Jon Walker over at Fire Dog Lake makes a very effective argument about why learning the wrong lesson from the defeat of Martha Coakley in yesterday's Massachusetts Senate race will lead to disaster.

Not only will Democrats lose badly if they adopt this strategy, but they will be laughed at. Republicans never had 59 Senate seats, and that did not stop them from passing the legislation they wanted. Trying to explain to the American people how, despite controlling everything, Democrats cannot do anything, because a mean minority of 41 Republican senators won’t let them, is a message that will go over like a lead balloon. If you try to use that excuse, people will think elected Democrats are liars, wimps, idiots, or an ineffectual combination of all three.

Right now the corporate-owned media is all atwitter with how the loss of the late Ted Kennedy's Senate seat in what should have been a shoe-in election stands as a repudiation of Obama's nonexistent leftist policies. Actually, his policies have been nothing but a continuation of Bush-Cheney (Glenn Greenwald has compiled some of the better entries describing how closely Obama mirrors Bush), but never let it be said that the right-wing media can be counted on to tell the truth.

The fact is that Coakley lost because of something comedian and political commentator Bill Maher pointed out last year that bears repeating:

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