We won't win because we're playing nice

[Onlooker]

BBV is obviously a good government group, a sort of Naderite group whose main failure is that they are not engaging in a political struggle. If the fraud issue is to get feet, some group needs to come forward and say, "The Republicans stole the election, and we have some of evidence right now and every day are discovering more."

No one has come out and said that the election was stolen and Bush did not win. If that is not done, there will be no major news story. BBV or some other group needs to rise to the challenge of making the fraud story into a political issue, in which case all the tools of politics (distortion, exaggerations, doubletalk, and so on) will be at their disposal.

[Bush_Eats_Beef]

1. To beat Rove at his game, you have to play it harder than HE does.

That's it.

Lee Atwater had "deathbead remorse" and started making phone calls to the people he screwed when he knew he was on his way out.

Rove doesn't CARE. Why don't people get that? Everything that we are going through in this country right now...the "Swift Boat" UTTER BULLSHIT Kerry had to endure...it was all orchestrated by Rove, and ROVE DOESN'T FUCKING CARE. Part of what he LIVES FOR is BEATING his opponent...the lies, the humiliation...where is the mystery, folks? The man LOVES to destroy lives, and he had become an unchallenged EXPERT at it.

The Democratic party needs a Karl Rove. If the party keeps thinking it "doesn't want to stoop to that level," all I can say is "welcome to extinction."

I thought James Carville was gonna be our Rove in the last election.

I was wrong.

[Ardee]

6. What will we win

if we become the opposition? I firmly but politely reject your premise. Getting the Democratic Party to get its act together and actually oppose Bush and company does not have to entail playing dirty politics. I would not vote for either of them should that occur.

[Bush_Eats_Beef]

7. I don't have the answer for this, BUT...

...Rove HAS TO be dealt with.

And NOT on HIS terms...that's how he wins. HE dictates the rules, he controls the outcome.

A guy like James Carville could stand up to Rove without turning the Dems into "the opposition"...he's tough enough to get the job done. But for reasons known only to Carville, this election seemed to lack a sense of urgency. He seemed to have fun ridiculing and taunting Tucker Askew on "The Today Show," but in the final analysis he was just another participant on the losing team.

I don't have the answers.

But the person who DOES knows how to handle Rove.

[Ardee]

8. Do you believe in the truth?

Do you stand on principles? Do you say "damn the results I will speak my conscience"? Well apparently Kerry and the neoconservative leaders of the Democratic Party do not.

The way to defeat Rove is by refusing to play his game and by standing up and speaking clearly that which you strongly believe to be the truth. In my opinion this election came down to believing either the lies of Bush or the lies of Kerry.

[Bush_Eats_Beef]

11. The one thing that I still don't understand about Kerry...

...why he, for all intents and purposes, took a month-long "time out" in August while Rove and his Texas money men HAMMERED him with the Swift Boat ads. FREE airings of the FULL CLIPS as "news items," 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, on MSNBC, CNN, Fox...and while others expressed their outrage, there was no "damn the results I will speak my conscience" speech from the target of the attacks.

At the time, on DU, posts from people asking "What is Kerry doing? Why isn't he responding and challenging this?" were most often met with replies of "Shut the f**k up, Kerry knows what he's doing."

There were a LOT of flame wars on these threads about Kerry's "strategy" in dealing with attacks from Rove, Hughes and Bush.

Newsweek claimed (if you want to believe them) that in private with friends and family members, Kerry regularly and emotionally vented about the Swift Boat ads during that "silent" time...the article specifically mentioned several calls he made to his daughter Vanessa.

Then there are the comments from Keith Olbermann (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6210240/) on Kerry's latest e-mail and video:

"But the video is just plain weird. The phrasing of the start of the relevant passage—“Regardless of the outcome of this election”— is open to the same kind of parsing and confusion usually reserved for the latest release from Osama Bin Laden. Those seven words are extra-temporal; they are tense-free. In them he could be describing an election long-since decided, or one whose outcome is still in doubt.

And the timing and delivery of the message are equally confusing. No notification to the media? When much of the mechanism of political coverage is kick-started by statements like this one? And its issuance on a Friday afternoon— the moment of minimum news attention so famously titled “Take Out The Trash Day” on the NBC series “The West Wing”?— is perplexing, if not suspicious.

It has the vague feel of deliberate ambiguity, as if Kerry is saying to those who are plagued by doubts about the vote just seventeen days ago, that he agrees with them, but they shouldn’t tell anybody. It’s exactly what these confusing times do not need: more confusion."

