We are falling for the "correctness" meme again.

[madfloridian]

I swear we are so gullible. All is takes a little criticism from the right and from the "be nice" wing of our own party, and all hell breaks loose. Then we all fall in line.

Al Franken is going to run for senator in Minnesota, so he is not going to make waves anymore. Trust me on that one.

Jon Stewart threw a bone to the right by going after the NARAL ad, he often does that. Don't jump down my throat, just think about it. He has a great show, but he does rein in sometimes when we need him the most.

Donna Brazille is a good woman, but she is way too nice a spokeswoman. We need someone tougher out there. She dutifully trashed NARAL as well.

Don't you see what is happening? The party is going to compromise on abortion rights. They are not going to fight Roberts, they are just going to give right in. The ad was controversial, sure. But is was not "wrong" wrong, it is was just "in your face" wrong to the "let's be nice" folks.

Last year I saw this happen whenever we made inroads. The same thing is happening. Suddenly we are on a roll, and there is a call to back off.

This post is only about Howard Dean in this respect...he is not "politically correct", and I say thank God for that. He is however going to cave in on abortion....the Democrats for Life group, Roemer, Jim Wallis, they all are setting percentages. The message was sent to him that abortion will be "controlled."

It is also about Howard Dean and the DNC in another way that affects us all. He said we were barely learning to be a minority party, that we did not know how to fight back yet. He is right. We have to fight back, no holds barred. We are not able to do that.

That is what the attacks on the NARAL ad were about. They have been attacked since Rhode Island and their refusal to endorse Langevin, and anti-choice candidate. Langevin was the choice of the congressional leaders, in the same way Schumer and Rendell chose Casey.

This was about our Democrats forming another circular firing squad. And we did it well, didn't we? :shrug:

I edited the post because I said the wrong state in relation to Franken. My apologies. Point still the same...we are afraid of our shadows.

[eleny]

1. Hackett would make a better spokesperson than Brazille

I can't get enough of him calling Rush "that fat assed drug addict". His delivery is priceless.

[geek tragedy]

2. Jon Stewart is an entertainer, not a DNC activist. eom

[madfloridian]

3. Then he did not need to go after the ad.

Anyway, that was not my point.

[damntexdem]

4. From what I saw of the NARAL ad, I suspected ...

another Rove setup. The ad made no sense. And there was plenty to criticize Roberts about in the 1991 case.

[madfloridian]

7. Baloney, the ad was ok.

Rove did nothing. They got attention called to Roberts, they got attacked. They took the ad down. Story over. Right wing happy again.

We do it all the time.

[AlGore-08.com]

5. Just FYI if Franken runs, it will be in Minnesota, not Wisconsin

He grew up in St. Louis Park, and he & his wife just bought a place in Minneappolis...

[madfloridian]

8. I made a mistake on the states, will edit. Now to my point.

Everybody is doing everything but addressing the issue of shutting up our own.

[AlGore-08.com]

14. I've been thinking a lot about this issue, I think the problem is two fold

We have a very bad messaging problem, based on (IMNSHO) on a lot of misconceptions among the most elected Dems - - the main one being that if our side just gives the GOP enough rope, the voters will "naturally" elect the Dem alternative in a landslide. But that isn't the case, as we should have learned in 2002 and 2004 - - just because their side s*cks, doesn't mean that we look any better.

Unfortunately, the solution most people seem to embrace is just as bad - - let's be like Hackett and hurl abuse at Republicans - - or like NARAL's ad, let's go way over the top just to attract the media's attention to the underlying problem. Both tactics are doomed to failure, IMNSHO.

I've never met anybody who's opinion was changed by being called an SOB. In fact, insulting people usually makes them far less likely to change their opinions. Would you vote for a far right Republican because somebody called your favorite pol an "SOB"? Why should Republicans do it if you don't? When Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity calls a leading Dem an "SOB", we'd be morally outraged. Why is it wrong for them but right for us?

And smearing Roberts with that over the top ad did exactly what anybody with a brain should have foreseen - - instead of talking about Roberts, and whether he should be on the Extreme Court (and for the record, I oppose his nomination, quite vigorously), it's about whether NARAL was out of line. This is a tactic that the GOP use all the time, launching an ad they know they will have to pull in one or two markets, just to get the national media reporting on the content of the outrageous ad. When the Republicans do it (the "Daisy" ad in 2000, the Swift Boat ads in 2004, etc.) we are all morally outraged. Why is it okay for us to follow them into the sewer?

There is a big difference, IMNSHO, between Jimmy Carter saying that the war in Iraq has made Islamic extremists a greater threat to the U.S. and yahoos like me calling Bush a coke snortin', draft dodgin' Granny killer for Christ. The facts are on our side, why do we have use their smear tactics?

