I sure don't qualify as Thomas Paine, but here is my warning and my call to arms:
If Republicans win the presidency, keep control of the House, win control of the Senate, own U.S. Supreme Court majorities for a generation, and own the Senate that confirms Supreme Court nominations it will be a dark decade for the nation. It will be a dark and desperate decade for the poor. It will be a dark and deepening tragedy for the heartland of the nation.
Do you want a one-party state with all branches of government controlled by today's Republican Party using words like liberty and freedom to justify policies and practices far outside the historical tradition of any great party throughout the history of our nation?
To close where I began, if Rupert Murdoch cares enough about his vision of America to make million dollar donations to fight for it, do wealthy progressives care as much as he does, and will you fight as hard as he fights? If you don't, he wins, we lose.
If the Koch family cares enough about their rightist vision of America to write checks measured in millions and tens of millions of dollars, do wealthy progressives care as much as they care? Will they fight as hard as the Koch family fights? If they don't, the Koch vision of America wins, and the progressive vision of America is destroyed.
I am fed up with those who offer excuses to do less. I am fed up with calls to inaction. I am fed up with surrenderists and dilettantes and hobbyists and those who counsel Democrats to play the dainty politics of badminton, when faced with the rightist Republican politics of total and destructive war.
There is a war being fought by the right for the future of the nation. It is total war. It is aggressive war. It is a war that would turn American government at every level into the hourly abuses we see from the Republican governor of Wisconsin. It is a war against values that Democrats and even Republicans have accepted for two hundred years. It is a war funded by huge sums of rightist money that uses words such as liberty to denounce anyone who stands against them as an enemy of the state.
There are men and women of great means and high values who can write big checks to groups that can accept them, such as Majority PAC working to save Democratic control of the Senate, and House Majority PAC, working to regain Democratic control of the House.
My advice to progressive wealthy men and women of means is take your checkbook and your pen and listen to what Republicans say they believe, and promise they will do, in the one-party state they are spending vast sums of money to create.
Ben Franklin once described America as a Republic, if we can keep it.
Let's fight to keep it.
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