a couple of thosuand doors every election cycle (And in VA, we have six or seven elections every year whether we need them or not). I simply mean that the party doesn’t really stand for anything that would get me to knock thousands of doors every year. How could it? We only have two viable parties in this country, but reality is sure as Hell not binary. Ideologically, neither party is firmer than a bundle of wet noodles.

I put in all that work, year after year, not because of my hopes and dreams of what the Democrats will do in office, but because of the proven nightmare of what Republicans do in office. They aren’t a party, a collection of ideological positions, anymore — they’re a cancer. They survive by exploiting, if not creating, whenever they are in office, realities conducive to the continued subjugation of the country to the fear and loathing they campaign on. I’ve always voted solidily Democratic because the Republicans have always, in my adult life (I didn’t start voting until after they had taken over the segregationist franchise from the Dems) taken the wrong and foolish side of every issue. But I took this nation’s basic sanity for granted, and didn’t think that the right side needed more than just my vote. I always assumed that bad or stupid policy positions might prosper for a time, but would be punished by the electorate before they got out of hand, because stupidity results in bad real-world consequences, that the voters would eventually notice and react accordingly. Well, I believed this until the results of the 2002 election convinced me that none of us can afford to sit back and just assume that there is some safety net that will keep the electorate from letting these goons push their schtick so far that we won’t be able to snap back, that the factors, like a free press and the climate of reasoned and informed discourse it should foster, that would bring us back from the stupid and evil before the nation was irrevocably committed, would be undermined fatally by their schtick.

All this by way of observing that some House candidate in SC raising, effortlessly, nearly a million dollars overnight because people hate the Republican incumbent, has a larger lesson. Maybe I’m just projecting my own outlook here, but a million raised overnight for a candidate whose personality and policy positions no one really knows much about, is almost certainly an anti-Republican, not a pro-Democratic, phenomenon. Maybe the fact that we are the anti-Republican party is our real strength right now. Sure, going to the well too often for too long on that, becoming permanently the party that survives by ginning up unreasoned fear and loathing of Republicans, would make us into just a second Republican party. But right now, and for the foreseeable future, until and unless continued and consistent rebuke by the electorate of their methods weans them of their reliance on ginning up unreasoned fear and loathing, fear and loathing of the Republicans themselves is not unreasoned, and needs to guide sound governance. Keeping the Republicans out of office isn’t sufficient as a basis of governance, but right now it’s clearly a necessary condition for the continued survival of our republic.

(Warning–it’s a PDF)

Real life also has a way of opening their eyes; I know in the last handful of years his views on abortion and end-of-life have changed dramatically. But by the time he actually reaches a more centrist stance, he’ll have moved on to the next world and won’t be voting for any of our candidates or issues from there…

Between now and then, he’ll view jerks like Joe Wilson as an aberration, unaware that his party has been completely hijacked and once aberrant behavior is the norm.

eCAHNomics (108) — there are better resources on the topic out there, but that was the quickest one I could get my mouse around. There’s a veritable encyclopedia out there of different trolling behaviors, worth studying them to know what we’re up against.

As long as we’re working on health care reform, you can expect any thread which addresses the topic to have a visit; any hot thread in terms of readership and any related to criminal investigations and prosecutions are also potential targets. They can’t have any of that stuff going on.

Just wait until immigration reform comes up…