I wonder why we can't get our messsage to everyone better. I think we are doing great work online and on the blogs, but the liberal media can do more.

Thank god for Olbermann.

This is funny,sad,arrogant-everything combined,but it Oct, 1st Sunday Paper of the Washington Post, in the A section, nect to the inside page of "State of Denial" book excerpt, there was a story, about the White House going in Spin motion to preempt the responce of the book.  Maybe they should've argued that Congressmen who send sexual letters to pages aren't that bad, because I think that to escape the Bush ad nausea, people are going to look at the Rep. Foley incident, as another reason to throw Republicans out.

It's a brewing sh#t storm Allen's racism, Foley's child molesting, Bush and all of them in denial.

from Think Progress comes this Gingrich gem:

This morning on Fox News Sunday, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich excused the House leadership for their apparent cover-up of Mark Foley’s predatory behavior. Gingrich said the emails seen by House leadership were “relatively innocuous, there was nothing sexual in those notes.” Asked if there should be “second thoughts” about the leadership’s conduct, Gingrinch responded:

Well, you could have second thoughts about it, but I think had they overly aggressively reacted to the initial round, they would have also been accused of gay bashing.

This is the usual tripe that being gay and being a pedophile are the same thing.  It is a terribly bigoted statement for Gingrich to be making.

Everything written here is the absolute truth. The truth is about the hardest subject to sell. People in general have a difficult time in believing the truth. It is always much easier to sell lies or distortions. It is one of the reasons Conservative talk shows can survive and Liberal talk shows fail.
Thousands of years ago a man was  crusified on a cross because the lies were more believing to an emporer. Even when the emporer knew they were lies and he could not find fault, he still condemned on lies.
When ever we as a society can know the truth when it is spoken we may end wars, etc.
Someday we truth seekers will find a way to get the truth across.

Am I a Dreamer?

It is also difficult to sell because truth can rarely be condensed into cute 1-3 word phrases, which seems to be where this society is heading.  To achieve truth requires work because the seeker has to cut through all the untrue BS. One of the reasons for the conservative success is coming out with short cute phrases that echo in the mind.  Many citizens don't ponder their possible meanings, just go with the sayers.

Preemptive Self-Defense
I Will Protect America
Stay The Course
Cut And Run
Faith Based

What do these mean? Who knows but they sound good so few question them.

is...

Can a 'puter-illiterate like myself somehow "harvest" the "kick the bums out" ass/elephant thingie at the top of Todd's posting? I'd like to forward it to several people of my acquaintance -- good Democrats all, who'd get a kick (no pun intended) out of it, but who refuse to allow blogs into their lives...

If it's possible, how do I do it (I'm on Mac, if it makes any diff)

You can send the link or download the file and email it as an attachment.  It is best played in a web browser.

Kick The Bums Out. Vote Democratic.
http://toddsmyth.goo...

Great post, Todd. There is a tactic (actually, multiple related tactics operating off the same principle) that I never see used that could help every Dem running anywhere in the country. The principle is simple: pick something where the case against the Bush Admin is really strong, and call on one's Repug opponent to join with the candidate is calling for a change in that specific policy or issue. That creates controversy, is highly newsworthy, and puts the Repug opponent in a lose-lose bind. If he, heaven forbid, joins one, he is forced to directly oppose his own party and the president of his own party. In almost no cases, will he do this. But his other alternatives are to 1) simply ignore the call (which allows us to make his refusal the issue and generate lots of media coverage on this), or 2), defend the specific policy or issue, which subjects him directly to every criticism being made of Bush. Let me illustrate in the case of the Webb campaign, and how it could do this to capitalize on the NIE and Woodward revelations:

I believe that Jim Webb should immediately issue a public call to George Allen to join with Webb in calling on the Bush Administration to immediately fire Rumsfeld on the grounds of the total incompetence from day 1 to the present, and on having lost all credibility with the entire military establishment (see Woodward for the Abizaid quote to this effect). If he defends Rumsfeld, as he almost certainly will, then you have him nailed to the cross of defending the indefensible.

Webb could then immediately open up with a barrage along the lines of "Allen defends architect of terrorist successes in Iraq," and nail Rumsfeld's incompetence, from using far too few troops from day one to the present, to having no plan for the post-invasion phase, to making no provision to prevent looting in the beginning, to condoning mass arrests and torture (and mostly of innocent people), to throwing out every counter-insurgency lesson from Vietnam (whereof Webb knows first hand), to misusing what troops he had, and the list goes on, as the primary reason that 1) the insurgency got started in the first place, and 2) that all U.S. efforts and sacrifices have only made it continually worse for 3 1/2 years. This makes very concrete the direct responsibility of Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld for the growth and present strength of the insurgency--the point of the NIE report and Woodward's book.

The follow-on tactic, extending the same principle, would be to pick some public Allen campaign events, and pass out a flyer making the same charge against Allen for backing the architect of the policy that has grown terrorism in Iraq. Again, I know of no case where this has been done. The point is to provoke Allen into a counter-attack, which further paints him into a hole. There will be a good chance he may say things that we can then publicize that will put him in an even worse light. Best of all would be if there is any attempt to prevent us from handing out the flyers, which would allow us to create a major media event on his anti-democratic, anti-free speech tactics.

The same approach could be used for many of Todd's other issues, such as the runaway deficit (for example, challenge Allen to either 1) restore the estate tax, and repeal tax cuts for the rich, enact an excess profits tax on oil companies, etc., in order to balance the budget, or 2) come up with his own plan for this--which is fair game since Allen says he actually wants a balanced budget amendment (he even says he introduced such an amendment). Call his bluff on how he would do this without raising taxes on the rich.

Since the point of Todd's items is to highlight the hypocrisy of Republican claims versus actions, by calling on every Repug candidate to JOIN WITH HIS DEM OPPONENT in implementing what the Repug CLAIMS to stand for, what better way to expose the hypocrisy, and force them to repudiate what they claim to stand for. It is the call to the opponent to join with the Dem candidate--a self-evidently bi-partisan proposal--that makes this so effective, much more powerful than merely denouncing the manifest hypocrisy. Yet I know of no instance in which any Dem candidate has called out his opponent to JOIN HIM, to  appear with him in public, behind a policy that the Repug nominally backs but actually opposes in deed, to force the Repug to either attack his own party, or expose that he doesn't really stand for what he claims to.

So, calling all Democratic campaigns (in Virginia, Webb, Feder, Hurst, Weed, O'Donnell, Kellam, and Nachman, to name the non-incumbents, though nothing is stopping incumbents from doing this to) to see the power of this tactic, which costs nothing, is easy to implement, and could galvanize lots of press and really help your campaign. Let's go for it.

Peter Rush
Leesburg, VA