"Stand Ready for the Next Battle: Peace Means Reloading Your Guns"

If this hadn't been posted at Salon, I'd think it was some nefarious right-wing scheme meant to lure us into letting our guard down:

Relax, liberals. You've already won

No matter who prevails at the ballot box in November, John McCain or Barack Obama, the four-decade-long conservative counterrevolution is over.

By Michael Lind
I have two words for Michael Lind: Bull fucking shit.

His article gives us a long list of reasons why we should hold the V-Day celebrations, but I'm not buying it. Sure, we've beaten back a lot of neocon assaults: they haven't been able to overturn Roe vs. Wade, Medicare and Social Security are still public services rather than private programs ripe for exploitation, and science standards still require science rather than religion be taught in public schools. I'll grant you, we've had victories. But the war's far from over, and we're still fighting a bitter, bloody battle againt the right-wing fucktard machine, despite supposed surrenders on their side:

While it serves the purposes of single-issue groups on the left to claim that the threat of the socially conservative right is growing, the leaders of the right themselves know better. In the 1990s, Jerry Falwell shut down the Moral Majority and Pat Robertson dissolved the Christian Coalition, whose membership numbers turned out to have been grossly inflated.

In 1999, Paul Weyrich, president of the Free Congress Foundation, wrote in a public letter to his fellow social conservatives: "I believe that we probably have lost the culture war ... [I]n terms of society, we have lost. This is why, even when we win in politics, our victories fail to translate into the kinds of policies we believe are important." According to Weyrich, conservatives should admit that they are a moral minority in America and form their own counterculture, like "a band of hardy monks who preserved the culture while the surrounding society disintegrated." If Weyrich is right, instead of taking back America, traditionalists should ask only for their own reservation, like the Amish or the Navajos. What started as a counterrevolution has ended as a counterculture.

What the fuck ever, Pollyanna. I'll believe it when I see the last of their warriors leave the field. I ain't seen a retreat yet - what I'm seeing is retrenchments.

Want to know why my glass is half-empty here? Let's have a quick survey, just off the top of my head:

• McCain and Obama are polling nearly neck-and-neck in a year when the Dems should be obliterating the Rethugs.
• "Academic Freedom" bills meant to sneak creationism into schools are sprouting up like venereal diseases in a fourth-rate whorehouse.
• Republicon thugs have a stranglehold on the Senate, despite being a discredited minority party.
• Bush has eviscerated the Constitution, and none of its steaming guts have yet been shoveled back into its torn belly.
• The Supreme Court is tacking severely conservative, and the last of our liberal judges are - well, let's just say that if God existed, they'd be picking a suit to meet Him in.
• Neocons and theocons are still screaming "CULTURE WAR!" at the top of their lungs, and they still get heard by our supposedly "liberal" MSM.

That'll do for now. Look back through the list of Happy Hour Discurso posts if you need further reinforcement of the idea that if we declare premature victory, we progressives are going to wonder just where the fuck our victory went come this time next year.

There might be pissing and moaning and groans of "We've lost!" from the batshit insane bunch that hijacked the right, but remember, these are the same assclowns who cry "Persecution!" when they're a fucking majority.

And I'm not impressed by the long list of liberal victories Michael "I Want to Believe" Lind pads his post with. All of those victories are still under assault by neocons - they're relentless buggers, and they'll leap to exploit any weakness. If we stop fighting, even for a second, they'll go for the throat. It's just how they are.

Even Lind admits that:

The defeat of the conservative counterrevolution should not inspire complacency among liberals and centrists. By rejecting the radical right, the American electorate has not endorsed bold new initiatives. The public has merely signaled its support of the older New Deal/Great Society/Civil Rights liberalism that the right sought to uproot.

Nor does the defeat of the counterrevolutionary right mean that conservatives may not win victories on some issues, from immigration restriction to the rollback by means of state initiatives and federal court decisions of race-based affirmative action. An increasingly conservative federal judiciary, appointed by a Republican president, might shift public policy toward conservative ideas of deregulation and approve of some state limitations on abortion.

That list doesn't give you pause, Michael? It bloody well should. Declaring victory over a wasteland of shredded civil liberties sounds like the dumbest fucking thing we could ever do.

Wars are lost unnecessarily when the seemingly victorious army quits the field before the enemy's truly defeated. Culture wars are no different. We won't win this thing if we rest on our laurels now. We've got the neocon thugs on the run and bleeding from every orifice: now's the time to run them down and deliver the coup de grace, not start slapping each other on the back and beating our swords into plowshares. We relent, they rise.

This country has been too damaged by too many years of neocon fuckery to leave her defenseless now. So you'll excuse me, Mr. Lind, if I don't "relax." I'm taking my cue from Dimmu Borgir instead. I'm standing ready for the next battle, because peace sometimes does mean reloading your guns.