Time To Run Up The Political Score

It's football season as you can tell by the jump in football related posts on my blog.  I've made it no secret that love of football is part of my Texan DNA and being a proud daughter of the Lone Star State.

When the University Interscholastic League, the governing body for Texas high school scholastic activities and its 'separate-but-equal' counterpart the Prairie View Interscholastic League were being integrated back in the late 60's-early 70's, you still had the stench of prejudice tainting many athletic and academic competitions persisting till the mid 80's between predominately Black and predominately white schools.

For those of us at predominately Black schools during that period, we not only wanted to win, but had a heightened incentive to prove we could successfully compete with the white kids and vanquish them.

In many cases we were the first groups of kids to get that historic opportunity, so we not only wanted to do well, but represent our community with class, pride, dignity and honor despite the sometimes shady officiating and jacked up rulings we'd get.  We'd also observed overt or covert cheating from the predominately white schools and referees that would be ignored.  We noted through previous examples of talented African-American high school squads (or integrated ones) that made deep playoff runs that if the game were close, the questionable calls or rulings would come down in favor of the predominately white school.     

So if we were in that situation, our mantra was to 'take the refs out of the game'.  In other words, if it was an officiated sport like football or basketball, the mission was to play well enough to not only avoid crucial penalties or fouls, but to run the score up to the point that a jacked up call or bigoted officials trying to shape the game in the white school's favor didn't determine the outcome because we were beating that predominately white school by a lopsided margin.

For a perfect example of what I'm talking about, see the movie Remember the Titans.    

It was why I had that mentality in 8th grade when I was captain of my History Prep Bowl team in junior high school it was 1st and 2nd place or bust.   Anything else was a wasted trip.  We also as the only Black school there wanted to prove we could compete and win the academic contest that conventional bigoted wisdom said we didn't have the 'necessities' to win.   We not only won that year, but won our matched in lopsided margins and earned a nice pizza party for our efforts.     

So how does this apply to the 2012 presidential race?   Pull up a chair and I'll break it down for you.

The narrative the corporate conservative controlled media has been trying to spin this entire election season is that the 2012 presidential election is close when even Stevie Wonder can see that Mitt Romney isn't qualified to be president of the United States, much less its commander in chief. 

The poll numbers since the conventions are starting to reflect that, and the conservanatives are starting to get restless.  President Obama has multiple ways to garner 270 electoral votes and get reelected, but the reality has always been the GOP has a narrower electoral vote path. If they don't get Ohio, and lose any of their Solid South states (think old Confederacy) like they are on track to do in Virginia, Florida and possibly North Carolina without grabbing from the Obama column Pennsylvania (which they tried to do with that shady voter suppression law) one of the upper Midwest states such as Wisconsin, Iowa or Michigan or some of the Southwestern swing states like Nevada, Colorado, or New Mexico, they're screwed.  

Now is not the time for our liberal progressive side to relax.  Since I'm bathing this political post in football analogies, we're just in the third quarter, we took the lead and the GOP side just made the equivalent of fumbling the ball Jacoby Jones style deep in their territory with that boneheaded cheap Romney political attack of the POTUS in the wake of four American diplomats losing their lives in Libya.

Now is the time to not only get the killer instinct and go for the touchdown that puts this game away, but run up the political score.  It's time not only ensure the POTUS gets reelected, but build on our Senate majority and give Senate majority Leader Harry Reid a better one to work with now that Joe Lieberman (I-CT) and Ben Nelson (DINO-NE) are gone.  

We only need to flip 25 House seats to take it back.  The  GOP has 77 freshman legislators, many of them notorious Teabaggers like Joe Walsh in Illinois and Allen West in Florida. . Let's do this and give John Boehner something to really cry about on January 3, 2013 when he has to hand the House leadership gavel back to a smiling Rep. Nancy Pelosi when the Democrats retake the House.    

Let's start the process of not only taking our state legislatures back, but ensuring we kick Republicans out of judicial seats, Attorney General posts and replace them with Democrats who will be more in line with fighting for the middle class interests than Republicans who lead toward corporate interests. 

In Texas we need to get control of our State Board of Indoctrination Education from the right wing nuts that have made us a national laughingstock in their brazen attempt to inject conservafool doctrines in our school curriculum. 

I haven't forgotten about that disgusting to me as a TK (teacher's kid) the plank in the 2012 Texas GOP platform that seeks to prohibit teaching critical thinking skills to Texas school children.  

We especially need to focus special attention on Secretary of State positions since they are the people that make the calls on voting rights issues.  As John Husted in Ohio proved once again, his knee-grow predecessor Kenneth Blackwell did in 2004 and Katherine Harris did in Florida in 2000 , we cannot trust Republicans to do the right thing on voting issues when they have that power.

We got work to to, so lets keep the starters on the field and keep scoring political TD's until November 7.