<satire>
That's it! I've had it with the Christian Left, they've really sold us up the creek this time. The Democrats in Congress have taken their advice and it has completely backfired. This whole thing appears to have started when somebody started forwarding the Beatitudes around on an anti-war/toture/nuking Iran/add disaster here email campaign. Some K-Street consultant noticed the "meek shall inherit the Earth" bit, and suddenly figured out how to pay for that vacation home in Aspen.
The logic works like this, every time Seymour Hersh publishes some blockbuster new piece of muckraking, the NSA starts picking up enormous increases in traffic that came out looking like a upswing in belief in God, prayer and a fear that the end times were near. Had someone actually gone and looked at the data, instead of just summarizing the reports on up the chain of command, they would have seen a lot of messages like this:
From: xxxxxx@example.org
Subject: FW: FW: FW: FW: OMFG! We're all gonna die!
To: xxxxx@example.com
HOLY MARY, MOTHER OF GOD! Did you read the latest Sy Hersh article?
Bush is really trying to destroy the US this time! HE [ insert invade Iraq, torture, nuke Iran here] ! HOLY CRAP! He really does think he's going to bring about the END TIMES. OMG, like the second coming is happening while James Dobson is still breathing!
Anyway, catch you later,
Guess I shouldn't post after Drinking Liberally, huh?
Xxxxxxx
PS. Oh yeah, forward this to 10 of your friends if you want to stop Bush!
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: xxxxxxxx@example.net>
Date: Aug 22, 2005 5:17 PM
Subject: FW: FW: FW: FW: Beatitudes
To: xxxxxxxx@example.org
The Beatitutes
Blessed are....
< clipped for brevity >
Of course, the Democratic Senators and House members, who were privy to this info and were siphoning info to create strategy for their 2008 campaigns. Yep, that's right, you heard me. The real reason Feingold's censure motion couldn't get any traction was that everybody else was drinking from the trough. A Censure might piss off The Cheney. You don't want The Cheney after you. All of the sudden copies of emails might start popping up in inboxes at the NY Times. Emails to your 2008 presidential campaign manager about how the netroots have all gone holy roller and bought into the whole Dobson thing. How it looked like they were willing to follow whomever managed to be the most pious in their policies.
Then right after some interest has been generated and a story is half-written, your campaign manager's reply suddenly makes it's way to the same little inboxes. Of course, this one states that recent gains in relationships and organization with the older mainstream Protestant churches would allow you to take advantage of the situation and really "connect with the base and people of faith" (cause the're different ya'know), while "facilitating a win-win synergy between two `partners'". Ok, you there! Put that down, there will be no Buzzword Bingo here; this is serious. See, look at the GOP, they know how to ratf@#! someone. They go take a peak at the actual data instead of sitting around snarking. Silly Democrats, didn't you guys learn anything from Watergate? The GOP did: Don't get caught! Deny everything!
Fortunately for the Democrats, God loves fools and Americans and since the Democratic leadership qualified in a number of ways, there was luck. A whistleblower, trying to bring attention to the lax hiring practices over at DHS, brought in a cache of Mary Cheney's rather intimate emails from eHarmony. Anyway, someone slipped this stuff to Hillary, Schumer, Reid and Pelosi. Schumer realized his opening. Thanks to another perv over at DHS (Or was it two more pervs, eh, I can't keep count, apparently Mary was popular. Who knew? Maybe she got the writing talent from her mother, Lynne?), Schumer knew he could keep The Cheney on a leash. He was doubly confident because he thought he could steal points from The Cheney over the new found Dobsonism / Falwell freakiness going down around the country if his bluff was called.
So Schumer met with his campaign manager and his new found Religious Left. The pastors were there to talk about social justice and giving to the poor, liberty of conscience and the American civil and theological tradition of establishment clause. But Schumer's campaign manager, we'll call him J.B. Shrumville, Shrumville had a different plan. This different plan dovetailed nicely into his partners' project to promote a 700 Club 8 part drama on why Easter was when we remember that Jesus died because we disobeyed authority and the terrorists will not rest until we've abolished gay marriage and defended Christianity from the rest of these Heathens sapping America's precious bodily fluids.
