We have come a very "long way" since Reagan said that ketchup was a vegetable
We knew back then that they war had been declared against the Democrats, the liberals, and the New Deal. It was a given, and Pat Buchanan said this on CNN’s Crossfire unabashedly, that their desire was to roll back any programs which assisted the poor, helped educate the masses, gave women and minorities equal rights and footing, and rollback not just abortion laws but also the legality of contraception. I recall Michael Kinsley with his mouth open wide and thought to myself liberals don’t have aggressiveness or answers for this kind of assault.
Then, at the terminus of the Reagan presidency, I heard a speech by one Craig Fuller and thought to myself that I had never heard language used in this Fashion. It was Prototypical of what we hear today: the garbled lies masquerading as assertions of the right wing, couched in convoluted language.
We need to step it up. We need to learn how to fight dirty, to knock the underpinnings out from under them. We cannot win this fight by being nice guys, reasonable, thoughtful, reflective, philosophical, taking the long view, or any measure which is not nuclear in nature. We have allowed this to happen by saying that we are Above the fray, that the voter will know what’s right and wrong. Let me tell you, despite the fact that people knew that cigarette smoking was bad for your health since the early 20th century, (and that is a fact), cigarette commercials promoted not only The allure of smoking but that it was actually healthy for you. Despite “everybody“knowing the opposite, when I was growing up virtually everyone smoked. Perhaps Tommy Lee Jones this character in mthe film Men in Black said it best: individuals may be smart but people are stupid.
What we need to do is to get down on every level: whether it be boycotts, paid commercials which denigrate to an extreme degree the other side, demonstrations both peaceful and if provoked, violent. How many movies have you seen where the protagonist starts out as passive, and becomes aggressively insane and wins the day against the evil doers? It’s a common theme in Hollywood and it should be in our party. If you think they’re all done when they finish with abortion, you have another thing coming.
You know, these people are not particularly creative. What they do is go to established literature or historical Chronicles and draw up plans which have worked in the past, or sound great on paper. There is no question in my mind that the Trump administration, via Stephen Miller and others, went to both Mein Kampf and The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William L Shirer, took notes, and drew up a plan in a few days. And Of course it worked: The Germans were much more sophisticated and educated than Americans and the Nazis convinced the country to declare war against the world and against minorities. We saw it here after 9/11, a time when even bright progressive people became “concerned about the clerk at the 7-Eleven” because he could be a terrorist. We are prejudiced, we are also at times not too bright. It is time to take the sword out of the scabbard and get to work fixing this country. The other side did it and has had remarkable success in very few years, we are fully capable of the same, we just have to get up the guts to do it.
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trying to earn a little money for baseball cards and such, toiling in my grandfather's ketchup fields in the hot sun, wishing there were a better way to grow those ketchup plants.
Maybe better irrigation, or a way to keep those darned relish plants from invading the acres upon acres of ketchup plants, which were my grandfather's pride and joy.
We considered those relish plants an invasive species. It was horrible. You'd just get all the dill relish plants pulled, and there would come those sweet relish plants. Then the corn relish plants, and don't even get me started on the succotash plants! 
Good times. 
I miss those days of my youth, but sometimes when I'm sitting in my rocking chair on the front porch, I wonder if the corporate ketchup growers have those same good memories. Probably not. 
to knock the underpinnings out from under them. We cannot win this fight by being nice guys, reasonable, thoughtful, reflective, philosophical, taking the long view, or any measure which is not nuclear in nature.'
