Can we do more for the truth than the Right for a lie?

This is our golden opportunity to turn back the tide of the right once and for all. DHinMI will write later today about how all the cards are stacked in our favor similar to the 1932 election, but I would simply point out the simple fact that the Republicans are brawling and that this piefight is not going to be over any time soon:

The speech wasn't enough, though, for Gary Cass, formerly of D. James Kennedy's Reclaiming America for Christ and now of the Christian Anti-Defamation Commission, an organization formed to protect Christians from "defamation, discrimination, and bigotry." (Numerous Huckabee supporters serve on the organization's advisory board.) In a statement, Cass said that Romney was free to practice Mormonism's (unspecified) "secret rituals," but he took issue with Romney's failure to renounce "Mormonism's historic antipathy toward Christianity." Cass continued, "If he does not renounce the historic Mormon hostility to Christianity, then we must conclude that he agrees with his church's defamation of the past."

And the war between the secularists and the right-wingers is heating up, with no end in sight:

In a webcast response to Sen. Charles Grassley's investigation into the Kenneth Copeland Ministries' use of tax-exempt donations, Copeland's son, John, the ministry's CEO, claimed to be "surprised" by the investigation and "not sure why we were singled out." (Could it be his father's $20 million luxury jet, perhaps?) In an "interview" in the ministry studios with an unidentified woman, Copeland contended that donors "have a right to ask" for financial information from the ministry but that the ministry has no obligation to provide it. Reminiscent of your childhood insistence that you could say whatever you wanted because "it's a free country," Copeland maintained that donors have a right to ask for the financial information as "part of our freedom of speech." But actually getting a substantive response to the question? No dice.

The financial accountability statement on the Copeland Web site is a rudimentary pie chart showing the percentage of ministry money spent on various programs, nothing more. Armed with all that detailed information, who would hesitate to donate $1,500 so Kenneth Copeland Ministries can upgrade to high-definition television equipment?

The younger Copeland, a self-described cowboy, offered up a strange and meandering defense of the ministry rooted in his cockamamie view of the Constitution and the Bible. "In the Bible, some of the richest people who were on Earth were people of God," he said, adding that "Solomon was so rich the Queen of Sheba fainted" and that "Abraham was so rich he had to leave the country he was in because it couldn't contain him." And about that vow of poverty? "Why would I want to become a Christian," he wondered, "if becoming a Christian means I have to be poor and sick?"

Waldman elaborates on the divide between the secularists and the theocons even more:

After months of tedium and mindless chest-thumping, the race for the Republican presidential nomination finally got interesting over the last couple of weeks. And the way it did so highlights the fundamental rift threatening the future of the GOP: the divide between the party's corporate/anti-tax wing, which includes the people who write the checks, and its social conservative wing, which includes the people who get bodies to the polls. It's the plutocrats versus the theocrats, and at the moment it's hard to tell who's going to win.

Try to imagine the combination of pain and dread now covering the Mitt Romney campaign like a wet wool blanket. After all the work, after all the enthusiastic pandering, after outspending his opponents by millions, after the months in which he was the only candidate airing ads in Iowa, his support there turned out to be a mile wide and an inch deep. At the first opportunity, the social conservatives whose feet he had kissed with such commitment wandered away from his gleaming campaign and over to that smooth-talking preacher setting up folding chairs in his bare-bones storefront.

It now looks as if a lot of Iowa conservatives were leaning to Romney because they felt that they didn't have much choice. Sure he's a phony, they thought, but what other options do we have? The somnambulant character actor? The cross-dressing New Yorker? As someone recently said, at least Romney was pretending to believe the right things.

