Imagine---a football game, in which the Blue team did its best to play by conventional rules.

[calimary]

42. Welcome to DU, Bibluca.

I share your frustration. TOTALLY! Heck, I'm in my mid-60s now and I've been an activist for awhile, and I remain frustrated. And I went to the Women's March, in L.A. that day. trump is still there, and still has way too many allies despite his lousy decisions and lousy numbers. We never did get dubya impeached, hard as I tried. Even from here I tried. And it can be almost desperately dispiriting.

I have MSNBC on in the background and heard Dem Congressman John Garamendi say "all these things tied together. It's about power". He was specifically talking about the growing efforts to kneecap Robert Mueller, but I think it applies as a motivator. That's what WE need. In MANY ways!
- Tying all these things together on the trump/Russia front is making it more clear by the day how deeply guilty they all are, INCLUDING donald senior. And the more these dots are connected, the more power WE will have at our backs (to, say, flip enough districts from coast to coast to take back the House next year which would make impeachment far more likely). It's also eating away, day by day, on the GOP talking point that there's nothing to see here.
- Tying all these things together ALSO means aggressive politics, using this GOP corruption contamination from trump/Russia AND the the Roy Moore contamination (plus trump's own) that they're now the Grand Old Pedophiles. They can NO LONGER claim the "moral high ground." Which can very well lead to taking back the House, AND the Senate.
- Tying all these things together when you think of all the ways to be an activist. This is cumulative stuff. The first cancer cell doesn't kill you. Neither does the tenth or the thousandth. Takes millions. Millions of them take you down, usually because they've multiplied and spread, attacking from numerous different parts of the body, metastasizing through the bloodstream, into the liver, kidneys, bone marrow, and you're sunk. They wind up working together, ganging up on you, and they just overrun and overpower everything, and you're screwed. It's a cumulative effect that screws you.

So yeah. Seems to me we need to make sure there's a cumulative EVERYTHING. Yeah, sure the next letter-to-the-editor is gonna be THE magic one that just fixes everything (from your post farther downthread). No, it probably won't. But it'll count for something. It'll be one more voice speaking up for OUR side. Hell, we've got a SECOND full-time, full-speed-ahead cable network, Sinclair Broadcasting, warming up in the bullpen to take over local TV news all over the country with its merger with Tribune Broadcasting. So that's Pox Noise Plus One. AND all the hate radio. AND all the sideshows and sidecars and talking heads and opinionistas and fly-by-night "news" operations that are marching in formation. SOMEBODY'S gotta speak up. Somebody's gotta tie all these things together for the public. After all, it might only take ONE letter-to-the-editor that winds up, by accident, being read by somebody who usually gets their "news" only from Pox Noise and limbaugh. What if it were enough, or YOU said something in such a way, unique to you, that actually hits home with that reader? And as far as whether that one letter-to-the-editor tips the scale or not, it wasn't till the seventh accuser came forward that the tide turned on Al Franken. When things stood at six, he still had a Senate ethics hearing ahead of him - that he himself suggested.

I'm sorry for the lengthy rant, but I wanted to add this reminder. I wrote about it long ago here on DU. I learned this from my years in local and network radio, and rock stations - which had request lines. Why do they bother with request lines? Because they want to know what their listeners want to hear, and this is direct delivery of that message. The request line operators keep a running tally of who called for what song. And why is that considered valid input? Because of how a single call into a request line is interpreted. That ONE call is regarded as representative of how multiples of other listeners feel. The same listener who takes the time to call in (on active mode) to request Taylor Swift or Ed Sheeran or Logic or "Stairway to Heaven" represents others who want to hear that same stuff too (the passives), but they DIDN'T call in, maybe because they were working, in a meeting, picking the kids up, weren't near their phone, didn't feel like it, or didn't think it'd make any difference. Depending on market size, that multiple could be one representing ten, or 100, or 1,000, or more. I once got called by the Gallup pollsters, and was told that I wound up speaking for 50,000 people, because that's the representational ratio they used. That's how your one little voice can do some perception management. YOU can be presume to represent ten others, or 100 others, or more, depending on the readership.

So EVERY LITTLE BIT counts. And seems to me you have to think of these larger long-range things to motivate you, and as we're suffocating in the bad air of this GOP smoke machine, it's HARD!!! Don't I know it! As I noted farther up, I never did get bush/cheney impeached and removed, hard as I tried, and as much time as I put into it (which was a lot)! Yeah, it's slow. So were the glaciers. But they sure had an impact.