For a change of pace, mainly because recent political events are so putrid for the most part, I thought I'd present this Alex Wagner interview with Dick Cavett – you can Google him (sad that there's apparently no place for Cavett or someone like him on network TV anymore)...
...though I suppose Stephen Colbert is cut somewhat from the same cloth, as they say (
here)...
...and this report by Rachel Maddow is stunning as far as I'm concerned; as anyone who knows anything about this site whatsoever has figured out, I routinely take what I consider to be well-deserved shots at the Repug Party...but at least THEY know who constitutes their base.
As for the band of well-compensated Beltway losers who don't know a thing, apparently, about what truly constitutes the base of Team “D” (based partly on
this), it looks like they're absolutely refusing once again to present themselves as an alternative, to say nothing of defining enough of the voters they need and recruiting/promoting someone to speak to those voters (yeah, it's nice that Mikey the Beloved is being true to his word and apparently his PA-08 seat is going to open up, but that won't mean a thing unless we figure out which voters we need to target, field a candidate to speak to those voters on the issues they care about, and then get those voters to show up on election day)...
...and I heard this on the way home tonight, and this to me goes out to the national Democratic Party organization – they got rolled last week because they didn't show any backbone first and foremost...don't piss all over the base and tell us that it's raining (team R must be laughing their asses off).
Update 11/14/14: This is a wholly other tangent I guess, but I think it ties into the theme of cluelessness on the party of Democrats (at least the national organization and some in the media, including the otherwise respectable Joy Reid).
Remember the business earlier this year in Mississippi, where incumbent Republican Senator Thad Cochran was challenged in a primary by Teahadist Chris McDaniel? And remember how some Democrats said, “Oh, gee, we have to support
Cochran because McDaniel is just too crazy?” And filthy, unkempt liberal blogger types such as yours truly said, “Hey, wait a minute! Why the hell are we defending Cochran when supporting McDaniel in the general election would help the
Democrat, Travis Childers? Why aren’t we thinking about this in solely political terms like the Repugs do?” And the response from people like Reid on “Real Time With Bill Maher” was, well, there just aren’t enough Democrats in Mississippi, and we should be forced to settle for the least bad Republican?
So now, we have Cochran getting ready to settle in comfortably with the incoming Repug Senate majority next year, and McDaniel is still carrying on like the nut that he is (and does anyone seriously think that Cochran is going to give a fig about doing anything to help Democratic voters who “crossed over” to help him)?
Here is my question: does anyone seriously think that McDaniel would have been any worse than what we’re going to be looking at next year, including Joni Ernst, Tom Cotton and Cory Gardner in the Senate, and life forms like Glenn Grothman of Wisconsin in the U.S. House?
We don’t need to do
more to utterly deflate our own base, people! We need to do a much better job of standing up for what we believe in and presenting ourselves as a serious, sane alternative to anyone who would still consider voting for our party in the immediate and longer-term future.
…and by the way, as you stew over what Cenk says here (NSFW), read this to find out the following towards the end…