The key to victory in the 2008 election is sticking together. If we can stick together while the right splinters and divides, then we will have a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, and we will get a lot more accomplished than we ever could during this session. As things stand now, the Democrats can legitimately claim that the reason that they are not getting more done is because of Republican obstructionism:

There is the even longer list of things they say would have gotten done, had Republicans not gotten in their way. The truth is, both lists are paltry, but it's also true there was little more that Democrats could hope for. Congress, particularly the Senate, was designed to frustrate quick or easy maneuvers; the power is with the dissenters, and Republican senators have used it to full advantage. I think that Democrats have put up a good fight and have nothing to apologize for. If they are guilty of anything, it is of their willingness to take the long view, and the political hit, rather than just allow everything to grind to a halt. The suggestion that Reid should just let the Republicans filibuster ignores the responsibility Democrats have to keep the government functioning. They have to be aware, however, that their voters may not be quite so understanding or forgiving.

This week, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid conceded in a roundabout way that the Republican minority may leave the most permanent stamp on the 110th Congress: "As the first year of the 110th Congress winds down, there is no doubt that if we continue in the current direction, this will be known as the Congress of Republican obstruction," Reid said in a statement. "What we're seeing this year from Republicans is not ordinary obstruction. It's obstruction on steroids."

What we have to now do is to work for a Democratic White House as well as a 60-vote majority so that the Republicans cannot filibuster presidential appointees or needed legislation. There have been many people who have decried what they see as a lack of spine by the Democrats this session. However, that is all the more reason why we should work for 60 votes in the Senate. This way, the Democrats will be without excuse if they try to make nice with the Republicans. And this way, our candidates will make up the difference needed.

We can and should primary sellouts like Dianne Feinstein, and we can and should either hold Harry Reid's feet to the fire or work to get a better Senate Majority Leader or Speaker of the House elected. But if we fail to achieve these goals -- a Democratic White House and 60 Senators -- then Reid and Pelosi can simply do nothing and throw their hands up and use the Republican obstructionism as an excuse for doing nothing. But if we work for those goals, then the Democrats will be without excuse if they fail to undo the damage caused by the Bush administration. This also means that once we have settled on a winner in the Presidential primary, then we must be able to put our differences aside and work to support the Democratic nominee as well -- keep in mind that a vote for President is a vote for two-thirds of the branches of government because of his or her ability to appoint judges.

And not only that, we should hang the failures of the 110th Congress on the heads of the Republicans:

--Iraq
--FISA
--Energy policy
--SCHIP
--Any other meaningful legislation that they fail to enact.

The saying of Norquist that he would like to drown the government in a bathtub is the saying that drives the mindless ideologues of the Republican obstructionists. This ideology is what drives these people to block, obstruct, and equivocate; their own self-survival is at stake. After all, if too many government programs and bodies work the way that they are intended to, then the reason for their existance would be gone.

And the strangulation of the FDA is a perfect example of the Roadblock Republicans in action:

For many decades, the right has been about as hostile toward the FDA as it has been toward Social Security -- another long-standing success story that undercuts the worldview that government is the problem rather than the solution. In a 1975 roundtable at the American Enterprise Institute, for example, Ronald Reagan claimed that the FDA was needlessly killing Americans. Referring to the drug Rifampin, he said, "I think something more than 40,000 tuberculars alone have died in this country who conceivably could have been saved by a drug that has been widely used the past few years throughout Europe." In fact, Rifampin had already been on the market in the U.S. for four years, approved by the FDA five months after the manufacturer submitted the application.

The network of conservative and libertarian think tanks that began to sprout in the years leading up to Reagan's presidency, blossoming in full during his eight years in office, continued to hammer away at his theme of FDA as murderer, pointing to its purportedly unreasonable delays in approving drugs and medical devices. The evidence they marshaled in support of that claim wasn't much stronger than Reagan's Rifampin fiction, but over time the sheer repetition of the argument gained traction. It's worth noting that many of those same right-wing institutions demonstrated considerably less concern for the public's health when they incongruously chastised the agency for its unfair harassment of tobacco companies.

Another persistent line of attack was most concisely expressed by Newt Gingrich, who dubbed the FDA the "number-one job killer in America." That accusation was applauded by the pharmaceutical, medical-device, and food industry funders of both the Republican Party and conservative think tanks, reinforcing their threats to relocate to countries with less stringent regulatory oversight.

The recent rulings of the SCOTUS show that there is too much at stake for us to sit out the 2008 elections.

The current Supreme Court term, however, could yield some historic decisions that do just that. For the past two decades the Rehnquist Court narrowed the scope of economic-security safeguards, insulated federal and state officials from accountability for maladministration of those laws, and obstructed citizens' access to legislatively guaranteed benefits and protections. Earlier this year, in its notorious May 2007 Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire & Rubber decision, a 5-4 majority on the Roberts Court gutted the 1964 Civil Rights Act guarantee of equal pay opportunity. Now, cases to be decided during the Court's new term will provide clues as to whether the Roberts Court intends to launch an even more aggressive campaign to dismantle 20th-century progressive reforms and abort similar 21st-century initiatives.

The weightiest such items on the Court's 2007–2008 agenda are two cases affecting legal guarantees of health and retirement security. These cases, one already docketed and one the subject of an as-yet unanswered petition for review, will test whether the Roberts Court will expand Rehnquist Court doctrines that have stripped workers and retirees of remedies for abuse by employers, health maintenance organizations (HMOs), and entities that administer their health and retirement plans. These doctrines have provoked outrage from legions of scholars and lower-court federal judges, who have complained that they mandate unjust decisions and grotesquely misconstrue the landmark federal Employee Retirement and Income Security Act of 1974 (ERISA). This is not an abstract or isolated problem; over 130 million Americans currently count on employer-sponsored plans for retirement and health-care protection.

ERISA was enacted after more than a decade of congressional investigations into widespread abuses of employee-benefit plans by company and union administrators. ERISA mandated that plan administrators would be required as a matter of federal law to act "solely in the interest of the participants and beneficiaries for the exclusive purpose of providing benefits" to them, and to do so with "care, skill, prudence, and diligence." But over the past 30 years, principally in 1993 and 2002 decisions authored by Justice Antonin Scalia, the Supreme Court has turned these common-sense goals upside-down. According to the Court's mystifying doctrine, victims of unlawful abuse cannot secure "make whole" monetary relief from ERISA plan administrators who have violated their fiduciary duties.

We cannot be silent in the face of this -- we must voice our opinions in order to put an end to the madness. We must do so twice -- first at the ballot box, where we select the most progressive candidate, and persuade others to do the same. The second time is when we respect the will of our fellow Democrats and vote for the winner in the general election.

To be silent is to give our consent for the Republicans to continue to roll back everything that we have fought for and won over the last 75 years. Silence means consent for the Republicans to gut Roe, Brown, Griswold, and other progressive legislation even more than they have already done. Silence means consent for the Republicans to make the right noises, like Bush did at Bali, and then turn around and do nothing meaningful to reverse the threat of global warming.

The Republicans are fighting with the cards stacked against them, and they know it. Therefore, they must do all they can to divide us and the Democratic leaders to the point where we refuse to work with each other anymore. We cannot fall in with their plans to divide the party; the consequences would be drastic. Phil Angiledes and Steve Westly turned their primary battle to challenge Arnold Schwartznegger into a pissing match that drove away the electorate, created record low turnouts, and led to Ahnold winning thanks to voters who thought that Angiledes was more of a Republican than Westly was. That almost happened in Virginia between Harris Miller and James Webb before the Macaca Moment revived our chances and allowed us to win there.

We should, of course, always call the Democrats to account when they do not do enough to stand up to the Bush administration. However, when a reasonable argument can be made that it was the Roadblock Republicans at fault, then we should not point fingers at our fellow Democrats, but must point our fingers at the real culprits -- the Roadblock Republicans. The Roadblock Republicans cannot afford to have us succeed in key legislation -- SCHIP, withdrawal from Iraq, meaningful FISA reform. Therefore, they will fight tooth and nail to make such efforts fail so that we will point fingers and blame each other instead of blaming the Republicans. This is the kind of political game the Republicans have engaged in since 1994. We must not fall in with their plans.

The Pooties are depending on us.

Our brothers and sisters in Iran are depending on us.

All those who aspire to better lives are depending on us.

The world depends on us.

The Universe depends on us.

Are we willing to do more for the truth than the right is willing to do for a lie?