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An Open Letter to My Democratic Spammer
(Image: Pete, Politic365; Edited: EL / TO)
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An Open Letter to My Democratic Spammer

(Image: Pete, Politic365; Edited: EL / TO)

Are you, by chance, feeling a bit ragged around the edges? On the verge of disaster? Perhaps even a bit doomed?

Me, too!

I can’t imagine why…

…oh, wait. I know exactly why. I looked at my email this week.

“TRAGIC Conclusion,” read one.

“Terrible News (JUST NOW),” read another.

“CANCEL NOTICE,” read another.

“we. will. fail.” read another.

And another, just like those. And another. And another. And another.

It wasn’t the end of the world, as it turns out. It was, in fact, the master plan of some fundraiser fuzzwit for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, who decided the thing to do is to scream manically into every email address available using panic-riddled headlines designed to make you click them open, because Jesus, what if?

“Terrible News (JUST NOW).” Oh, no, what happened?

“CANCEL NOTICE.” What didn’t I pay for?

“TRAGIC Conclusion.” Oh God, who died?

Probably 300 emails like this in my in-box since the weekend, one after the other prophesying calamity…unless I gave $5 to the Democrats.

Here’s a memo to whoever came up with this particularly obnoxious fundraising tactic: You suck. I hope you get fired with such velocity that you can’t even get a job drowning puppies in a kill shelter.

I got one email titled “FINAL NOTICE,” which jolted me upright, because it looked like a dunning letter from a bill collector, and I leaned in wondering who I could possibly owe to such a degree that I would get an angry ALL CAPS email…but it wasn’t a bill collector. It was the DCCC, using shock tactics against the people it sought to suck money from.

Did I happen to mention that you suck, you who devised this program? I did? Good. Because you suck out loud, you suck in Technicolor, you suck so hard that you actually bend the light. So fired, I devoutly hope. So totally fired for browbeating and bombasting the very people you’ve alienated and betrayed and abandoned in your party’s neo-liberal quest to have your cake and eat it, and mine, too.

You want my money? Really? After decades of sucking up to Wall Street and the “defense” industry, you’re telling me, over and over and over again, that you’re hat-in-hand broke?

My ass. You have pornographically wealthy friends, and you bow and scrape to them every chance you get, to my detriment, and to the detriment of everyone I know, all of whom you’ve pestered for money.

As you send your hundreds of emails seeking cash for a party that is stacked from pillar to post with a Who’s Who of Wall Street insiders, the rest of us scratch by as best we can in this catastrophe of an economy you most certainly helped to create, if only through your ongoing and ignominious cowardice. To be battered with begging emails about how oh-so broke you are is, frankly, a bridge too far. You have a job, email fiend, for now. Count your blessings.

I know the Koch brothers exist, and I am all too aware of what they are up to. I know you need to contend with the billionaire neo-oligarchs who think they deserve to run the country because they can write checks with a lot of zeroes to the left of the decimal. Near as I can tell, however, your plan to this point has been to run away from those of us trying to fight these bastards. We’re useful right up to the fundraising deadline, but after that, we get the back of your hand.

Say what you will about the Republicans, but you cannot fault their tactics when it comes to winning. They are a minority in the United States, by the numbers, but they are running the show both politically and economically, and for one reason: they fire up their base. Sure, “firing up their base” means gay-bashing, and woman-hating, and Jesus-shouting, and war-mongering…but it works. In the fourteenth year of this brave new century, the party everyone hates and thinks is crazy, according to all the polls, is about to take over the Senate and increase its hold on the House.

It’s not a magic trick, and it’s not a mystery, why that is about to happen. The Republicans are acting like Republicans, and the people who support them will run through stone walls to vote for them. Period, end of file.

If Democrats acted like Democrats, they might enjoy the same level of support from their own base…but instead, the people are presented with this eternally timid “Please Don’t Hurt Me” coalition, afraid of the word “Liberal,” and certainly addicted to the Wall Street/Defense/Petroleum money swelling their coffers. You ain’t broke, despite that barrage of emails to the contrary.

You support fracking while giving lip-service to climate change? You want Keystone XL approved, despite the fact that it will run the world’s dirtiest fuel through our breadbasket and over our main aquifer in a pipeline that is dead-bang guaranteed to leak? You endorse the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement? You’re satisfied with the barren lack of accounting meted to the Wall Street brigands who stole our future? You’re down with a third war in Iraq?

Wait, you don’t support all that? But you won’t stand against it, because you’re afraid of losing votes or campaign money?

My heroes.

A bunch of braniacs have crunched the numbers and concluded that young people, plus minority voters, plus women, plus old white racist Fox News viewers dying off, means the long-term electoral odds are in the Democrats’ favor, and gee wilikers, isn’t that nifty news for the party in 30 years…except for the millions of people who will take a deep beating between then and now, and that’s only if the party’s institutional cowardice and greed doesn’t let the oligarchs buy out the whole process from soup to nuts in the meantime.

The police are being weaponized and militarized from coast to coast, making even mild street protest a potentially lethal exercise. The Supreme Court doesn’t believe women should have control of their own bodies. There are parts of the country where the tapwater is flammable. The US is spending billions of dollars to bomb the weapons it spent billions of dollars on just a few years ago.

And from the alleged “liberal” party? Silence, acquiescence, and that’s only if they’re not too busy cashing a check.

Come November, if the Democrats wind up flopping and flailing for an explanation as to why they got routed at the polls, let me offer a succinct reply: You stand for nothing. You are the Washington Generals to the Harlem Globetrotters. Everyone expects you to go down to defeat, because you always lay down, because you are paid to do so.

It doesn’t have to be that way, but that’s the way it is. When the midterms eat you alive, remember what I said. When you stand for nothing, you get nothing in return.

Write me an email about that.

We’re not going to stand for it. Are you?

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