And yet here you are.
Duh. How many vanities have you posted today?
Maybe the other side wastes as much, or more time on political media, but that doesn’t mean we couldn’t improve on our side.
What was I supposed to say? John McCain will screw you less than Obama?
Yes.
The conservative movement began on the grassroots level. It started in discussions with friends and neighbours and people spreading the message of conservative values and principles face-to-face.
We should have spent our time tarring and feathering McCain!
This was a tough year to begin with coupled with a President with 25% approval. I don’t know what could have been done by the McCain people to not be painted by that brush.
I think we should restrict vanities to those that have been here more than a year.
Nah... we lost by 10 million votes. Plus, we were performing a valuable service of keeping the supporters motivated.
Not many of the chosen one’s followers were even willing to listen to the origins of the mortgage crisis. Much easier on their part to blame GWB and move on. Sadly, McCain didn’t gt in front of the cameras and point blame where it belongs - the House and the Senate for the melt down.
Given how many Obama fans were something straight out of Jonestown, I hardly think that logic or reason would have been accepted by any of them.
-ccm
I spent some time on some of the MSM message boards defending Sarah Palin. It was pretty clear that Obama’s supporters were swarming those boards to set the tone but they really weren’t prepared for a detailed and supported defense. So, yes, I think we need to divide up the MSM message boards and be as rational and factual as possible to answer them the next time around.
I can only speak for myself, but I did a fair amount of time discussing the presidential race with some of my friends and colleagues. FR was a great resource to help equip me with what I needed to know.
For example, Obama could count on every slightest stumble (or perceived stumble) by his opponents being plastered all over the front pages for days, while his own major miscues and those of his running mate would go unnoticed by the mainstream press. That's a huge advantage, an enormous advantage, maybe an insurmountable advantage.
There's not much point in asking what we could have done differently; it's rather like asking what the Junior Little League All-Amputee Team could have done differently to avoid their shellacking by the Major League All-Stars. At a certain point, the deck is stacked so heavily against you that there's no way for you to win.
It's not too late, however, for us to ask what we might do differently next time. The mainstream press has sold its soul to the Democratic Party, and as such will provide enormous advantage to any Democrat -- as long as a significant number of people trust them. Our major task for the next four years will be to educate people, to convince them that the New York Times and the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times and the news desks of CBS, NBC, ABC, and CNN are not reliable sources of information, that nothing they say should ever be taken at face value.
Make no mistake: the mainstream press is at this point effectively nothing less than the propaganda arm of the Democratic Party. They are our enemies. Our strategies, our plans for attack, our allocation of resources, all must take this basic fact into account.
You and your brother should be out in the barn picthforking manure out of the stalls.
And yet here you are.
You have not grasped the level of contempt America has for the Bush dynasty. This was not an election about choosing the lesser of two evils. It was about repudiating Bush. The Bush doctrine is about cheap labor (immigration), insecurity (drop your pants at the airport and watch a raghead go ahead), corporate raiding of the treasury (War contractors and mischief with the markets).
You mean you didn’t talk to voters????
You didn’t make calls????
You didn’t volunteer to knock on doors????
Yes and no.
The "no" part: We depend on political websites (especially sites like Free Republic) to gather news, express and share ideas and sample the general tone of our fellow conservatives.
The "yes" part: We do need to do much more than type out our frustrations. It's never productive to preach to the choir.
However, I am sure that many are much like myself that at least hold in-person discussions and send out email barrages to friends, co-workers and family of left, right and confused persuasions. Hopefully, those on the left and those caught in the middle will learn something. Those on the right will pass the messages onto others and so on and so on.
Between work and family, it's about all that I have the time and resources for, although I wish I could do much more. But much to my pleasure, I did succeed in convincing many to vote for McCain instead of Obama. I wonder what I could do with more time and resources? I'm sure I'm not alone in that question and it's a question that needs to be asked by all of us.
We need to explore our resources, pool them and exploit them to their fullest potentials. We can not simply rely on those few with the most resources and influence. We all need to get organized and get busy. Make better use of web sites and the Internet in general to communicate, network and organize. The left has had a leg up over us in this area for years.