Psych! Operation SOAHC*

Daily Kos is lit up at the moment by a little scheme Markos and Chris Bowers have cooked up, titled Operation Hilarity. Markos proclaimed the initiative on Wednesday:

Announcing Operation Hilarity: Let’s keep the GOP clown show going!

It’s time for us to take an active role in the GOP nomination process. That’s right, it’s time for those of us who live in open primary and caucus states—Michigan, North Dakota, Vermont and Tennessee in the next three weeks—to head out and cast a vote for Rick Santorum.
...
If you live in one of those states, pledge to participate in Operation Hilarity by voting or caucusing for Rick Santorum. Click here for Michigan, here for North Dakota, here for Tennessee and here for Vermont.

If you live anywhere else, please contribute $5 to our Facebook ad effort to turn Democrats out in those elections. You can see a sample ad at the top right of this post.

Hilarity wasn’t much in evidence in the swift backlash from many Kosites who thought this was a really dumb and quite possibly counterproductive idea, which prompted Chris Bowers to try to re-sell the joke a couple of hours later:

How Operation Hilarity will work

This didn’t go down any better among the courted conspirators, and as of last night there were numerous diaries on the Kos rec list denouncing or criticizing the plan for a variety of reasons.

If I were to be asked—which I haven’t been—and if I were to choose the mantle of an expatriate Andrew Sullivan—which I shudder to contemplate—my reaction would be similar: You’ve got to be kidding me. The GOP is doing a fantastic and already hilarious job of splitting itself and running round in circles at the moment, alienating its own electorate with a seemingly endless death spiral of arguably pointless votes and caucuses and generally being quite horrible to itself and wasting vast amounts of money to no good purpose, and you want to dabble in a high-profile way in this debacle ... For why?! Have you never heard of the Wilsonian edict, “When your enemy is destroying himself, don’t get in his way”?

This smacks to me of a strategy born out of boredom and cockiness (coming on the heels of Cenk Uygur’s bright idea back in December that the best thing anyone on the left could do was to vote against Obama in the Iowa primary, and we all know how that worked out)—and not least, attention-seeking behavior on the part of Markos and Bowers—and likely to prove too clever by half.

Meanwhile, Rachel Maddow reported the idea without explicitly endorsing it in last night’s program, which means the cat is now truly out of the bag and the righty blogs have gotten hold of it and are reacting much as you’d expect.

Maddow mentioning that the idea has been mooted on the GOS translates in wingnutspeak to the not unhilarious:

MORE PROOF THAT THE LEFT LOVES SANTORUM AND FEARS ROMNEY

(I still haven’t figured out whether that site is pure performance art.)

It even provoked an “Oh my” from Allahpundit:

They’ve hatched a diabolical plot to support the guy whom few people think is electable over the other guy whom few people think is electable.

I know that crossing party lines in state caucuses etc. isn’t that unusual—and that a number of Democrats have already been voting for Santorum in the caucuses without any central coordination—but this proposed publicly announced concerted effort strikes me as a waste of time, effort, and resources that could be better aimed at—oh I don’t know, downticket races? Inventing better Santorum jokes? You probably have ideas of your own.

Anyway, expect a denunciation from Rush any time now.

* Coined by our own in-house clairvoyant Mrs. Polly.

The reactions in some of the RW comments sections are not unilluminating. Sample from Hot Air:

Kos and Palin are on the same page.

They want to win elections; she wants to make money.

More: Our pal SteveM is a little more sanguine than I am about all this, but sounds a note of caution:

And now Kos is trying to get Democrats to vote for Santorum in upcoming primary states? Yeah, sure, do it—though I think it’s hard to get enough people to join in these efforts to make a difference (Rush Limbaugh’s pro-Hillary Operation Chaos didn’t have much impact in ‘08). Right now Santorum doesn’t seem as if he needs the help, but we all see the Romney Death Star on the horizon, so I guess Rick’s the guy you want to help if you want to keep the Republicans bashing one another. (Then again, if the Romney campaign is really running out of money, as is being reported, and if Santorum is rising in every GOP poll, should Democrats vote for Mitt to keep him in the race?)

Meanwhile, another perspective from the Hot Air comments:

Hey, Libs? If you really wanted to screw us, why not support Romney? It’s what the Mainstream Media did.

Posted by YAFB on 02/16/12 at 08:31 AM • Permalink

Categories: Politics • Election '12 • Mittens • Manic Progressives • Poliblogs • Our Stupid Media • Skull Hampers •

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Kos is doubling down, equating the naysayers with those opposed to Obama using Super Pacs:

So here we have a situation where we can help extend what has been a fantastic GOP primary season—one that is destroying its presidential candidates, damaging the GOP brand, demoralizing its partisans, and boosting Obama, and many of you get the vapors because of some lofty ideals you think are worth more than winning? Really?

Let me be clear. Daily Kos is a site for fighting Democrats. We are here to do what is legally allowed to win. Because all your lofty ideals ain’t worth shit when people like George W. Bush get elected.

There is nothing illegal or unethical about Operation Hilarity. Indeed, we’re only playing in states in which the GOP has explicitly allowed open primaries. They’ve made the conscious decision to allow non-Republicans to participate. And somehow, that’s underhanded? We’re not asking anyone to pretend they’re Republican or change their party registration. We’re just asking people in Michigan, North Dakota, Tennessee, and Delaware to continue sowing chaos in the ranks of the GOP.

How about, you know, spending more time on GOTV efforts in swing states? Is that “fighting dem” enough for you?