I recently received a survey from the Democratic National Committee. It asked about by concerns and legislative priorities. It also asked this question:
Please rank the following elements of the DNC’s election strategy in order of importance to you. (1 = most important. 11 = not as important)
I read the choices a couple of times. My 1 through 5 priorities took some consideration. Number 11 took no time at all, it was the first one I numbered:
Reaching out to voters and demographics that did not vote Democratic in 2016.
The DNC even has a Etnics Caucus, whatever that meant. Charlie Pierce thinks it might have meant “white people who didn’t come from California.”
Why should I even care about trying to reach these ignoramuses? Why should the DNC care? They’ve tried the BS compromise with Republicans and all that has accomplished is the GOP in charge and Democrats scratching their stupid heads because they still have not learned that you CANNOT bargain in good faith with these people. They will stab you in the back every time. There is no point reaching out to those who voted against their own interests.
I’m not alone thinking that this is the least of the priorities for the DNC. The rest of what Charlie Pierce said really sums up where I am on stupid people who continue to vote against their own self-interests:
A while back, I ran out of patience with the endless provision of cookies to the people who looked at the United States of America and decided that just what we needed was to have it run for a while by a Manhattan real-estate grifter and career public nuisance because he was going to bring jobs and money back to a bunch of states he very likely couldn’t find on a map. But, in a continuing act of self-criticism that would do the Cultural Revolution proud, ever since the results rolled in last November, America’s elite newspapers and news divisions have offered up linespace and airtime as a kind of penance to the “overlooked” and “forgotten” real Americans.
After the first several of these, I was on the verge of recommending that the people running the newspapers and news divisions simply stand themselves up in the town square of Bug Tussle and flog themselves for being educated as well as they are. The sub rosa tone of apology in most of these exercises was revolting.
Holy mother of god, I’m tired of reading quotes from people who live in places where the local economy went to hell or Mexico in 1979, and who have spent the intervening years swallowing whatever Jesus Juice was offered up by theocratic bunco artists of the Christocentric Right, and gulping down great flagons of barely disguised hatemongering against the targets of the day, all the while voting against their own best interests, now claiming that empowering Donald Trump as the man who will “shake things up” on their behalf was the only choice they had left. You had plenty of choices left.
In Kansas, you could have declined to re-elect Sam Brownback, who’d already turned your state into a dismal Randian basket case. In Wisconsin, you had three chances to turn out Scott Walker, and several chances to get the state legislature out of his clammy hands. And, now that the teeth of this new administration are becoming plain to see, it’s a good time to remind all of you that you didn’t have to hand the entire federal government over to Republican vandalism, and the presidency over to an abject loon on whom Russia may well hold the paper.
You all had the same choices we all had. You saddled the rest of us with misrule and disaster. Own it. I empathize, but I will not sympathize.
My dearly beloved aunt, for whom I am named after, used to tell us kids whenever we came crying to her about mistakes we had made, “if you’re looking for sympathy, it’s between shite and syphilis in the dictionary.”