Romney and Ryan between them are setting new lows for outright lies and dishonesty. Every day they provide ammunition for devastating ads against them - and the truth hurts. But... even as pundits shake their heads and Tsk Tsk the Democrats for being mean by pointing out such unpleasant things, I can't help but feel that there's more to be done. I'm amplifying a comment I posted earlier in teacherken's diary about how to recognize when Ryan is trying to change the subject.
Going after Romney and Ryan aggressively and intelligently is necessary - they are the opposing candidates after all. But, what we need to recognize is that Romney and Ryan are just symptoms of the real problem: the elephant in the room. The crazy, extremist, radical, ass-clown insane Republican elephant in the room.
More below the Orange Omnilepticon
Ryan and Romney are just the front men for an increasingly toxic GOP agenda, one that's been slowly destroying this country for decades. It's not enough to point out the lies and distortions coming from Romney and Ryan, or the hypocrisy and lack of substance both candidates embrace. We need to connect that to the entire Republican party and its 30 plus years of broken promises dating all the way back to Reagan.
• Wealth hasn't trickled down - it's all been sucked up!
• Smaller government hasn't made us more free or richer - it's left us helpless in the face of natural disasters, collapsing infrastructure, and massive unemployment.
• Deregulation hasn't unshackled our economy - it's turned crooks, thieves, and con men loose to prey on Main Street with impunity, filled our shops with dangerous goods, and our groceries with contaminated food.
• The party of liberty and personal responsibility doesn't trust a woman alone with her doctor.
• The party that claims to choose life is perfectly happy letting millions of people suffer and die for lack of healthcare.
• The party of small government has no problem demanding voter ID's, drug testing people on unemployment - but is horrified at the idea of the least scrutiny of corporations.
• The people touting fiscal responsibility can't balance budgets, can't create jobs - but boy can they blow up deficits!
• The people claiming to be strong on defense have bungled every war they've gotten us into - and left it to others to clean up after them.
• Their rule of law treats corporations as people, money as speech, and democracy as something that should go to the high bidder.
And so on and so on...
We need to boil these points down to where people feel them in their guts instinctively. We need to hammer them every day. We need to polish them to where they'll fit on a bumper sticker. We need them sharpened so they can be phoned in to Hannity or Rush before they can hit the panic button and shut them out. We need to make them simple enough that even air head media types can recite them. And we need to keep them out there 24/7 any way we can.
Look, one of the biggest reasons Democrats have trouble being Democrats is that conservatives have been working for decades to systematically depict traditional Democratic policies in the most negative terms possible. We end up with blue-dog Democrats cutting us off at the knees because the simple, effective, progressive agenda that used to be common sense for real Democrats has been buried in toxic waste from FOX and the rest of the rightwing echo machine.
When people complain that they don't know what Democrats stand for, it's because what they should stand for, what they used to stand for, has been portrayed in terms that no one wants to be associated with. They have put a huge effort into making the Democratic brand repellant to voters.
At the same time, conservatives have built a media machine that champions their ideology 24/7 as things that should be unquestioned - smaller government, lower taxes, deregulation, personal responsibility, the power of free markets - despite decades of evidence that the way conservatives go about these things is the road to perdition. We can't allow them to keep getting away with that.
It's not enough to hammer Romney and Ryan on their many flaws - we have to go after the whole, damn, corrupt cult that is the Republican party. Karl Rove's speciality is turning a target's strengths into negatives. We have an easier task - all we have to do is get the truth out about them and keep it out there. Harry Truman got it right.
We should be fighting this election not only to defeat Romney and Ryan. We should be working hard to discredit the entire corrupt, incompetent G.O.P. conservative apparatus. We should be revealing the bankruptcy of their so-called Big Ideas, their continual policy failures, their broken promises, their outright un-American behavior. And we should NOT make the mistake of thinking it will be over in November - because the Republicans will only continue their war by other means. Vicious in Victory, even Nastier in Defeat.
They don't want to play nice, they don't want to share, they have no respect for anyone except themselves, they hold themselves accountable for nothing. It's time to put them out of business.
Let's do it.