PRIORITY #1

Tom Hilton is right:

McCain Is the Enemy

...In the absence of any official DNC effort, the answer to "who takes on John McCain?" has to be us. This is what the blogosphere is for, folks. If we're a laboratory for memes, the memes we really need to be testing are the ones that could keep McCain out of the White House.

So far, we--well, a lot of us--have been falling down on the job.

Many of the bigger, more politically obsessive blogs and blog communities have been focused almost exclusively on the primaries.... All over the lefty blogosphere, people seem to be more concerned about the minor difference between Obama and Clinton than about the vast catastrophe it'll be if we let McCain win....

What does matter is keeping Captain McQueeg from taking us all for a ride on the Straitjacket Express. How about we focus on that for the next 8 months or so? ...

There are some good links at his post.

I'd add this: If we're a "laboratory for memes," we also need to be working on undoing memes. For instance, why isn't the entire left blogosphere howling mad at the fact that "maverick" and "straight talk" appear in every single news story about McCain, as if these are neutral descriptions rather than de facto campaign slogans? It's no more appropriate to use these descriptors in straight news stories than it would have been to assert as a statement of fact that "Nixon will bring us together" in 1968, or "It's morning in America" in 1984. And that's only one of several message wars we need to start fighting.