Feigned disgust at it’s best
The fuss over this MoveOn.org ad is something else: it is the result of a desperate scavenging for umbrage material. When so many people are clamoring for a chance to swoon that they each have to take a number and when the landscape is so littered with folks lying prostrate and pretending to be dead that it starts to look like the end of a Civil War battle re-enactment, this isn’t spontaneous mass outrage. This is choreography.
The last thing that supporters of the war want to talk about at this point is the war. They’d far rather talk about this insult to General Petraeus.
Similar to the ad hominem strategy.
But it’s ok for them…those little, whiney, scared BABIES!
No, Don, I really think MOVEONDOTORG crossed a line. It is hard to define or describe, but they went a bit too far.
You ever work with someone, or have someone work for you, who keeps coming up with crisis that in and of themselves may have some merit, but after a while you suspect that the crisis too conveniently interfere with the job assigned?
Moveondotorg = worser than HITLER!!!
Really, too far, huh?
Was it too far that Petraeus read off of the WH stenographer’s machine? And allowing politics to seep into the military? His testimony has been refuted by two separate independent findings, so it’s safe to conclude that he’s giving Bush and his wimp brigade cover.
Now, Allen, the only line crossed was the one Petraeus carried Bush over….
The ad was spot on….and, BTW, the term “Betrayus” was coined by the troops in Iraq!
Alan,
I don’t know who said it, but i think it was in the article this Administration new what they were doing when they put him out there. By putting him out there you make it difficult for the Democrats and everyone else to criticize him. Criticize him and you criticize the troops which means you hate the troops.
the add may not be the best add but if you are going to put a general out there to be a politician and point to him as the reason we are doing XY and Z then you damn sure better not be offended when someone criticizes him.
They aren’t offended. They are trying, as you pointed out in the post, to push ANY issue to the forefront over what a complete clusterfuque this war is.
Me, I am so very glad that Congress is keeping me safe from a newspaper ad.
A.Newspaper.Ad
Meanwhile BushCo gets to keep on pouring American money and blood into this mess in the cowardly effort to ensure that he has quite washed his hands of ever making it right.
What is funny about the ad is that no one can fault the ad for its facts. And none of the leaders of offense crowd had anything to say about the Swift Boat Yada Yada. The administration put Petraus and Crocker out there as the new faces of their misadventure because they no longer had any credibility on the thing. Now they are upset that people saw right though that crap.
And, soldiers called him Betrayus (scroll thru the comments til about the end of the page) well before MoveOn ever did.
I still don’t like it, but I have been reading about the Korean conflict (not a war either) and ran accross this in a preview of a new book;
The Coldest Winter
By David Halberstam
Hyperion, 719 pages, $35
“The bitterness of the conflict was echoed by the sourness of politics at home. “It was one of the enduring myths in the 1950s and 1960s that politics stopped at the water’s edge. . . . Nothing was further from the truth,” Mr. Halberstam writes. It was the “mean season” in American politics, with vicious Republican attacks on the competence and character of President Harry S. Truman, Secretary of State Dean Acheson and even Gen. George C. Marshall, the iconic defense secretary whom Indiana Sen. William Jenner took to calling a “front man for traitors, a living lie.” (MoveOn.org’s venomous “General Betray Us” ad is the direct descendant of this McCarthyite malignancy.)” – from the WSJ.
As I said, I don’t like it, but at least there is precedent. I just think MoveOn likes being the center of attention. They knew use of the Betray Us ad would focus attention on MoveOn and not the Iraq conflict.