Sunny

With a heated Democratic Senatorial Primary contest less than a month away (8/8), Arlen Spector about to offer a bullshit compromise with BushCheneyCo on their illegal domestic spying, and the November 2006 Congressional election now a Quarter away, I've been thinking Sun Tzu. It's time for Dems to starting thinking Sunny:

One who knows the enemy and knows himself will not be in danger in a hundred battles. ?

One who does not know the enemy but knows himself will sometimes win, sometimes lose.

One who does not know the enemy and does not know himself will be in danger in every battle.

Some Democrats still seem slow to comprehend what kind of war the GOP is engaging with them.

Last month Nettertainment warned its readers about Senator Specter, another key Administration enabler albeit in "Moderate" Republican clothing, Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. As we surmised then, the bill has just been revealed as a complete capitulation to Bush/Cheney/Rove, with all kinds of amnesty and unprecedented Presidental powers to invade your privacy. Per Friday's Washington Post lead editorial:

Mr. Specter's bill began as a flawed but well-intentioned effort to get the program in front of the courts, but it has been turned into a green light for domestic spying. It must not pass.

Josh Marshall gets it right (as usual):

Democrats seem to have a highly evolved (and perhaps misplaced) sense of sportsmanship: magnanimous in victory; chastened in defeat. Whereas Dems will rise to a political fight when they deem circumstances warrant, Republicans consider politics nothing but a fight, with peace the exception, not the rule.

And so it is that many Democrats are unprepared to face an adversary who has a fallback position situated just inches behind the frontline, and a fallback position just inches behind that, and so on indefinitely.

When the Dems overrun a Republican position, they celebrate like drunken Hessians, only to sober up and realize they have gained very little ground at all and that the Republicans are still fighting.

He goes on to talk about Hamden, which to the Repuglicans is just a starting point for negotiations, ditto Specter's bill. It's a very corporate lawyerly approach to governing. Like Sun Tzu told us, you've got to know the enemy, and I still think some Democrats don't:

"Many Democratic activists and bloggers have concluded that some of the party's most visible scars are self-inflicted,"” said Ari Melber, a former staff member for Senator John KerryÂ’s presidential campaign who writes regularly for The Huffington Post, a Web site with political commentary. "“When prominent Democrats regularly capitulate to Republicans, they undermine the rationale for an opposition party. Lieberman is seen as the serial offender."”

Don't most of us have the sneaky suspicion that by the time we go to the polls in November, Bush and the GOP will have started another war or fixed another couple states or wiretapped their Democratic rivals?

I urge you, fair reader, to think of the current political climate in the U.S. not as somehow overly "partisan", since that's a Fox News code and club for not toeing the corrupt Bush/GOP party line, think of it as all-out "war"...for the soul and future of America.