Catastrophe Strategy

I’m reading a lot of comments in the blogosphere saying things like this today:

“…we’d be far better off politically if Roe were overturned and Griswold were curbed. And if a couple states — say Kansas and Alabama — enacted medieval restrictions that made the rest of the country puke.”

This is a great idea and I don’t know why we don’t use it for everything. For instance, why don’t we stop talking about torture. Our position is “soft” and it turns off the NASCAR dads we need to reach. Certainly, the prohibition against torture, which nobody even considered was in danger of being repealed until a couple of years ago, cannot be easily abandoned. Once people become aware of this medieval behavior, they will “puke” and step in to do something about it, right? Isn’t that how it works? When the right pulls some outrageous stunt, the country stands up en masse and rejects it.

There is a lot of action on the right these days about due process. If we just keep very quiet about the threat to habeas corpus and the right to confront your accuser, trial by jury of your peers — all of these fundamental constitutional rights, people will see how bad it is when our system of justice becomes “medieval” and then they will rebel.

Following this strategy, we should allow the Republicans to have their way on tort reform and consumer rights. Once people get ripped off badly enough they will look at the Republicans and see that they don’t have their best interests at heart and they will vote for us instead. Indeed, I think that we should carefully consider whether or not it’s smart to keep harping on tax policy too, for that matter. If we let the Republicans completely bankrupt the country so that we have a catastrophic economic meltdown, destroy social security and medicare, all those old, poor and unemployed people on the streets will surely wake people up. It will probably make them puke.

I’m not sure why that would lead to anyone voting for the Democrats, though. After all, we’ll have sat idly by and let these things happen without fighting because we thought it would be politically helpful to our cause to force women to have back alley abortions, enable torture, destroy our judicial system, let common citizens be conned out of their hard earned money, and their lives destroyed in economic calamity — in order to make a political point. But hey, it’s a good plan anyway. We’ll run on the “we told you so” platform and everyone will love us.

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