Reply #6: Americans are not sheep

[mikehiggins]

Mocking people who don't share your views is fun when you're sitting around the bar with your buddies, but when it shows up on a newsgroup it just means someone is unconcerned with how they appear to the rest of the world.

It reminds me of the cartoon in which one dog says to another, "on the internet, no one knows you're a dog."

What President-with-an-asterick Bush succeeded at was managing to convince a shocked and terrified public that he had somehow gone from being a semi-literate buffoon to a world leader.

That's it. That's all he did. We did the rest. Thanks to our inabiity to figure out how to deal with the GOP attack squads we had already managed to lose both the House and the Senate (the Supreme Court was the GOP's long ago) to a reactionary bunch of liars. Instead of girding up our loins and taking the battle to them we allowed our "leaders" to sit back and play along in a comfortable game of incumbency. And then we managed to so thoroughly ignore what the people were thinking that we lost an election that should have been a cakewalk. Blame Al Gore? Go right ahead. But somebody who should have known better nominated him, right?

Why? Because WE are the stupid ones who never learned from what was going on around us because it didn't fit in with the old ways that our party had thought would always be reliable. Well, guess what? They weren't.

So, if there are any "sheeple" in this equation, its those of us who watched Newt Gingrich take the Congress away from us and couldn't even understand why, let along how to counterattack.

Don't ever put down the American voter as a sheeple. They know what they want, even if they end up with something much worse. Bush put together a confusing mishmash of platitudes and confusion, but our side didn't do any better.

Generally speaking you can't beat somebody with nobody, but in 2000 laziness and complacency managed to pull it off. Maybe after eight years controlling the White House our guys figured it was a lock.

So who were the sheep then?