You see, Shrumville had been studying the reality based community and how it "utilized the nooshphere, to dictate mass responses to stimuli and how to harness that human-focused power in a reciprocal conversationally centered communication paradigm". I heard BINGO! Stop that, I said. Shrumville wouldn't appreciate your humor anyway. He did manage to catch on to the reality-based community's trust in logic. Thus did Shrumville start to deduce. He deduced and deduced until he could deduce no more, and his little foray into logic spit out a single course of action:
Perhaps if we become so meek, we will be seen as the inheritors of the Earth and on the side of God. Yes, as long as we present ourselves as more meek than the Republicans, this will be seen as a sign of Godliness and ultimate victory. This is the logical conclusion of fanning the flames of sectarian disagreements. Previously it has led to violence in Western culture, but this time it will be different!
So Shrumville was off to Power Point and Spreadsheet his little golden insight. Oh and it was golden all right; half that preparation time when to the invoices and contracts. It turned out, to Shrumville's dismay, that you need to do a lot of paperwork to wheelbarrow off big piles of cash in exchange for a bunch of hot air. He made note to look into the regulations surrounding that, maybe he could "assist in releasing the free market's potentiality" in that capacity.
He then toiled all through brunch and then a little after the 2 hour lunch at the Club, expensed to one of his clients. After a few days of this, he had his insight all colored, transitioned, pie charted and 3D bar-graphed with real-time data updates. He readied his "Task Lists", filled with "Action Items" like, "Read the Beatitudes. (In Bible)". His favorite one was "Be Meek with the Confidence of Knowing You're Right (Meekly pat yourself on the back)".
Back to Shrumville's meeting. He began by lambasting Dick Murtha, called him dangerous. Said that his not-meekness was hurting us with what he termed the "Confirmed Stop-Work Order Date" voters. He cautioned that we not refer to them as "Armageddon" voters, that would only make them angry. He took Feingold to task next and compared his dangerous lack of meekness to that of Paul Hackett. Apparently, Shrumville had determined that the Democrats would have won 2004 in a landslide if Kerry had only been so meek as to confuse the GOP and split the absurdly pious vote, they could have overcome the fraud in Ohio. Alas, Kerry gave in and finally swung back at the Swiftboaters and that not-meek behavior really cost a lot of votes. At least they pre-positioned well for 2006 by meekly accepting the returns in Ohio and not investigating Diebold or its shareholders. Shrumville was sure that this would make the Republicans overconfident in their electronic-ballot stuffing scheme and accidentally add them to the Schumer-Miller ticket (Oh what? Gore-Lieberman made sense?!), it'll be a coup when ol'Zell comes out of retirement with his crazy base land credentials. As long as Miller keeps speaking that evangelical code that he'll get Judge Roy Moore on the US Supreme Court, 2008 Shrumville has assured, is a lock-in. Unbeknownst to Shrumville, but posted across the `Net was Miller's speech where he promised that he would not only get Judge Moore on the SCOTUS bench, but he would make Judge Moore's 10 Commandments statue an Associate Justice. "Man doesn't need anymore laws than 10!", barked Miller in front of the Daughters of Concerned Citizens Councils last week. Since the history of Caligula belonged to "knowin's from the devil", Miller completely missed the irony content of his statement.
Shrumville was starting to think he could out-crazy base land McCain. After he danced his danced, flipped his charts and established a "foundation for understanding the dynamism of the problem domain", Schumer fell to his knees and proclaimed how "Humbled he was to participate in such an open experience!" He called his staffers to stop responding to press queries, retract all amendments and resolutions and start crafting a message of humbly accepting whatever may come as the fulfillment of God's will. He next set out to play party enforcer, making a list of Democrats whose unmeeklike behavior was jeopardizing the new strategy. After all, he'd paid a lot of money for his strategy, with this much invested, there was no turning back.
The Christian Left was still expecting to here about a concrete plan with goals to combat the cancerous effect of such rigid sectarian identity with a political party as they had witnessed in the previous years, what they heard instead caused exasperations that are simply not publishable. The FCC doesn't play around with those particular words, especially when they're put together like that. This might have rattled anyone else, but Shrumville had his wingmen, his partners they were there to protect their investment.
