If there's anything the two political parties in this country have in common, it's this:
     They keep making the same mistakes over and over.
     George Santayana, Thou Art Vindicated Time and Again.
     During the live road show of the DSM V (aka CPAC 2014, held, appropriately, at the Gaylord Hotel again), the GOP held a minority outreach forum that drew...
     ...well, this many people, if John Hudak's picture is to be believed.
     The worse-than-anemic turnout was sniffed at by Republican flaks, one saying (and I'm paraphrasing here), that Democratic minority outreach efforts succeed because we give out "goodies." In other words, Obama phones, welfare, food stamps. You know, goodies like the kind in the gifting suites at the Academy Awards that was ransacked four years ago by Sarah Palin and her pack of vulture grifters.
     This reaction contains within it the three fatal flaws that the GOP cannot get away from in their risible attempts to "reach out" to the same minorities they've been buttfucking into oblivion since Lee Atwater hatched the Southern Strategy over 40 years ago. Number one, it essentially admits the GOP has nothing to offer minorities aside from platitudes and slightly toned-down racist rhetoric in their cynical attempt to poach votes from the funner, more multi-colored Big Tent of the Democrats.
     Secondly, the GOP made an assumption that there would be enough people of color at CPAC to fill their ambitiously large room at the Gaylord, despite the fact that your average CPAC convention inevitably looks like a huge bowl of vanilla ice cream with a few miserly Oreo crumbs sprinkled on top.
     Lastly, they shoot themselves in the foot right out of the gate in their minority outreach efforts by sneering that people of color will vote for anyone who offers to give them something. You know, like a social safety net that actually works in times when they actually need one.
     But in reality, it's Obama and his Blue Dog cohorts in both chambers who want to eliminate the COLA for Social Security for no earthly reason. The sheer insanity of Obama's insistence on doing this needs no belaboring: Social Security is funded 52 times a year through payroll taxes, which Obama cut years ago by 2%. Ergo, the same Republicans who for nearly a century have been calling for Social Security's repeal or privatization were thrust, through sheer, racist, mean-spirited spite, into the absurd position of opposing cuts to Social Security benefits.
     Because, you know, that's what the black guy wants. To Republicans, it would be like refusing to fuck that white chick they've been lusting after for years because she had sex with a black man.
     It just boggles the mind: Imagine if Obama went full-tilt, Crazy Base World and crimson red Republican: The GOP would have to oppose him so many times it would actually get us back on the right track as a nation. And a die-hard Obamabot would probably say this is Obama's political genius at work here: Reverse psychology. By adopting one GOP initiative after another, the GOP and Republican think tanks that had originated them would be shot down by the same people that had tried to launch them.
     Of course, those of us in the know, know better. Barack Obama is indisputably the most Republican Democratic president we've ever had.
     You think the GOP would make hay over this fact, that Obama has been working ceaselessly and shamelessly for over five years now to literally take food from our mouths and money from our wallets. But they don't. Because secretly, they agree with what he's doing and proposing. They just can't admit it out loud to Crazy Base World.
     This was why, when Chris Christie floated his way to the podium like the slow motion Hindenburg he is, he received just a smattering of polite applause. Christie's dead in the water and his presidential aspirations are finished for the simple reason he seemed to work with Obama after Hurricane Sandy, because Christie shelved his Ralph Kramden schtick long enough to act like a state Governor who seemed to care about his people in the midst of a national disaster area.
     Because the real red meat was thrown out to the hungry and frustrated lunatics at CPAC by zookeepers Sarah Palin, Rand Paul, Ted Cruz and Rick Perry. But it was just rehashed propaganda disguised as satire and vice versa. As always, it was impossible to tell where and when the propaganda ended and the satire began.
     And this is one of the biggest mistakes the Democrats keep making over and over again: Not calling these racist ass pirates of the Republican Party out for what they are and continuing to work with and debate these shitheels as if they're actually interested in debating us. Which they're not. The late Steve Gilliard said as much almost a decade ago.
     He had no intention of debating conservatives and no delusions about besting them in debate because he knew that, in these assholes' addle-pated minds, they're unassailably right because, in these selfsame assholes' addle-pated minds, liberals are wrong about everything. And conservatives are so fucking stupid and/or misinformed or just twisted up with hatred they've been conditioned to believe that everything, and I mean every-fucking-thing liberals want is evil, evil, evil.
     And Steve had no interest in debating these knuckle-draggers, especially on their own turf and within their own framework because his one, painfully simple goal was to piss them off. Or, as Steve-O said in his elegantly inartful way,
     "I'm tired of people acting like these people can be reasoned with or talked to. They don't want to talk, they want to drive us away into a corner and ridicule our ideas.
      I'm not writing to make conservatives happy. I want them to hate my opinions. I'm not interested in debating them. I want to stop them."
     Amen, brother. Gilliard was like a real-life Hari Seldon, a guy who continues to be right even nearly a decade after his untimely death, long before the Tea Party reared its ugly, tri-cornered head, long before the GOP descended ever deeper into the Appalachian mud pits and committed unnatural acts with unabashed racists, gun-clutchers and sundry and assorted lunatics.
     Then the establishment GOP finally decided to climb out of the primordial ooze and now they're wondering, after said unnatural acts, why their penises hurt when they pee and where those chancre sores are coming from.
     They think they're right even while history is against them.
     We know we're right even as history sides with us.
     That is the difference and it's as easy to see as the trunk on an elephant's face.
     I'm not afraid to be a liberal nor am I afraid to call myself one any more than Steve Gilliard was. It's a badge of honor, not a scarlet letter. And, to us liberals, it goes way beyond mere partisan politics. We stand by our beliefs because they strike deep into the heart of humanism, what it means to be a compassionate human being.
     If the Democrats simply worked to repeal corporate tax breaks and bring jobs back to the country, they'd never lose another election for the next century.
     But they can't do that for reasons both known to us and for secret reasons we cannot fathom and can only glean and speculate over while watching the first two seasons of House of Cards.
     That's the Netflix series in which the President of the United States is, literally, a serial killer who happens to belong to the Democratic Party.