We've shamed them before. For our party's sake, we need to do it again

....if we ever want to win another election, and I have an idea.

The way I look at it, there are only two ways we can win the next election. We have to either gain millions of voters ourselves, or easier yet, we could cause a net loss of huge masses of voters on the other side. The kicker is that we don't even want the voters that they lose, not the ones I'm going to talk about anyway. By the power of association, we can shame them into offending and abandoning a huge part of their support base...the bigots.

We need to have our loudest "mouthpieces" start hollering out loud and clear in the media that the Republican Party is a haven for all bigots and caters to all the bigots in the United States. If our spokesmen repeat it loud and often enough in the media, sooner or later the Repukes will have to respond. All our leaders must do this, not just the Deans and the Sharptons, and they need to be accusatory in their tone when they do it.

Here's what I think could happen...

It'll be like taking a page out of the Swift Boat liars books, only we'll be telling the truth. Sooner or later, after enough repetitive hammering, the Repukes will be forced into responding. At first they'll laugh it off as simply a smear, but if we keep hammering away with the same mantra, they'll start to realize that people will begin to listen and wonder, and then they'll be forced to go on the defensive...because no one wants to be associated publicly with bigots...not even them. Eventually, they'd have no choice but to come out with some major "anti-bigot" rhetoric just to prove they're not really that way, and that will in turn start offending the bigots themselves, which over time could result in a mass exodus of hordes of formerly loyal Republican voters...the bigots. Where the bigots would go, who really cares. Maybe they could start their own party. We sure as hell wouldn't want them voting for us. The bottom line, though, is that the Republicans could lose a huge part of their fan base. Of all the countless millions of bigots in this country, I'm fairly certain that each and every one of them is a Republican voter. Even though we don't want them voting for our side, we should do our best to make sure the Repukes don't have them working to their advantage.

It's time we put an end to the Republicans catering to bigots for the sake of winning elections. At the very least, it might go a ways toward reducing the amount of bigotry in this country. At best, not only could a strong effort reduce bigotry and intolerance, but it could take away the huge edge that the repukes have enjoyed for far too long, putting us in the drivers seat again.

We've done it in the past...By power of association, we shamed them into appointing minorities and women in their cabinet. By the same token, we should also be able to shame them into denouncing and expelling all the millions of bigots who currently support them.

The general perception is already there. We just have to give it more emphasis.

From my own experiences, the puke's majority are bigots, so, yes, your plan just may divide them, at the least it will be a truth enriching operation.

by having some brave Democratic leaders step up to the mike and spout it loud and clear. Over and over until they react. Then the fun begins.

leaders. This is the most morally/ethically corrupt group of people who have ever stolen power. These hypocrites kicked the shit out of Clinton based on a tawdry affair of consensual adult sex....time to expose these scumbags for what they and their Party are...lying hypocrites.

Check this site out: www.redmorals.com

The repukes have a sophisticated system to deliver the proper amount of hate to the proper audience. If the general public knew what kind of Fascism the GOP was engaged in, there would be widespread shame. It goes beyond racism. For example, a couple of weeks ago, Rush Limbaugh told his listeners that some people shouldn't be allowed to vote. The general public should know about all of this.

We would need major media cooperation.

if our big Democratic guns start sending the message. If they come out with an accusatory tone, like they need to do, the media will be all over it. We can't be tactful about it, though. We have to be direct and in their face. We've been throttled too many times for being too nice about it.

I completely disagree with what you just said.

The Republicans do recieve a huge amount of support from bigots. That's what we Democrats have been saying since the 2000 election. We have called the Republicans racist, homophobic bigots, which does have some truth to it. And, it looks like we've lost 2 elections now.

This means it's time to rethink our strategies, not try more of the same. Calling the Republican party the party of bigots isn't going to change anything. The Republican leaders know that they need the bigots to win, and they certainly won't abandon them. Moderates, who are the people we need if we want to win, won't be convinced that the Republican party is racist unless there are several cases of white Republican leaders showing strong discrimination towards minorities, something which is unlikely to happen.

Second of all, most people vote for one party or the other. Since most of these bigots are on the far right, the Republican party will have to become socialist for the bigots to stop voting Republican.

I think we need to send the message that the Republicans are screwing our country. We've lost hundreds of thousands of jobs, we're in a bad war that we can't get out of, we've become hated by the rest of the world, we're killing the enviornment, we're in a huge debt, we're relying too much on foreign oil, the rich have gotten tax breaks, etc. The message is true, and there's plenty of evidence to support it.

about this, then maybe you didn't learn a lesson from the swift boat fucks. And no where did I say that the intention was for the Republican leaders to abandon their sheep. It's the other way around. By doing what I suggest, it's the sheep who will abandon their leaders. They'll have no choice if we play our cards right.

As a previous poster mentioned, the key is emphasis. Emphasis and repetition will eventually get a response. I only hope you're joking when you imply that we've lost two elections because we've used anti-bigot rhetoric towards those thugs. We haven't been anywhere close to tough enough. It's time to turn the freaking tables on them, and we can do it by telling the truth, not resorting to lies like they do.

Cannot be repeated nor emphasized enough.

Cannot be repeated nor emphasized enough.

Cannot be repeated nor emphasized enough.

And no where did I say that the intention was for the Republican leaders to abandon their sheep. It's the other way around. By doing what I suggest, it's the sheep who will abandon their leaders. They'll have no choice if we play our cards right.

There are only two parties that have a chance of winning. You aren't going to get the bigots to abandon the Republican party unless you convince them to vote Democratic. And as I said earlier, the Republican party would have to become socialist for that to happen (a small exaggeration).