Before the religious leaders in the room had a chance to object, the partners' swept into action. They cajoled and obfuscated. They spoke of "under the radar" campaigns and "people of viral faith" marketing efforts. The Christian Left eventually wore down, unable to withstand the attacks, they began to doubt themselves. All the years of being truly meek in their heart had taken a toll. Fearing that options were not forthcoming, they found themselves signing up for expensive and dubious media buys. Had they listened to their instinct, telling them these guys didn't know what they were talking about, things might have turned out differently. Some thought they should have mentioned to Schumer that he had a moral obligation to civic duty, rendering unto Caesar and all that. But they figured he was a bright guy and that this new meekness plan must be part of his overall strategy to fulfill these obligations. They all learned a lesson in not assuming the obvious that day.
So Schumer hit the road with Shrumville, they opined on the virtue of accepting whatever may come, that quiet self sacrificing service was best, to leave the decisions to those whom God has ordained to make them. They talked of how victory will come when the meek inherit the earth, they wrote condescending letters to the netroots. They proclaimed that we must all be so meek as to become the rightful inheritors of the earth. Only then would we win the confidence of the American voter and regain power. In essence, pipe down, we're trying to lose another election here!
Schumer and Shrumville's efforts had quite an effect on many incumbent Democrats. That's why I got the following reply when I asked Bill Nelson to support Senator Feingold's censure resolution:
Dear Mr. Johnson:
Thank you for contacting me regarding Senator Russ Feingold's proposal to censure President Bush. A number of members of Congress and other groups, including the American Bar Association, have raised serious concerns about the legality of the President's domestic wiretapping program. I share these concerns, but I want to hear the outcome of congressional investigations into this program before judging the appropriateness of any action such as censuring the president.
Please do not hesitate to contact me in the future with your thoughts on this or any other topic.
Notice the meekness there. See how the Senator is thoroughly committed to a wait and see approach? After all, this is a man too pious and humble to make a decision about law after the American Bar Association has called it illegal. He needs to make sure all the facts are allowed to be called into question and that every Senator's argument (not yours), no matter how irrelevant, are heard. Meekness or analysis paralysis, you be the judge.
Unfortunately for Shrumville and the Schumer-Miller ticket, the netroots had actually been building the community software infrastructure to organize effectively enough to make sure their collective power impacted the election. A new set of Congresspeople took over in fall of 06 and Feingold won the primary in 08.
This new set of grassroots organizing tools allowed ordinary citizens to insure that they could compete politically with corporate interests and rich near-dead white guys who had their priorities completely backwards. It allowed individual citizens to "leverage their domain expertise" to "penetrate the attention sphere of the individual political consumer" thus "creating a relationship that will produce push-pull transactions that distribute value throughout the logistical chain". In short, average people got their act together and made winning happen. They used tools so that small contributions of time and energy went a long way.
By 2015, this software suite had been exported around the world. George Soros had the software translated into 20 different Central European dialects and Arabic. He then had his various Open Society Institutes train people around the world to utilize the tools. In 2020, liberal democracy spread across the Middle East, organized by the people on the Internet, without a single US Soldier having to sacrifice their life. That's not to say it went completely smoothly, there was some violence here and there, but nothing like Iraq. There was one Dutch Soldier killed though. He was an MP at the Hague and was guarding Rumsfeld's cell. Rumsfeld, who was in for war crimes in Iraq, heard the news and his head immediately exploded. Unfortunately for our brave Dutchman, Rummy's cranium was excessively thick and would degrade the West's military capability one last time.
As for Schumer and Shrumville, well Schumer retired to a monastery to plan his comeback for the 2024 primary. Shrumville is still trying to win elections, just that now he's been relegated to School Board Primaries in Alabama for Zell's offspring.
</satire>
Oh yeah, BINGO!! I uhm, found this on the internets, so uhm don't audit me please. And the DHS guys, I'm really just jealous of all the high-powered hardware with OC-192's attached. My name on that no-fly list would be no-good.
Dedicated to the memories of Graham Chapman, Douglas Adams, Karl Popper, Carl Sagan and Bill Bartley.