Amanda Marcotte at Salon writes—Right-wing hawk attack tactics aren't working this time — and here's why:
This is a game conservatives perfected in the Bush years: Bullying liberals with false accusations of being sympathetic to Islamic terrorism, simply for daring to question the bloodthirsty and provocative approach that Republicans prefer.
But, during those bad old days, this outrageous lie tended to get traction, and liberals were often on the defensive, trying haplessly to argue that, no, they don’t love terrorists.
This time around, however, the tactic … simply didn’t work. [Rep. Doug] Collins found himself forced to explicitly apologize. There was absolutely no reason to believe his apology, however, as he’s still fundraising off this “Democrats love terrorists” sentiment — and was still making this outrageous claim on Fox News only two hours before his supposed apology. But even the fact that Collins had to pretend to be sorry shows that the current political environment is no longer so friendly to this strategy.
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“If by a "Liberal" they mean someone who looks ahead and not behind, someone who welcomes new ideas without rigid reactions, someone who cares about the welfare of the people-their health, their housing, their schools, their jobs, their civil rights and their civil liberties-someone who believes we can break through the stalemate and suspicions that grip us in our policies abroad, if that is what they mean by a "Liberal", then I'm proud to say I'm a "Liberal.”
~~John F. Kennedy, Profiles in Courage, (1955)
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BLAST FROM THE PAST
At Daily Kos on this date in 2007—The Uniter Divides: Bush plan fractures the DLC:
Well, the reviews are in. Bush's 11% doctrine speech was a bomb IED.
So now, the scramble is on for politicians of all stripes to distance themselves from his idiotic "plan." Of course, that surge was well underway even before the teleprompter was even hooked up, and Democratic presidential candidates were among the first to find their way to the microphones.
I'd round 'em up for you, but that's not actually what this post is about. This post is about the few "Democrats" who didn't distance themselves. No Democratic presidential candidate was that stupid, of course. And no, I'm not even talking about Lieberman.
I'm talking about the DLC wonks.
In yesterday’s LA Times, Will Marshall stunk up the joint on behalf of the DLC, from his perch at the "Progressive Policy Institute," the DLC's "think" tank:
"Conventional wisdom says that presidential candidates who want to be responsible on this are going to hurt themselves with the angry, impassioned activist left," said Will Marshall, president of the Progressive Policy Institute, a centrist Democratic think tank. "But the activist left is out of sync with the American public. Americans don't want to concede this is a total debacle."