Over the last few days, I've come to despair over the sorry quality of the trolls around here.

I mean, hey, I can understand that the trolls working to sow discord and thereby do their small part to help usher in the McCain administration must be kind of down these last few weeks.  I know it must be hard for them to wake up every morning, knowing they're going to have to work their devious little fingers off, trying to get the Republicans over the finish line when John McCain is all the inspiration they have.  I understand how dispirited they must be.  I feel for them.  I really do.

But let's be blunt here: the trolls just aren't pulling their weight these days.

Everybody's been making a big deal about Obama's "win" in North Carolina and his "narrow loss" in Indiana.

The truth is, last night was just another nail in his electoral coffin, yet another demonstration of why he can't "close the deal" with American voters.

Yes, superficially, it might seem like he had a pretty good night, but looks can be misleading. I'll show you why below.

I just read a piece at David Neiwert's blog in which he outlined 5 lies Republicans tell about immigration, and then shot each one down, using all kinds of facts, and other, you know, true, reality based stuff that a lot of people just don't find convincing.

And I read it, and I thought, "He's wasting his time doing this. I already know these are lies, and so does everybody else who reads his blog. But the people who buy into these lies won't believe "facts" or "proof" that shoot down their beliefs.

Now that isn't to say he's really wasting his time. We need reporters who write things that are actually true. It is to say, though, that what he's doing isn't enough. Even though everything he wrote is true, and demonstrably so, that's only the beginning of changing people's minds.

All we ever really have is today. Right now.
I want a president who leads. How will I know whether one presidential candidate or another will lead once in office?
Well, I can look to see who's leading now. And to my mind, there is only one candidate who's leading now. Who has asked us to call our senators and ask them to vote to keep debating the FISA Amnesty abomination? Who has consistently been shoving the fight for the nomination to the left?
Maybe you can guess, but if you're still wondering, you can read the rest of this crappy old diary:

How can people seriously believe it would be healthy for a democracy to hand its presidency off between 2 families for almost 30 years?  George Bush is doing everything he can to see that this country doesn't stay a democracy, and if we choose Hillary Clinton as our next president, we'll be giving him a big hand in doing that.

We must choose somebody else, anybody else, to be the Democratic nominee in 2008.

What is it the far right wing, as exemplified by people like Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter really want?  I think that what they want is to see the United States become an autoritarian state--a dictatorship, and they egg on their readers and listeners to make it happen.

I began thinking about this today when I heard a few minutes of Limbaugh in the car.  He was going on about the failed immigration bill, which seems kind of odd, as killing that bill will turn Hispanic Americans off the Republican Party for a generation.  They'll turn themselves into a minority party for 20 or 30 years.

So why are they doing it?  It's because they no longer care about elections.  They can see what's coming next year, and they now know they can't win at the polls.  But I fear that the victory they ultimately want need not be won at the polls...