DEAR LIBERALS: PLEASE STOP TRYING TO REPLICATE THE ZOMBIE RIGHT'S HIVE MIND

This isn't going to work, which will make us look weak, so why bother?

Gay marriage activists are planning to swarm Starbucks on Tuesday in an attempt to counter the record sales from last week’s Chick-fil-A Appreciation Day.

The chicken chain enjoyed a surge of support during the Wednesday event, dreamed up by former presidential candidate Mike Huckabee after Chick-fil-A President Dan Cathy went on the record backing the “biblical definition of the family unit.”

A follow-up protest from Chick-fil-A critics on Friday, which was dubbed Same Sex Kiss Day, was more subdued....

Er, yeah, I'll say it was more subdued. There were lines around the block at Chick-fil-A stores all over the country for the right's big day out -- and of course there were, because conservatism in this country is like communism in Mao's China, an utterly top-down phenomenon, with the equivalent of Mao's Little Red Book being whatever talking points are being promulgated on Fox News and talk radio and other wingnut-noise-machine outlets at any particular time. Oh, sure, people on our side will repeat what lefty and liberal opinion leaders say, but we don't share the right's obsession with joining, with following, with imagining ourselves to be some sort of holy/patriotic army mustering for battle. (Last Wednesday you could go to Free Republic and post "Chick-fil-A after action reports." At Free Republic, they love describing their accounts of demonstrations and counterdemonstrations as "after action reports.")

Face the fact that Chick-fil-A Appreciation Day was a great one-day success for the right, and it's going to be difficult to mount an imitation protest that equals or exceeds it; if you fail, you look less powerful, and even if you succeed, what you did looks like me-too-ism.

Better to give the right its one-day news-cycle victory and then stop drawing attention to that victory. Take advantage of the fact that it's a hell of a lot easier to avoid Chick-fil-A every day than it is to eat there every day. Work hard to make a success of the Chick-fil-A boycott, slowly and patiently, getting the word out to more and more people, while also spreading the word to marriage equality supporters about sympathetic companies like Starbucks. Play a long game.