We were never 'stay the course'? Or, the death of accountability

[Hentor_the_Barbarian]

In the post above, I repeatedly referred to the torture bill as the “terror” bill. My apologies - I meant to be talking about the reprehensible torture bill that was recently passed.

[Ludovic]

@Kimstu

Except you, perhaps:

If you recognize that dishonest soundbites are in fact an important issue because lots of people do care about them, then don’t try to shrug them off with a “who the fuck cares?”

He was never “lots of people get worked up over soundbites”.

[Oy]

@Hentor the Barbarian

I think what it highlights is a desire/preference/tendency what have you/for a contingent of liberals to engage in self-defeating attacks on their own side for the sake of appearing as thoughtful and non-partisan as we can. I would prefer that we be nuanced and thoughtful about important matters, but we’ve nuanced and thought ourselves right into a position of being able to do absolutely nothing good for our country.

For example, we tried being nuanced and thoughtful about the terror bill, right? What happened? We watched the Republicans pass a terror bill. On the other hand, a week later the Foley scandal acheived multiple orders of magnitude greater damage to the Republicans than the terror bill ever would. In your opinion, which issue should be of greater concern? I know my opinion on the matter, but I also know that a nuanced and thoughtful statement about the terror bill is a fart in a windstorm compared to one joke on the Tonight Show about Republicans and house pages. I’d much rather be in a position from which we could put an end to both the terror bill and the shoddy and self-serving management of the House.

I’m not sure how, but I think you’re missing my point. My point is that, if you don’t like the “stay the course” issue, just move on by. It does nobody a lick of good for you to be chastizing Democrats for their criticism of the President. If it is not worthwhile, the issue will go away on it’s own. In the meantime, your passion and 1,000 words would do us all much more good if you spent them addressing the thing you think is of significant concern.

And my point is that we’re bad at the sound bite, and that maybe, just maybe, the American electorate has actually realized after six years that the utterly simplistic world view isn’t working, and that what we need to be putting our energy into is presenting an alternative rather than pointing and laughing. Believe me, I’ll enjoy the pointing and laughing as much as anybody here, but is it going to influence the public? I hope so. But the question still arises - what do we have to offer instead? Maybe we can’t sum it up in a sound bite. But maybe we can sum it up better than we have so far.

@Hentor the Barbarian

Instead of criticizing Bush for what you (and I) regard as a substantial concern, you chose to spend a lot of effort criticizing liberals for a trivial matter.

And my second point was that I personally don’t have the substance to get into a factual argument about this stuff. I’m not well-informed and I don’t debate well. But I can see when somebody here is being attacked as being the bad guy even when he agrees with you in substance, because he points out that this particular situation isn’t quite as clear cut as the wording made it sound. By all means, go to town on W - you won’t see me defending him on policy or as a human being! But stop savaging our own because they’re not perfecting toeing the party line as you see it, because even a political idiot like me can see that that is going to drive away moderates and potential converts. And that’s not a trivial matter.