Only by losing can you win

That sounds like a fortune cookie or a line from The Sphinx.

Anyway, at the risk of sounding like a broken record, there is a fundamental problem with a strategy based on losing. Only by losing can you win. And what you have won is a loss. You can come at it from every side, but there’s just no way around it. But when every effort to win by losing keeps going down in ignominious defeat, and the win that you hope to portray as a loss keeps showing up as a win, you risk losing everything. Which, presumeably, must mean someone else is winning. But that’s a loss, which is victory. Stay with me here. It follows then that the greatest Democratic victory, short sword having already been honorably stuck in the belly, would be a merciful lopping off of all surrender dreams in November 2008, when Thompson or Romney or Giuliani gets elected, when Mother Sheehan takes Pelosi’s seat … OK, that might be a little farfetched … but when that glorious Democratic mandate of the people loses a dozen seats or whatever narrow margin it holds, because the American people, who can only be fooled some of the time, have finally figured out that losing is not winning.