Monday, December 06, 2004

Asshats

Yglesias says:

It probably paints with too broad a brush to say that every opponent of the Afghan War is a pacifist or someone who thinks that the whole thing was motivated by some nefarious natural-gas pipeline scheme, but the pacifists and the tinfoil hatters are very much real people, and liberals need to recognize that when these people become the public face of progressive politics -- as Michael Moore did around the release of Fahrenheit 9/11 -- that conservatives are the ones who reap the benefits.


For sake of discussion, let's stipulate that every thing in this excerpt is correct. But, if you have a problem with Michael Moore being the public face of progressive politics, you have a couple of choices. You can spend all your time wringing your hands about it, demanding that all good people can renounce him, thereby alienating him and his supporters. Or, you can realize that there's an extraordinarily lack of leadership in the sphere of progressive politics, especially within the Democratic party itself, and understand that without that vacuum someone like Moore (or Nader) would have a much harder time thriving. So, you can put forward a less tinfoil hat-prone more credible alternative, or you can call on people to condemn Moore. And then call on them to condemn everyone who hasn't condemned Moore. And then call on them to condemn everyone who haven't condemned the people who haven't condemned the people who haven't condemned Moore. And, then, hey, it's 2006 and oh shit we lost again and Karl Rove is still laughing.

If we truly believe the reason we can't win elections is because of an overabundance of lefty asshatery because the Democratic party gets held accountable for everything anyone to the left of Tom DeLay says, from Michael Moore on down to the perennial favorite "some guy with a sign somewhere," then we really have a problem - the problem is that we've failed to play the same game against the Republicans. The Right is filled with asshatery of such epic proportions. It's our failure to exploit that which is the problem.

Who has crazier "conspiracy theories" -- Moore or Laurie "Saddam stole my car keys" Mylroie? Which one has the ear of people who run our foreign policy?

And, since we're still talking about opposition to the war in Afghanistan, we shouldn't forget one prominent opponent:

Donald Rumsfeld.