"The Donkey eats 'em up and spits candidates out in small electable chunks.
Daily Show ace reporter Ed Helms asks Paul Hackett why he was asked by the Democratic Party to exit the Ohio Senate race after his stunning success last August...
Hackett replies that it was his outspokenness and willingness to take a strong stand -- the very things that nearly scored him the win in a heavily Republican district -- that got him ousted.
Confused by this apparently counterintuitive strategy, Helms questions Democratic Strategist Hank Sheinkopf, who tells him that there's a "matrix" for choosing a candidate and that Hackett didn't fit it.
And clearly, with all their, you know, wins, Democratic strategists and their matrices are to be followed...
Helms thinks so too, offering a brilliant montage of Democratic victories and their tools for achieving them, such as The Dukakis Method and Al Gore's 837 Steps to Campaign Victory.
Helms is told that it's gonna be easy with all the Republican missteps. He responds with a story about being beaten senseless with a bottle on the street, all the while hoping his attacker will slip and beat himself. "you know what, I'm gonna sit back and wait for him to accidentally hit himself with a bottle. He did -- I mean, I was unconscious -- but I think I won that battle..."
Most Beltway Dems seem to be in the same payroll of the Corporatists that own Bush and his administration. They are content with the status quo. The so called Matrix is proof that no waves will be made. No revolutionaries will be allowed and no revolution should be expected from them this year. They are interested in keeping their cozy seats but not in winning this year.
Most beltway Democrats are old timers hailing back to the 70's, and expecting to retire from their cozy posts. Faces of change or revolution they are not.
By now a gang of revolutionary Democrats led by a Democratic Newt Gingrich should have made mincemeat of the Republicans and their scandals.
Inertia alone will not implode the Republicans under the weight of scandals, incompetence, and corruption. Generic polls that favor Democrats in 2006 do no mean much if there is no program or revolution. The coming attraction is two more years of Democrats walking the political wilderness.
Wish bloggers, progressives and Democrats could quit Bush and stop answering the Republican noise machine and instead, with the same fervor, work on the important job of Getting out the Vote, firing up our base, and getting new fighting Dems, because the "Old Guard" beltway Democrats, are just interested in retiring eventually from their cozy seats, are sold to the same corporatists that own Bush and are not Interested in whether Democrats retake Congress or not as long as they retain their seats.