First of a four part series entitled:

How to talk to a Christian -

because we have to, whether we want to or not.
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Part I: Tell it like it is!

The Democrats have now officially lost the second of two illegal elections. We've been licking our wounds, planning our protests for Bush's second inauguration/coronation, and trying not to think about what the next four years are going to be like.

Anyway, our problem has been that we won't use the truth. That is the most powerful weapon. If someone lies to your face and you're afraid to call it a lie, it doesn't matter how correct your position or how altruistic your values. You are a coward, and your cause will fail.

This will piss people off, but our biggest failure was not emphasizing Bush's Nazi connections. Not just the origins of his family fortunes, but the Rove playbook as well. "Tell a big lie and keep telling it." - sound familiar? 9/11 conveniently giving them an excuse for curbing civil rights, just like the Reichstag fire. Demonizing a particular group of people. And the real tip off - the nationalism and the religiosity.

"We need believing people." - Adolf Hitler.

Think about it - Americans were signing <>loyalty oaths to attend a political rally and Kerry never called it fascism. A grieving mother was removed from a campaign stop in handcuffs. One family was ejected for wearing t-shirts that said "Protect our Constitutional Rights". When did that become verboten in America?

Everyone is talking about the red states being on the dole, and about the connection to slavery, but they aren't pointing out the most obvious problem here - the poor educational systems. I'm in the South after living on the East Coast for many years. The one thing a Philadelphia Catholic from a poor neighborhood and a Dixiecrat in the rural South have in common is that they haven't been taught that America is not a Christian country. They were taught just the opposite at home, in school, in church. They don't know about Jefferson's wall between church and state. Half of them don't know who the hell Jefferson was.

Don't underestimate the change in pop culture created by new technologies either. We have over a hundred TV channels now. In the past, there were three, so odds were that most of the people you encountered saw the same thing you did on tv last night. At 6:00, everybody watched the news. Variety can not only expand your world, it can limit it, too. I know people who use satellites to watch nothing but rodeo, college basketball, and reruns of Andy Griffith and Leave it to Beaver. My point is that you don't have to learn anything at all if you don't want to. There's no Walter Cronkite anymore, and even if there were, he'd have to toe the party line to keep his job.

Our most effective tool is the internet - it's our only real source of news, and it's the way we spread the truth. Our next best weapon is numbers. There are a lot of us, and it's never been easier to make our presence known to power.

We won't get anywhere sneering at religion. They'll never listen to us if we make fun of them. I know it's tempting, and I know it's frustrating. Freedom of religion is one of my main issues, and I get really fed up with their bullshit. Telling them it's bullshit will just make them tune out.

End of Part I.