Not Like Us

We need to focus on the warriors; not the wimps

Thomas Paine is credited with the saying “lead, follow or go fuck yourself, you pathetic loser.”

Ok so that might not be an exact quote, but it does sum up our appraisal of this current moment. In the hours since it became clear Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and his squad of weaklings were going to fuck us all over, we heard from a lot of proud Democrats who are in despair over the lack of leadership they are seeing.

Why bother, they asked, if these are the people who are supposed to be fighting for us?

It’s a fair question, usually asked when drowning in a sea of fundraising texts while watching yet another core democratic principle go down in flames. The answer is both simple and complicated — we need to fight for the fighters and teach the wimps a lesson.

So how do we do that? Well, that’s where it gets complicated.

We are neither naive nor new to this arena. Geographic and political realities are not lost on us. We have long understood and appreciated that big tents win elections, and that includes bringing in moderate and even conservatives and you can’t compete everywhere with the same kinds of candidates and policies. We get all of that.

We also get the reality that we are in uncharted territory when it comes to Trump, Elon Musk and a government shutdown. We acknowledge that shit that is already scary could get a lot scarier.

And still, we say it’s time to focus on the fighters and teach the wimps a lesson.

In practice, this means we identify the candidates who show the fire we demand in pushing back against Trumpism, and we shun the chickenshits. If we have to bleed the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee dry to teach them a lesson, then maybe that’s what we have to do. And if we’re going to lose the Senate anyway — and a very tough map suggests that is possible — why would we also go ahead and forfeit our principles and our self-respect by helping the wimps who just sold us out?

That means Chuck Schumer needs to be fired as Minority Leader, and we need to see that our senators get that. It also means that our campaign efforts, for now, will be focused entirely on the House.

As fugly as it has been — and it has been plenty fugly — this has been a clarifying moment for Democrats. Now we know who understands the stakes and the reality of the awful situation in which we now find ourselves. We know who deserves our time, money and effort and we know who will wipe their asses with it. We know who is listening to us, and we know who is using us.

There is no getting around the fact that our party is in the minority, and we are up against dangerous, reckless people who do not feel bound by any laws or a sense of decency. It makes the fight unfair from the jump. We have very little leverage, and it sucks.

But that makes it even more important that we use whatever leverage we do have to gum up the works. When the opportunities to fight are rare, then you better damn well fight when they present themselves. Preemptively surrendering in the name of norms or fear is just embarrassing. If we assume we’re going to lose, then we’ve already lost.

There are Democrats who get this. We heard and saw them fighting like hell for us all week. They’ve had our backs, and now we need to have theirs. We’re not talking about ideology right now. We’re talking about guts — the guts to take on the scary people who are destroying our country.

Those are the people we can help. Where we can, we can lift up credible primary challengers and send the wimps and wusses packing. But until then, we can applaud and support our warriors and encourage them to keep fighting the good fight even as the party leadership tries to steer them to the false safety of surrender.

We know there are some folks who are so disgusted they are ready to abandon the Democratic Party altogether. We get it. Some of this shit from Schumer has been pretty insulting. But we are sure as hell not gonna throw out the party of John Lewis to join the party of Jill Stein. That would be stupid and gross and self-destructive.

So instead we’re gonna support the people who are doing the right things. And we’re going to starve the corrupt and the cowardly. It’s probably not that simple, but it seems like a good place to start.

And then we can go back to focusing on the evil assholes taking a blowtorch to America.

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