There’s been alot of yelling going on with health care lately, and rightly so, it’s pretty important. But all this rhetoric about public option, death panels, whatever, is all the same kind of thing when it comes to policy debates. What I did find interesting though is the strategy. I noticed right off the bat that all the town hall screaming smacked of all the stuff I used to hear on Democracy Now, but I didn’t really connect the dots. Then I heard a story from the show On the Media that spelled it out for me.

Conservative activists have gone and taken a page from a pretty prominent progressive book called Rules for Radicals, and basically adopted the tactics that progressives use. Yell. Cause a public scene. Come out swinging with the big questions. These are things progressives have been doing for a bit with environmental issues, education, gay rights, any issue that normally gets pushed to the back burner and ignored.

Just like Obama utilized what he wanted from conservatives in how to win an election, conservatives are now cherry picking out ideas from liberals they can use to stall policies they don’t like. The interplay is just fascinating, as good ideas are implemented, and bad ones aren’t, in a nice little example of the evolution of ideas, a sort of social darwinisim. it cracks me up a little, actually.

who says there’s no bipartisanship?