No, no – although the word itself does mean something negative, the entire post does not. You actually never even said, directly, that the Democrats did something sordid. You said the Republicans dared the Democrats to do something sordid, and the Democrats “called their bluff.” The overall impression given by your post is that the Democrats did a finer thing – balanced the scales, kept karma where it should be.
Of course, the advantage you gain by this overly flowery, rhetorical flourishes, laced heavily with sarcasm, is that you can come back to a paragraph like this and claim it means any damn thing you like.
But the fact remains that this paragraph, read fairly and fully, does not cast the Democrats in a negative light.
Want to use this post as a poll subject in IMHO?
We’ll post it as written, and ask readers to vote on whether it shows Democrats, Republicans, both, or neither, in a negative light.
Care to predict how that voting will go?