So I just...don't...know.

:shrug:

[Ardee]

13. I get a headache

when attempting to assess the absence of intelligent strategies in either the Gore or Kerry campaigns.

In the absence of any inside information I would have to go with my gut reaction; that the conduct of the democratic campaigns begins with the mantra "first we do not anger the corporations".....

Whatever happened to political candidates who were not ruled by polling data, who had coherent vision and confidence in the nation's ability to see the truth and get on board?

Oh no, now we get Rove and infinite polls, and minute interest groups , focus groups, telephone polls, push polls, lies and distortions, and not just from the GOP. Right here on this forum we get a small but very vocal group of neocons who try mightily to distort the progressive message, to distort the reasons for yet another democratic loss, who try and obfuscate and push for even further swings to the right, chasing Gaia knows what.........

The single most absurd political happening is Kerry's attempts to position himself for the '08 race....Oh shit!

[Ardee]

14. sidebar alert

Edwards /Clinton or reverse in '08?

[nashville_brook]

9. he's sleeping w/the enemy n/t

[boojumhunters]

12. eliminate Rove

We don't need to do the smear and lies campaign for everything... the only thing that needs to happen is to bring Rove down. If he falls, dragged through the dirt, not only will it stop him, but any of the sleazeballs that were coming up through the ranks seeing him as a hero will think twice.

[BlueDog2u]

15. I humbly suggest

That if we want to stop this bulldozer, the operator who is ready for a fall, is Ohio SOS Blackwell. Let's concentrate on what he's done in this election. Then move on to strategize about how to expose and bring down Rove.

[Oak2004]

17. No, for more than one reason

No, because it's not possible to get away with such things unless you've got the power to make the Justice Department and the major media look the other way. We don't have that power.

Look at what they're doing right now to crucify the handful of Democrats around the country who either cheated, or were confused and double voted. If there was widespread funny business of any sort, they'd festoon every tree in Washington DC with Democrats (or any other opposition party -- I'm far from convinced that the Democrats have much life left in them as a major party).

No, because dirty means have a way of morphing into dirty ends. As a former Republican, I had a front row seat for the corruption of the Republican Party into a fascist party. I even briefly dabbled in some of the slime at a very low level, and I mercifully had the insight to see what it was doing to me. The means play a big part in bringing birth to the ugly end.

Note I said dirty means -- not hard hitting means. We don't have to make up stories about the Republicans to discredit them. We live in an America where the rest of the western world discusses how they can legally arrest our leadership for war crimes -- what kind of rumor could we concoct that would be worse than this kind of truth?

Hitting them hard with pointed truth till they bleed out voters was not done this past election, and it hasn't been done by any leading Democrat that I know of. Instead the DNC is so concerned about presenting some fictitious parody of moderation that they've become accessories to the crime of deceiving the American people.

More importantly they did not take seriously the warnings they received about electronic voting. Most of the Democrats, in fact, still seem to believe there's little wrong with the technology. They should be rallying people to plague the media and their county election officials until black boxes and hackable tabulators are replaced with a verifiable voting system. Where is their righteous anger? Instead we read stories about how buddy-buddy the likely next head of the DNC is with Karl Rove. Again they don't need to fight dirty. They just need to fight.

No, because the effect of playing dirty is to create cynicism and reduce voter turnout, which favors them.

And finally no, because it's wrong. Keep in mind Lee Atwater's deathbed misery, and ask yourself if that's the way you'd want to die, too.

[Carolab]

2. I AGREE!

If the DEMS just come out and say, "We believe the election was stolen and we are going to get to the bottom of it for the sake of democracy", what IN THE HELL are the Republicans going to come back with?

That they are ANTI-democracy? That they won fair and square? If they say that--then the DEMS should say, then what's wrong with investigating it? If you won, let's PROVE it!

[truehawk]

3. We have to be tough and presistant.

Randi Rhodes on AirAmerica is doing a pretty good job!

[Us vs Them]

4. We need to buy media time.

Sorry to be so blunt, but this is the only way. Now is the time for us to consider allocating funds to airtime. It has been proven that Democrats are efficient and generous benefactors when under pressure. We've effectively raised money for the investigation cause, now it is time to start raising money for the education cause.

[Roger_Otip]

5. direct action

get out onto the streets and get seen - and video it.

[nashville_brook]

10. i like this

where's george soros? moveon.org? kerry's got some xtra cash.

[Nightjock]

16. Once the evidence is collected completely

we will no longer be "nice" about it.
That's what I would like to believe.