[madfloridian]

15. The facts have been on our side for 5 years.

They have not helped us one little bit. No one has listened. The NARAL ad got attention. It should have been left alone.

No one has cared that the facts are on our side.

[AlGore-08.com]

25. I disagree that "no one has cared"

First of all, Smirk only won 2004 by a little over 3 million votes - - he only got 50.73% of the vote. So a hell of a lot of people did care about facts in 2004. More to the point, in 2000, Gore got 1/2 million more votes than Bush - - so more people did care that the facts were on our side. The 2000 election was so extreme between our side running on the facts and their side running on spin, I think it's a better example.

IMNSHO problem with 2004 was that we backed off of a number of issues that were our issues previously, issues that we supported on principle, in order to chase after a few swing state voters - - under the mistaken idea that we could back off those ideas without any downside. Backing off of support of gun control and choice and gay rights was a mistake for several reasons, the one nobody talks about is how it played into the GOP's meta-narrative about us. According to the GOP, we're flip flopping panderers who will say anything to get elected. So backing off of controversial positions makes us look bad unless we have a good reason. (Your own reaction to pulling the NARAL ad is a good example.) The Kerry/Edwards campaign never gave a good reason, instead their PR people told the press the political advantages they hoped to gain by those positions. Which, again, played right into the meta-narrative that Democrats are flip-flopping panderers who'll say anything to get elected.

Add to that the fact that our nominee did not have a national profile (outside of political junkie circles), so folks could not say to themselves "yeah, I know MOST Democrats are flip-flopping panderers who'll say anything to get elected, but I've been following John Kerry for years, and I know HE'S not like that!". They had to take on faith that John Kerry was the guy he claimed to be - - something that most people won't do when they vote. They'll vote for the devil they know many more times than they'll vote for the devil they don't know.

I think we're basically in agreement about the message and "spine" issues, but I firmly believe there's no long term value in us embracing the sleaze tactics of the right. Pulling the NARAL ad is caving only if it was fair and accurate, and it wasn't. It implied that Roberts wrote the argument just to aid abortion clinic bombers - - in other words, it implied Roberts is pro-terrorist. To make matters worse, Roberts was even interviewed at the time he wrote the argument and he explained that the argument was NOT designed to help folks bomb abortion clinics. Now, because NARAL so heavily implied that Roberts wrote that agreement because he is pro-terrorist, anything else NARAL says about Roberts will be ignored by vast numbers of people - - because NARAL is now the wacko group who claimed Roberts was pro-terrorist.

We've been watching the Right destroy their own credibility for years. Do any of us listen to anything The Family Research Council or Accuracy In Media say? No, of course not - - because they're the wackos who do nothing except spew partisan BS, and we tune them out for that reason. Is that really what we want for NARAL? To be tuned about by people we want to persuade?

When people in the past have faced much worse evil than Bush (like Hitler and Stalin), they had much more reason than we do to question whether the high road was the right one to take. Hitler looked unbeatable for almost a decade. Even though there were people in the States who advocated adopting fascism because of that, we smart enough to avoid that mistake. We could have entered World War II much earlier if Roosevelt had rounded up everybody who disagreed with him and had them killed. The fact that Roosevelt came even close to Nazi tactics by rounding up some Japanese Americans and put them in camps is not something we celebrate - - it's something we're ashamed of, because we know it was beneath us morally, and it did nothing to help us win the war.

[madfloridian]

26. You are letting the other side define us.

No, NARAL just showed a connection to the bombings, since he ruled earlier that it was not discrimination or a threat to women to have the strong arm tactics. He was wrong to do that.

"In Bray v. Alexandria Women’s Health Clinic, Supreme Court nominee John Roberts, then Principal Deputy Solicitor General, co-authored and submitted for the United States an amicus curiae brief, siding with the notorious anti-choice group Operation Rescue and some of the world’s most aggressive and violent anti-choice extremists, Michael Bray, Randall Terry, Patrick Mahoney, and others. In the amicus brief and during oral argument, John Roberts maintained that Operation Rescue’s unlawful behavior and “military-style tactics” used to block women from accessing reproductive-health clinics did not amount to discrimination against women and that a civil rights remedy was inappropriate."

I am sorry but those tactics were most definitely discriminating against women. Those are 3 of the worst guys on the block.

NARAL refused to endorse an anti-choice Democrat against a pro-choice Republican in RI. That is when they became the bad guys. They are the good guys in my book.

I see Planned Parenthood is on the chopping block now as well.

The media won this round big time, and we fell for it.

