When the enemy is in defeat and disarray, you charge them.
If you read about battles everywhere throughout time, when the victors break into celebration instead of pursuing the attack, you'll find that too often the respite gives the enemy time, or at least a foundation, to come back at you.
And these things from the Right: they don't die. They'll be back.
Their value system, their belief, their ideas, their heart is this: Everything is mine, all the time, including that which is yours by right. Your money, your heart, your body, your thoughts, your actions. All mine. And it is infuriating that you won't stop trying to keep it out of my hands. I'll make you suffer for that.
Mind you, I'm not saying a day or two of being happy about their most recent putsch being defeated shouldn't happen. It's a pleasure and a joy to feel the pressure off for a while. But that can only go on for so long. We have to move to the attack, and soon.
What we see is the division between Mammon Republicans and Hysterical Republicans. (The deep crazy: the Racist Republicans can be found in both camps, but can barely exist without their support.) Most of the Hystericals keep dropping Jesus' name as if that means Jesus is behind what they are up to.
Hit them -- now and hard and repeatedly -- with a Real and Massive Jobs Plan. Plan. Not immediate passage in the current Congress. What we will do when the voters give us all Congress.
We shift the conversation away from the concerns of the Right, now, and before 2014 to 'hey, Main Street ain't been saved yet, and here's how we're going to fix that.'
The Republicans will NEVER come up with a reality-based jobs plan. Here is their Jobs Plan, it the same in 1920, in 1990, in 2013 and will be in 2411: More Tax Breaks (and Perks) for the Rich.
Been there; been through the wringer as a result. As have we all to one degree or another.
Here's what we attack. And attack. And attack. And then, after all that, we attack:
Trickle Down. Ain't worked in over 30 years. Instead the money trickles away with our jobs to foreign lands, when it isn't gambled in the Casino Banks while driving up the price of life's necessities.
Deregulation. Over and over, for 30 years now, everything gets worse with less regulation. Poisons go out as food; toxins go out medicines; fraud goes around as sound banking; pollution goes out as 'acceptable'... Deregulation assumes integrity. Your average person, your mom-and-pop, they have to show integrity. The rich don't have to care what the community thinks.
Privatization. 30 plues years have shown that when a thing gets privatized, it generally gets more expensive, the quality generally declines, the corruption grows, and the public assets get stripped. It fails to deliver savings in military, it fails in savings and quality in the other fields.
Free Trade. A generation and more of Free Trade ... well, let's all take a moment to contemplate the virtues of Free Trade, and then to barf. Free Trade is a fiction. What free trade is about is a race to the bottom for labor the world over; in reducing quality of what is produced; and generally pillaging the earth, nature, and people.
By the way, this means, if we're not to give the Republicans a potent distraction, that the Trans-Pacific Partnership must be strangled before it is ever proposed for law. There is no section of the US political spectrum, except Corporatists and die-hard partisans, who will not see this as a most foul and threatening doing.
Okay, that's the Mammon Wing of the Republicans. Now to bludgeoning the abusers of god's name, the Religious [sic] Right.
Back in the 1950s or 1960s you could say 'holier than thou' to any one spouting their lunatic version of religion and that pretty much shut them up. At least in the Northeast.
Now, I have to confess I feel a bit sorry for these fools. They have literally worked themselves up into hysteria. When I was 10 or 11 and hanging out with my friends, we'd break into an abandoned building some nights. It usually wasn't long before someone told a creepy thing they heard about, which escalated to 'what's that sound?' and 'did that move?' and eventually we worked ourselves up to running out the building in panic, pursued by ghosts.
We must have liked the thrill of it.
So that's what you've got, imo, with these hysterical fools. It's about the thrill more than anything. Anyway, in my experience at least, you can't really 'beat' hysterical people by mocking them, shouting at them, telling them they are insane, or even cursing them. 'Beating' in this context means getting them calm enough to think. Which is hard because they don't really want to, as that would diminish the thrill of it all, and then what do they have?
So something has to replace that. Probably self-reflection would be useful, if possible.
The first thing, in my non-professional experience, has been to sooth the panicky person. Then get the breathing regular, followed by eliciting their account of what they fear. Professionals could probably say what exactly to do with an hysteric, I'm sure there's long years of experience.
To me, the only 'attack' we could do is point out to them that their beliefs are transparently self-serving and have almost nothing to do with the teachings and words of Christ. Point out the history of their doctrines.
For instance -- and my memory is poor here, but I have the gist though it can be filled out better -- despite all these literal words of Jesus and the Bible making it plain as day that all God wants is for us to work good for the disadvantaged, they've managed to pervert that entirely. Back in Europe and England of the 15th and 16 Centuries suddenly 'deserving' got added in front of the word 'poor' in the Bible. Christ, the Bible, made no such distinction. "Poor = give help" unequivocally throughout. (btw, you could drop a modern Christian of the pray-in-public variety straight into England of 1540 and they'd just have to replace Obama with the Pope and they wouldn't miss a beat; be part of the community immediately.)
They pulled the same crap with 'neighbor.'
Then somewhere along the line some wiseacre came up with 'oh, all that stuff about the poor and helping and stuff -- that's all meant for AFTER the second coming. We don't have to worry about it now.' That became popular in our Bible Belt in particular.
So pointing out to them that what the Bible literally says, and the difference from the purely invented interpretations, the self-serving interpretations, might have value. If you can catch them at a calm moment.
Anyway, that's all I've got. The Racialist Republicans -- I can't really say how to beat them beyond cutting them off from their proxies; and letting them die off in isolation. The solution I tend to drift toward involves them all gathering someplace and being unsuspecting. And that's not right or mature.
The enemy is in disarray and retreat. It is time to attack with everything we have.