I was just reading
Karen Kwiatkowski's latest essay on Lewrockwell.com, titled "Cutouts and Paper Tigers, and What To Do With Them", and formulating thoughts on doing a diary about it. A happy diary, one of hope. Of overthrowing the neo-con cabal and taking our country back.
And how we are going to do this.
Then I clicked on Deleware Dem's diary on moral courage. One with many of the same theme's as Ms. K's essay, which then goes on to real action. So allow me to take it a little further over the fold...
Karen argues that the Iraqi insurgency has already won the hearts and minds of their countrymen, and it's only a matter of time until we leave:
Halfway around the world, this insurgency - for all of its complexities and wanton violence - has already won its argument with the American occupation. The majority of Sunnis, Shia, and even Kurds, see absolutely no future in American occupation. For every one willing to physically attack the occupiers, a thousand or ten thousand or a hundred thousand stand by, hoping for an insurgent victory sooner rather than later - knowing full well that it will come.
Iraqis of all faiths and classes are planning on it, and it gives them a measure of hope. There is no question in their minds that they will eventually take back their country, piece by piece.
Even as Iraqis themselves die in droves in this third year of their struggle for real freedom, the insurgency has won hearts and minds, something the American military or the American government has never done. The insurgency is winning because there is only one way for the situation in Iraq to conclude, and every Iraqi knows it. So do most Americans.
It will end when we will leave Iraq.
And then she makes the leap that we Democrats have already won the the hearts and minds of our fellow countrymen, and it's only a matter of time until we take back our country:
This makes them the winners.
Exactly what the Democrats hope to be on November 7.
I told these small town Democrats that they are already a great American insurgency. They are going up against a Republican media, big GOP money and a blatant bumper-sticker regime that, at first glance, seems robust. Like most insurgencies, the Democrats are widely distributed, decentralized, subject at times to a cacophony of voices and fickle leadership. Like all insurgencies, they hold forth righteous reasons for taking their country back.
Like a native and righteous insurgency, they already have won hearts and minds. They already - by default perhaps - stand for something that resonates overwhelmingly with average Americans. The average Democrat today stands more consistently, and more publicly, for rule of law, anti-federalism, the Bill of Rights, limited government and fiscal responsibility than any registered Republican.
This means they have the silent support of millions of Democrat, Republican, independent and libertarian Americans. This means that it is Democrats who hold the hearts and minds of the country - and whether in November or later, they will defeat the forces that occupy Washington.
This simply resonated with me.
Applying the principles of insurgency in the politcal arena. Because we are on the right side, the side of truth.
As DelewareDem puts it,
All we need possess is moral courage. We need to know what is right and what is wrong, and we need to have the courage to stand up for that.
Exactly. We know what is right and what is wrong. We are on the right side of the issues, from Iraq and torture to healthcare and alternative energy. We are realists. We don't make our own reality, we acknowledge what is reality.
So how best do we do this?
By becoming an insurgency of our own. As Karen puts it:
I suggested that they think of themselves as the insurgency they are, and apply the insurgent's code. Dedication to faith, brutal honesty, boldness and courage. Never ever attack where the enemy is strong, but always and incessantly attack where the enemy is weak. But where are Republicans weak? As with our military in Iraq, weakness is found exactly where we tend to see strength.
Where do we find this weakness. Where can we marshall pinpoint attacks, even without the advantage of endless talking heads to parrot our talking points?
Its right in front of us, we just have to look, and have the moral courage to act:
Working for the Republicans are talk radio hosts at all hours of the day, all of FOXNews and most of CNN, the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and most of the Washington Post. Yet no one listens to them anymore. We are too busy looking at whistleblower video on youtube.com, watching the brilliant Steven Colbert on the Comedy Channel, or debating the latest commentary by Keith Olberman at MSNBC.
<snip>
The GOP has bumper stickers, but the latest ubiquitous war on this or that, this morning's versus last night's fear-mongering, the superficial pro-family-while-hating-everyone message has become part of a background that Americans largely ignore.
Lastly, the GOP is terribly conflicted. The fiscal conservatives are enraged at six years of the President's financial recklessness. The nationalists are incensed, betrayed by the President's lack of concern over border security. The Religious Right has begun to wonder what Jesus would do, and find that His righteous anger is directed not at Muslims or terrorists, but at a faithless flock that built idols of war and created their own Caesar.
For a shining example of how an insurgency based on honesty and moral courage works, Karen holds up Jim Webb's campaign:
An example of how a political insurgency works might be the Allen-Webb Senate race in our home state of Virginia. Allen is losing precisely because he is a big money, big organization, big-Bush, authoritarian and for all of the above reasons, a hypocritical Republican. He is scared to death of the election he faces. His less well-funded opponent, a combat-hardened military and political veteran, a fiscal conservative, an intelligent and reflective man, needed to simply enter the race to send Allen into rages, retractions, and stumbles, and ultimately, defeat.
We want to be winners on November 7th, and we can be. We have to fight hard, so hard that our margins of victory are insurmountable by any Rovian voting shennigans. So large that exit polls will not be able to be ignored when election results do not match them.
We have to fight as an insurgency--attacking the weak points, framing issues in our words, speaking truth with honesty, with the insurmountable strength of our moral courage.
And what will we get when we win? For one, once we have control of the House, we will get subpoena power. That power to really investigate things like lies leading to war, single-source contracting, and voting machine manipulation. As Wilford Brimsly put it in "Absence of Malice":
I'll tell you what we're gonna do. We're gonna sit here and talk about it. If you get tired of talking here, Mr Elving Patrick there will hand you a subpoena and we'll go talk in front of the grand jury. We'll talk all day if you want to. . . . Wonderful thing, a subpoena.
And it will be very entertaining and enlightening to watch these proceedings on C-SPAN :)
To say nothing about repealing some of the more egregious legislative assaults on our civil liberties.
All we have to do is win the House, for starters. Everything else will come in time.
Are you ready to join the Democrat Insurgency?