[ClassWarrior]

6. Boy this is real credible - Franken's running in MN, not WI.

NGU.

[madfloridian]

10. I fixed the state....did you say I am not credible?

Are you saying I am not credible?

[madfloridian]

13. Fixed. Now what did I say that was not credible.

I happen to pride myself on being accurate and clear. Please clarify.

[LittleClarkie]

9. Again? Brazille is often working against us

And more than just Jon Stewart have said that the NARAL ad was not fair. As for Franken, I dunno. I think he's pretty disheartened still since the election. That's when he got sorta quiet.

[madfloridian]

16. They have not played fair for 5 years.

I did not say Donna worked against us. I just said she was very nice and properly criticized NARAL. You know, like how dare they.

[LittleClarkie]

18. NARAL is not golden just because they're on our side

If they screwed up, then they should be called on it.

I don't hold it against Donna that she criticized NARAL, unless her information was messed up. Again. She has a tendancy to criticize the party, often with bad info. And get all googly over Republican minorities being appointed to higher office. For instance, she criticized Kerry for having 15 mill at the end of the campaign, when Gore's campaign, the one she managed, had almost exactly the same amount.

You didn't say she works against us. I did.

But still, I see nothing wrong with criticizing NARAL if they were peddling bullshit. My bullshit-o-meter is non-partisan.

That said, I have to give NARAL a chance. I haven't seen the ad, and I haven't fact-checked it. If someone can debunk the criticism, I'm all ears.

[madfloridian]

21. Again, my issue was "correctness".

They were not peddling bullshit at all. We will do the same thing to anyone who tries to fight back.

The Christian left is after Howard Dean again because he says our values are more like those of Jesus.

Never mind. I don't want to fight. I wanted to make a point. We are giving up the issues by being nice and non-confrontational.

[LittleClarkie]

24. I'm not fighting. I'm disagreeing. And making my own point.

That I think you're wrong.

[Guaranteed]

11. Look, we need to drive a hard line, but we also need to be truthful.

We need to be the "party of truth." Our credibility, in so many ways, is extremely important. When we make a mistake, we need to correct it. That's what makes us the good guys.

Now, there have been a number of issues that we did NOT make mistakes on, at least in my opinion, that we backed down on when we shouldn't have. However, I don't think that that is the case, here.

This bolsters our credibility, and we can even use it against the Repukes.

[madfloridian]

12. It was not untruthful. It was "in your face."

There is a difference.

[union_maid]

17. Hackett does "in your face" well

Let's face it. It's a skill and probably a gift. He does it well. He calls names. He states things in a forceful way, but those things are either clearcut fact or they're cleary his opinion. Also, he's just done one congressional race and took everyone by surprise. He's still a relatively unknown quantity, but he's sure got a lot of promise. I'm all for his approach if you can carry it off.

As far as Roberts goes, just who do you expect to get if his nomination is defeated by some miracle? It's not going to be better. Could be worse. It's certainly not going to be a champion of reproductive rights.

[madfloridian]

19. Right. He will be confirmed.

Because it would take down and dirty to bring out the facts. Our Democrats are not ready for that.

[union_maid]

20. Right, but if not him, who?

I'd rather have a court full of liberals, but it's not going to happen with the amount of time that Bush has left in office. So if Roberts goes down, what sort of nominee do you think they'll put in? Would it be someone more liberal, or would it be someone who's batshit crazy. There are a couple of those possibilities. We have to have something to fight for as well as something to fight against, at least in a case like this.

[madfloridian]

22. 50,000 pages withheld.

How do you know he would be ok? Why would they redact or withhold 50,000 pages of an ok nominee.

[union_maid]

23. I didn't say he'd be OK

The problem is that in my wildest dreams I wouldn't think that anyone that Bush nominates would be anything like OK. I say, go ahead and try to get that information, fight the nomination if you want to, too. I just don't think it's going to help much because I can't see anyone better being nominated by Bush. If anything, we'll get Janice Rogers Brown or something.

[omega minimo]

27. Malloy commented tonite on hypocrisy of RW attack machine attacking NARAL

"The hypocrisy is so thick it's almost as deep as the blood of the soldiers and Iraqis in this war..." (paraphrased?)

The attack machine seems to ONLY know how to do THAT and is looking pretty fucking pathetic right now (thanks largely to Cindy Sheehan). This "I don't care" thing is ridiculous...

How bout "fighting back" aikido style? Hoisting them on their own petard? What if we show them up as pathetic bullies who have nothing constructive to offer? If this moment can be turned to REVEAL in the public eye the FACT of RW terminal HYPOCRISY, folks may actually open their EYES.

That way, they could see the actual ISSUES more clearly.

:patriot: