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How to Kick Against the Pricks [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-01-24
I’m damned if I’ll be a lickspittle like Zack or Bezos or any of the other venal, spineless worms slithering on their yellow bellies for the privilege of rimming Trump’s smelly ass. I will not be the dog that licks the foot of power. I will be the Opposition, I will be the Resistance, I will be the Maquisard who blows up Nazi bridges.
The question is—how?
I’m just some old retiree with back pain and a bum knee. I have Morton’s Neuroma and my toes burn. I not only have no vote in Congress I didn’t even have one in Michigan, thanks to the winner take all Electoral College BS. As far as the Presidential election goes I might as well have stayed home. So, imagine my delight at seeing an article from good ol’ MSNBC that claimed to be “a playbook on how to defend” American democracy. Just what I was looking for!
I dug in.
It said it was the new Marshall Plan. Hot diggity. That was a good thing. There were “seven pillars”. I’ll list them for the sake of completeness, but don’t get too hung up on them—the authors certainly didn’t. You can even skip them but if you really want to know them, here they are:
Protect elections
Protect the rule of law, and guard against the erosion of checks and balances
Combat corruption
Reinforce civic and media space
Protect pluralistic governance
Counter disinformation
Make democracy deliver
Okay. So far, so good. We see the goals. Now to see how to achieve each goal. How do the authors propose to protect elections? Well, spoiler alert. They don’t say. Instead, we get a short lecture on why free, fair, and transparent elections are important. Duh. Like we don’t already know that?
Okay, whatev. Let’s see how to protect the rule of law and guard against erosion of checks and balances, which, I dunno, maybe it’s just me, but I would have thought those were two different pillars. But okay, how we gonna do this one? Alas, again all we get are a couple paragraphs of blatantly obvious blather on why rule of law is important. Is it even conceivable there might be someone in this article’s audience who doesn’t know that?
By now I was getting a tad discouraged. I pressed on however, wanting very much to know how to combat corruption. You see, turns out this Trump fella has a history of being corrupt. And this Elon Musk fella is really, really rich and is now Trump’s BFF. Try as I might, however, I could find not one word on what to do about that.
As for the final four pillars, well, those were all smooshed together like honorable mentions. I dunno. Seems to old naive me that countering disinformation, at least, could have had a bit more meat on the bone. At any rate, the article concludes with such bromides as “Every sector of American life must get its act together”, “media can’t engage in false equivalences”, “big tents will be necessary”, and “it’s up to the American people”.
No shit Sherlock.
Tell ya what we don’t need, what I don’t need at any rate, what I am utterly fed up with. Pundit prattle like this that has zero value and was only published because of the names of the authors. Sound and fury signifying nothing. I want teeth. I want a plan that is detailed and doesn’t insult me by explaining shit I already know. I want Dems who are gonna kick the goddamn door down and come in biting knee caps.
But maybe that’s just me.
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