We've all done it. We've all watched the talking heads go at it. The Very Serious People discussing the Very Serious Issues and screamed at the television or computer in frustration, maybe even thrown something. Who are these idiots pushing these talking points? Or missing the crux of the whole thing, ignoring the real issue and chattering on about absolutely nothing to fill their requisite twenty-four hours?
I don't know about you, but one thought inevitably follows the ones I have just described, at least for me and my colleague, BBQ Chicken Madness. And that is, "We could do so much better."
So we decided to put our webcams where our mouths are and apply the open source solution to one of the great bastions of gated "Insiders" - the pundit class. We created Open Source Pundits, a website where we take clips from the pundit shows and the cable news and replace the replies with our own. It's fun and satisfying, and we'd like to invite everyone here and (and everywhere else) to come over, fire up the webcam, and give it a try. While it may not be registering voters, it definitely feels good, and may even help with those phone banking and canvassing skills.
Ultimately, if we want to enact lasting change and make sure progressivism is the dominant force in this country for the foreseeable future, we, as a community, need to develop the skills to argue down the idiocy and successfully advocate our own points of view, not just in print, as DailyKos and others have excelled at, but also rhetorically and conversationally.
We also need to crash every conceivable gate in new and different ways, fighting to pierce their bubble while growing our own alternatives to their system. Republicans and neoconservatives have worked for decades to dumb down the national discourse to levels where they can win, since they can't win in a serious debate on the issues. It's up to us to build the debate back up again to one that is worthy of this country and its people.
With that, I'd like to post our first few attempts so far and again invite you to download the videos and give it a try. I'll warn you, it's tougher than it looks. But that's exactly why this is necessary; debating effectively is a tight rope walk of being an expert on everything and a master improvisational actor at the same time. Excelling at that takes practice - practice politicians and right-wing think tank funded pundits get plenty of and that we need to match.
So, please, come on over, give it a shot, tell us what you think, and help raise the level of debate in this country.