Classic Quotes from the Imploding Left

"Divisive Results"

Edwards had it right when he spoke of Two Americas.
Those Two Americas just threw up a big brick wall between them in the last 2 days.
I don't think any of us can knock it down. (source)

"Those Religion Wackos!"

The talk of values on tv and i heard it a lot on CBS because that was the network on which i watched most of the time last night. it's not values, it's a terrible form of Christianity, where you don't have a god to love but a devil to hate and sinners to punish. that is your hard-core bush-supporting evangelicals. (source)

Out-Jesused?!

Bush made a conscious decision not to be "out- Jesused." The only way to fight him was to show his supporters that their candidate had feet of clay, that he did not in fact live the life they thought he did. (source)

Facing Reality

There are more conservatives out there than liberals, and as I wrote at length here, they stand for things we are diametrically opposed to. We can't siphon the "racist" vote, or the "anti-gay" vote, or the "religious nutcase" vote. And the numbers are saying that those constituencies are very large, even if we liberals don't want to believe that. (source)

We need to SIMPLIFY our message, and as someone else said up-thread, celebrate REAL family values- health care for all, clean environment, respect for LIFE on our terms, etc.

For crying out loud, this is why we lost the election. Stop looking for conspiracy theories and start looking for answers. Kerry lost this election, as Gore did...now what are you going to do about it? You can scream fraud all you want, but it's not going to change anything. We (i.e. the democrats and their supporters) have to stop playing the blame game, and get their own house in order.

Solutions

Reframing the argument. In the coming era, Pro life could mean protecting people at all stages of life. e.g. Pregnant single women with low income and little access to affordable healthcare are more likely to have an abortion. If you want to stamp out abortion, you have to demonize all the root causes of abortion, not just sex and not the procedure itself. Improve access to education, expand section 8 housing, fight for a higher minimum wage, etc. By using the momentum of the theocrats against themselves we can bring mainstream-conservative Christians into our tent but it will take years (probably decades) to reframe the arguments sufficiently so that a 3 second sound bite with a few code words thrown in will move 50+ million voters.

I do think we have to understand that Rove has changed the make up electorate. We can't go buy official party registrations; Rove has increased the size of the reliable conservative electorate and put us at a greater starting point disadvantage. This has helped Republicans beat expectations in both 2002 and 2004. Traditionally Presidential parties take a beating in the sixth year of a two term president, but Clinton beat that rule in 1998, and I would ignore it in 2006- we are going to have to fight for every inch

Fraud alone is not why Kerry is behind in the popular vote by 3+ million.(Although if all the absentee and provisional ballots are counted, this number will decrease). And even if Kerry won Ohio, a 3 million vote deficit and a Rethug Congress would make Kerry's presidency impossible to govern. The likely outcome is that W runs again in 2008 and wins. (source)

Conspiracy

Mike Malloy covered this on his AirAmericaRadio show last night.
Four republican backed, religious fundamentalist christian inspired companies have cornered the touch screen voting machine market. They are:

ES & S, Diebold, Sequoia, SAIC

Our despair, on the other hand, is undiluted. American liberalism is going into a deep internal exile. This will be, at least with regard to our public institutions, Tom DeLay's America--craven toward the economically powerful and vicious toward the economically weak, contemptuous of open debate and thuggish toward an increasingly embittered world. It would be comforting to believe the pendulum will naturally swing back. But, as my colleague Jonathan Chait has argued, the Bush administration and its allies have gone to great lengths to insulate themselves from democratic pressure, to make decisions in secret, and thus to prevent public opinion from forcing their hand. Already, the president is claiming a mandate for partial Social Security privatization and regressive changes in the tax code-- even though he rarely campaigned on these issues and there is no evidence the American public voted for them. The pendulum will not inevitably swing back. It will have to be moved back by a political opposition that knows what it believes and knows how to fight for it.