Daily Kos, quoting Kevin Drum talking about how Republican activists have gotten far more extreme in the past 25 years:

And yet, Republicans keep on winning anyway. But why? How is it that a party can continue to drift farther and farther from the center of American politics -- the Holy Grail of most political strategists -- and yet continue to be successful? Why is the center no longer holding?

Why do Republicans keep on winning Drum asks. For the precise reason the Netroots has advocated for a Fighting Dems strategy -- Democrats have been afraid to call the Republican Party extreme, even though it is. Democrats have been afraid to fight for their mainstream principles.

Democrats aren't willing to get attention.

Look at last year's Swift Boat controversy. Well-funded opponents of John Kerry spent months simply inventing slanderous lies out of whole cloth. What happened? They were scandalous, so the media reported them. The progressive machine (more like five station wagons and an oxcart, but anyway) spent weeks refuting the charges one by one, but the charges were old news by then. The media spent one sentence reporting that the charges were disputed, using the "he said, she said" formula to avoid actually determining truth. By then, the wingnuts had made up new lies out of whole cloth, and gleefully announced them. The media reported them, the progressives spent a week refuting them, and then new lies came out, and the cycle repeated.

Maybe the Democrats think that's part of the problem, so they don't want to participate in it, but that's how the game is currently played. If they want to win the game, that's the game they have to play. They have to get attention. The only difference is that they have to get attention by speaking truth.

That's not difficult. Two FDA commissioners resigned over the political refusal to approve "Plan B" for over-the-counter release, despite overwhelming scientific and medical evidence that it's safe for women who don't want to get pregnant. Now they're trying to stop the cervical cancer vaccine, with its 100% success rate in clinical trials (100%!), because it stops the viruses that cause cervical cancer, and those viruses are sexually transmitted. Combine that with most of the rhetoric over abortion, and you have a very simple truth:

The extremist GOP leadership wants to punish women for having sex.

Scandalous? Yes, but provably true. The extremist Republican leadership believes that women who have sex without their authorization deserve pregnancy (since the GOP thinks those women should be able neither to prevent nor end pregnancies without the GOP's approval). They also deserve STDs, and cervical cancer that could have been prevented by a simple vaccine. Men who have sex (with women), however, are scot-free. In fact, the GOP made sure men get free Viagra as part of Medicare, until it became clear that people they didn't like (gay people, sex offenders) were getting it too, then they moved to stop it.

In Tom DeLay's America, men can have all the sex they want, but women must be punished for having unauthorized sex. It is their philosophy and their policy. Democrats are afraid to say it.

Imagine this as the Democratic message of the day. The wingnuts will go insane. They'll start shooting, they'll burn cars, they'll have riots, they'll demand Guantanemo Bay for anyone daring to have said it. It's still true, and the more they protest, the clearer that will become. If the Democrats had any sense, by the time the wingnuts had their lying response coordinated, Democrats would be ready with the next truth:

The extremist GOP leadership doesn't care if poor people die.

There's plenty of evidence for that, too. The Democrats have to stop following the GOP's cycle of lying and start their own cycle of truth. The wingnuts don't have to defend their policies as long as the Democrats don't lay those policies out on the table in stark, clear, get-your-attention terms.

Oh, and any "Democrat" who feels the need to defend the GOP's track record on women's rights or poverty (or whatever the next message is)? Throw him overboard. That's what the Republicans do. If a GOP politician tries to get attention for himself by contradicting the Message of the Day, he gets shut out. They don't attack him, necessarily, but they do not support him. They say "Well, Senator XXX is a great public servant, but he's wrong here." The GOP money machine even backs primary challengers against suitably-disobedient Republican incumbents. If they won't support the party's core messages, the party shouldn't support them.

If some Democrat wants time on Nightline by saying "Well, the GOP isn't really that bad on women's rights," then the party has no need to put him front-and-center on any other issue. Core issues like competence, equality, and justice are not negotiable.

There's no end to these messages. Look at today's House vote where, for the third time in two years, the leadership kept a vote open far longer than was allowed to "persuade" members to vote for their corruption. That's the next message right there:

The extremist GOP leadership will break any law, including the rules they wrote for Congress, to keep the corruption going.

This is how the game is played. These are the rules. If the Democrats want to continue playing by different rules, they shouldn't wonder why they're not winning.

(Grammar updated - if Moltz is going to link to it, I might as well use all the right pronouns and crap like that.)

I'd hoped I wouldn't have to write anything about the suicide explosion last Saturday outside the OU game, but there seems no limit to the amount of crap that people will just make up to support racist, bigoted fantasies. So I debunked it in a new story.

New facts may change my mind, but the existing facts are pretty compelling.