Mistake this man for a palooka

at your peril.

Steve Gilliard has this up.

If you've seen the right blogs lately, you would think Osama was doing a jig on the White House Lawn and Bush saw seen fleeing to Canada to lead the resistance. I've never seen such deranged bed shitting in my life.

But then Bush set the stage for this by claiming that the Dems were going to let Osama escape.

It would be funny, if it wasn't so corrosive for our democracy. Bush took Gingrich's demonization strategy and then turned it into psuedo-treason. It is beyond vile to suggest the opposition would surrender to an enemy, but Bush and Cheney did it and many of their cultists fell for that nonsense.

But their insanity isn't the only one to hit the beltway lately

After not lifting a finger to help, the DLC crowd talks about a wave of conservative Dems. Which is really their way of rehabilitating their failed strategy. So you get Carville attacking Dean and calling for his replacement, which he doesn't realize is quickly making him enemies among the base.

Chuck Schumer graciously goes on Kos to thank people and doesn't slam Dean, but the DLC crowd, in a week, swiftboat Jack Murtha, attack Howard Dean, and try to downplay the role of citizen activists. Acting as if they had anything to do with the victories.

Carville goes on TV today and says Dean cost them seats.

Dean is trying not to piss off the Clintonistas, but the idea that Dean, the most popular DNC head ever, can be fired, after a record of success, is amusing.

These are the same people who fought Dean's 50 state strategy all the way. Now, they want to claim credit.

I think, one day soon, they're gonna wake up and realize that they're the losers here.

Since I seem to have been oddly movie-themed recently, let me add this.

The DLC apparently believes they’re a veritable gallery of badasses.

Like this guy.


And have deluded themselves into believing, at some point in the past, they had something like this conversation...

MARSELLUS:
I think you're gonna find -- when
all this shit is over and done -- I
think you're gonna find yourself
one smilin' motherfucker. Thing is
Butch, right now you got ability.
But painful as it may be, ability
don't last. Now that's a hard
motherfuckin' fact of life, but
it's a fact of life your ass is
gonna hafta git realistic about.
This business is filled to the brim
with unrealistic motherfuckers who
thought their ass aged like wine.
Besides, even if you went all the
way, what would you be? Feather-
weight champion of the world. Who
gives a shit? I doubt you can even
get a credit card based on that.

A hand lays an envelope full of money on the table in front of
Butch. Butch picks it up.

MARSELLUS (OS)
Now the night of the fight, you may
fell a slight sting, that's pride
fuckin' wit ya. Fuck pride! Pride
only hurts, it never helps. Fight
through that shit. 'Cause a year
from now, when you're kickin' it in
the Caribbean you're gonna say,
"Marsellus Wallace was right."

BUTCH
I got no problem with that.

MARSELLUS (OS)
In the fifth, your ass goes down.

Butch nods his head: "yes."

MARSELLUS (OS)
Say it!

BUTCH
In the fifth, my ass goes down.
...

...with this guy.


They believe they own the venue from ring, to refs, to purse, to popcorn and therefore can dictate any crazy terms they like to all comers.

If the DLC says so, winners have to take dives and losers get the titles and the endorsements and the victory pussy. All for “The good of the Party.”

Well fuck that.

We’re the Party, and far from getting ringside blowjobs in their causality-proof skyboxes, the DLC has forgotten that they’re just as much down in blood and sand as anyone else.

And they're losing. Again.

They forgot how to fight, and found that there was much bigger, steadier money to be made in the fight promotion game and figured they could somehow keep getting rich losing elections and punditing gassily during the off-season forever.

The reason is simple; In addition to politics being a very rough game, the way they play it it’s also very much a zero sum game. If someone else is up, that means you’re down. That means their sweet consulting gigs and lecture fees and lucrative face time with the Barons of Media start to dry up. Their Pot ‘O Hunny begins to evaporate like the last mud hole on the savannah in late summer, and they begin to behave more and more like starved predators fighting it out for survival as evolution works its merciless will.

So they work very hard to annihilate any competing visions. Strangle all potential rivals in their cribs, which can only work for awhile. Because as they move to safeguard the perks of their now-only-dimly-remembered revolution, the power elite end up having to spend more and more time and effort crushing dissent and less and less on delivering the goods.

The predictable side effect of all of this is that competent people set up shop elsewhere.

And then, because they can’t actually control the market like a real monopoly, the power elite start losing.

Repeatedly.

Embarrassingly.

And in their failure they can smell the reek of their own ruin, so they begin lashing out more and more violently at anyone they perceive of as a threat. Which is to say, they begin attacking the very people who could save their sorry asses if they just showed a little class and held the door open for the next generatio of leaders.

There’s a saying in the world of work that bosses hire people, but great bosses make lifetime allies.

Great bosses know they, too, can be fired. Because they have been. They've shoveled shit and worked in the cold, pre-dawn rain. They know, above all, they're neither omnipotent nor immortal, and that the world is an amazingly small place.

Anthony Bourdain writes about this in “Kitchen Confidential”. That there are some bosses who circumstances or bad habits or bad marriages or bad luck may drop off the radar from time to time, but when they put up the Bat Signal and call for help, people come. People will barefoot tarantella across broken glass to come because people will work their hearts out for a chance to be part of an enterprise where competence is the watchword. Where they get a chance to do what they enjoy with a sense of accomplishment and adventure. Where they’re treated like professionals.

In other words, good bosses don’t treat people like shit, and the DLC is behaving like a textbook Bad Boss.

Good bosses celebrate when their colleagues and employees do well, because A) it’s the right thing to do, and B) it show how sagacious they were in backing these bright people. Good bosses don’t try to poach the successes of others, and they don’t try to poison their betters because A) it’s immoral, and B) unless they’re hereditary royalty, they know they’re gonna meet those they treated both well and badly the next time the Big Carousel turns. And the next time around, the folks that once worked for them may now outrank them.

By a lot.

It’s like “Karma for Dummies” and good bosses learn to take the long view, for reasons that are both highly ethical and ruthlessly pragmatic.

The DLC treats voters, netroots, the blogosphere and outsider candidates like Lily Tomlin’s “Ernestine” used to treat customers: “We Don’t Care. We Don’t Have To. We’re the Phone Company.”

But blogs and netroots and the Dean phenomenon are doing to the world of Left-Of-Fascist politics what the 1984 Consent Decree that busted up AT&T began to do to telecom. The political world is being aggressively deregulated, and you and I get play a loud and important part in that, because with our help those who run the monopolies and insist that their shitty, loser service is all you have any right to expect are being run down by younger guns with a better business model.

In the end, the DLC and their parasitic symbiots in the Big Media are doomed to fail.

Because in the end – from empires of land, to industrial production, to technology, to media, to education, to the modern GOP – moribund monopolies that shift from innovation and customer service to a fearful stasis obsessed only with protecting their shrinking perks and market positions always fail.

Because, in the end, three things are true:

The wheel always turns.

Competence will out.

And they need us more than we need them.