The battle for public opinion is over. We won.

I'm cautious about declaring victories, but I'm ready to announce a decisive win in the court of public opinion.

Long story short: The battle for public opinion is over, and our side won. Other bloggers are already saying the same thing, so I'm actually playing it safe by declaring victory now. On almost every individual issue, polls show progressives' stance soundly defeating the conservatives'.

It doesn't matter if more Americans identify as conservative. I know folks who label themselves as conservative, yet even they disagree with most of the key features of the right-wing agenda. This blog is the very essence of left-wing populism, but I can't count the number of e-mails I've received from people who say they're conservative while cheering some of my most important points.

Polls on the Obama administration's birth control policy provide stunning evidence of how badly the other side has lost. Meanwhile, surveys show that most voters in Indiana would vote to repeal that state's disastrous new work-for-less law. On economic and social issues alike, the right-wing intelligentsia has overreached, and repudiation appears imminent.

Never in my life have I seen as much opposition on the ground to right-wing policies as I do now. I was around in the '80s when you'd hear blue-collar folks rightly complaining about Reagan and Big Business, but that's nothing compared to what I've heard just in the past few months.

It's over. And the Evil Empire knows it. That's why they've been so shrill lately, even coming up with ideas so ridiculous and extreme that they know they'll probably never become law. It's a sign of desperation. They think that if they get what they want, that's great, but if they don't, that's fine too because it's just "proof" of how the big, mean world is so unfair to them. They see themselves as martyrs.

Notice also that the right-wing paid thugs who spam Facebook and the comment sections of news websites don't have anything left to say except standard one-line stock replies, which usually have nothing to do with the issue at hand. That's proof that somebody's feeding them the vitriol they spew.

Unfortunately, a public opinion victory doesn't automatically translate into an electoral victory - as anybody alive in 1994 knows. This time, it likely will, and the other side doesn't seem to care. But this isn't yet the slam-dunk for us that it should be. For starts, elections are routinely rigged. Secondly, folks aren't always on guard as well as they ought to be, and not everybody bothers to vote.

The Evil Empire doesn't seem to be playing to win at the polls, but they're menacing enough that they need to be off the electoral game board. They are still very dangerous. The danger they pose has become exceptional.

But the war for actual public support is over. They lost.

I'm more energized than ever, and I'm not afraid to die for the cause. The thought guardians of the extreme right are not merely misguided. They are simply bad people. If they choose to start a ground war, I will be on the front line to fight them.