Centrists Never Learn

Former DNC chair Donna Brazile to join Fox News

Brazile in a statement said she was “delighted” to join the network and said she was eager to represent Democrats for Fox News viewers, who she argued don’t “hear enough from Democrats.”

God, could anything be more on-brand for Donna Brazile? I don't know what could be more pathetic than thinking that if we just reach out to people who willingly submit their brains to hours of FOX's right-wing propaganda every day, we're sure to find some common ground. Surely they will listen to reason! And sure, my presence on their network will allow FOX to continue to propping up the thin veneer of "fair and balanced" or whatever they're calling it now, sure I'm helping them to try to rehab their image with some facade of legitimacy, but that's beside the point. We all need to work together, blah blah blah.. . .

She acknowledged that she might catch heat from members of her party for the move, saying that “my response is that, if we've learned anything from the 2016 election, it is that we can't have a country where we don't talk to those who disagree with our political views.”

So in other words, we have not learned anything from the 2016 election.

The one lesson we should have learned from 2016 is Play To Win. There is nothing to be gained by playing not to lose. It's tempting to think you can just sit back and be the responsible adult in the room while the other candidate implodes, but it didn't work for Al Gore (a campaign run so teeibly by Donna Brazile herself)* it didn't work for John Kerry, and it didn't work for Hillary Rodham Clinton. The Republican electorate Does. Not. Care. how incompetent, how stupid, how ridiculous their candidate is, they are going to turn out to vote for him. Honestly, they like a candidate even more if he's seen as stupid or incompetent because they see voting for him as "triggering the libs." You can not expect that you're going to be able to pry any votes away from the Republican candidate by reasoning with them.

These people are not reachable. They can not be reasoned with. They need to be soundly defeated, not appeased.

The only way to win is to energize your base, get your voters to the polls, give them something to vote FOR, not just a Republican monster to vote against.

These centrist-liberal "third way" Democrats still think that we can get back to a pre-Gingrich version of Washington where Ronald Reagan and Tip O'Neill would go out for cocktails after work because despite their differences, they still respected each other. Those days are gone and they are never NEVER coming back.

Barack Obama spent eight years trying to get along with these people. Their response was to state publicly that their chief legislative goal was to make him a one-term President, then filibuster and obstruct everything he tried to do including refusing to even consider anyone he might nominate to the Supreme Court. They spent 8 years sometimes implying sometimes stating outright that President Obama was not born in America, then elected one of the biggest mouthpieces for that smear to the presidency.

They do not care and they do not care who knows it. There will be no getting along, there will be no compromise, there will be no dialogue, there will be no good faith negotiations because they do not believe in any of those things. Those things are all anathema to them. Even if some of them wanted to work out some sort of compromise, they would be afraid to admit it because they know they would get primaried by someone even crazier, stupider, and farther to the right.


And FOX is a big reason why things are the way they are.

And Brazile thinks she's going to accomplish something by becoming a part of this network.

They never learn.






*And yes, I know the 200 election was stolen, but Christ, it never should have been close enough to steal!