As a previous poster mentioned, the key is emphasis. Emphasis and repetition will eventually get a response. I only hope you're joking when you imply that we've lost two elections because we've used anti-bigot rhetoric towards those thugs. We haven't been anywhere close to tough enough.

Our country was founded because the British used repetition against us. They kept sending bigger and bigger armies marching towards us, and we kept changing our tactics. That's why we won.

Calling the Republicans racist in 2000 didn't work. It didn't work this year either. Sure, with enough devotion we can send the message again even harder in 2008, but will it really work? We would be better of trying something new, not more of the same.

It's time to turn the freaking tables on them, and we can do it by telling the truth, not resorting to lies like they do.

Yes, we can do it by telling the truth. We can tell the truth about how screwed our country is right now. We can tell the truth about the hundreds of thousands of people who've lost jobs. We can tell the truth about how much money the rich people are saving, and about the things we could accomplish with that money. We can tell the truth about how bad the Iraq war is going. We can tell the truth about how hated we are by the rest of the world. We can tell the truth about how the world won't last much longer if we keep treating the enviornment the way we have been. We can tell the truth about how we'll run out of oil very soon if we don't start working on a new energy source. We can tell the truth about how we will never be able to cure many diseases if we don't do stem cell research. We can tell the truth about how bad our education system is. We can tell the truth about how many people can't afford healthcare.

That's the message we need to send.

They are not exclusionary. There's no need to have everyone agree on only one way of attacking this problem. The republican party requires a top down approach because it is all about control and manipulation of the populace.

We don't need that. We need faith in our fellow citizen's ability to be reasonable and desire fairness. And I have faith in that.

We are aware that the republican elite engineered this change in public perception since the 70's. That's not a very long time. It means that there really isn't a major difference in the actual population's concerns so much as a change in most people's perceptions of what
*everyone else* is thinking and feeling.

The wealthy 2 % of the country got that way not by being smart but by turning part of the population against the other while the wealthy were stealing the money out of their pockets. They did it with 401Ks and they will do it with this "hot" housing market when rising interest rates make the people who are now taking out interest-only loans default and the rest of the housing market implode.

Just as in the Depression, everyone does worse except the already wealthy - and I am only talking about the 2 % who are so vastly wealthy you will never travel in their sphere, not the "upper class" doctor down the street. He's being screwed too.

I think the way to attack this problem is to focus on the wealthy elite controlling the puppet strings.

But it's also effective, I think , to try to point out how ugly the bigots are who are in this party - and shame people into dissassociating themselves with those people. Ted Kennedy's presidential aspirations were destroyed when democrats found out he was responsible for a woman's death, accidental or not. They saw the ugly side of his character and disassociated themselves with him, at least to the point of the office of president.

Of course, now I feel that what he did was so much less than the mass murder that Bush is responsible for that I could see voting for him as our country and our world are at stake.

You call their **leaders** bigots - preferably by name and list the offenses.

we'll never win. Our main goal should be a transparent election process. Without it and voting integrity we're wasting our time and money. We gave them a real scare in the election and made it more difficult to overcome the massive voter turnout. That's why they had to ratchet up their turnout efforts. Not to beat us -- they knew how to do that by fixing the election -- but to not make it as obvious. A huge disparity would have upset their plan. But as we turned out more and more voters they had to get careless and the tracks are there. They wanted to make sure that the margin was big enough so not to trigger an automatic recount like in Florida 2000.

We need to insist that Athan Gibbs voting machine is used across the country.

"Gibbs' TruVote machine is a marvel. After voters touch the screen,
a paper ballot prints out under plexiglass and once the voter compares
it to his actual vote and approves it, the ballot drops into a lockbox
and is issued a numbered receipt. The voter's receipt allows the track
his particular vote to make sure that it was transferred from the
polling place to the election tabulation center."

"They can then go to a Web site, punch in their voter validation number and make sure their vote was recorded."

As Gibbs himself noted before his untimely death in a car accident earlier this year, "These machines are set up to provide paper trails. No business in America would buy a machine that didn't provide a paper trail to audit and verify its transaction. Now, they want the people to purchase machines that you can't audit? It's absurd."

way to overcome what ails us. We can talk about things all we want, but we also need to come up with more specific ideas like yours to make things happen. I hope you've talked about these machines on the voter fraud threads.

so I just put things in reply lol. Actually I ran across Gibbs through a DU link then another few links later. The ironic thing was that Gibbs lived in Nashville, which is where I am, and I know just where his accident occurred and remember hearing about it. I'm going to try reaching his son who's continuing Gibbs' efforts.

The optical scammers and the magical touchscreens.

That is the ONLY strategy we need.

But wait until after this election is official.

Bev Harris and the lawyers may have some surprises for us.

Getting rid of the machines would be great, I agree, but we can't stop there and say that's the end to all ends. Even if/after the machines are gone, there's still plenty of things we need to change, and one of them is going on the offensive as far as the repuke party is concerned. They've had it too easy.

I'd rather start taking action now and if Bev Harris happens to come through, well, then that will be a heck of a nice bonus ;)

thing that we need to concentrate on. That's why we end up getting our butts kicked all the time. The repukes are doing a Lucy and Charlie Brown number on us. Just when we think we've figured out what sneaky, dispicable dirty trick they will pull, they do an end run that we are totally unprepared for. The poster is right in this instance about shaming Americans. You are also right. It's not an either/or thang. :D

that's a great idea!!

That said "HOW THE FUCK DIDN"T ANY OF OUR ELECTED OFFICIALS THINK OF THIS BEFORE!?!?!?!?!!?!?!?!?"

methinks they area bit out of touch