"The Left" has been properly chastised and sent to bed without their supper.

[madfloridian]

Many times lately "The Left" has been properly chastised and sent to bed without their supper. We really did nothing very wrong, just a little too outspoken. The Senate did it first, and we had high hopes the House would not do it...Pelosi said she had other things to do.

But today the House censured the speech of MoveOn as well. I don't have the wording yet, but here is an article. The vote was pretty overwhelming.

House Condemns MoveOn.org Attack

The House on Wednesday overwhelmingly voted to condemn the liberal advocacy group MoveOn.org for a recent advertisement attacking the top U.S. general in Iraq.

By a 341-79 vote, the House passed a resolution praising the patriotism Gen. David Petraeus, the commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, and condemning a MoveOn.org ad that referred to Petraeus as "General Betray Us."

The article originally said it was attached to the stopgap funding measure, but they took that sentence out. Don't know why.

So now we have both the Senate and the House on record of chastising a group that has worked hard for Democratic values. They stood with the right wing against their anti-war base.

They have done this for years, though. Nothing new. The centrist Democrats called us "fringe activists" way back in 2003.

Activists are out of step and are not the real soul of the party

There's one big problem with this strategy: Most of those party activists the candidates are trying so hard to please are wildly out of touch not only with middle America but with the Democratic rank and file. The great myth of the campaign is the misguided notion that the hopes and dreams of party activists and single-issue groups represent the heart and soul of the Democratic Party. They don't.

The fact is, "the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party," as former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean likes to call it, is an aberration, a modern-day version of the old McGovern wing of the party, defined principally by weakness abroad and elitist interest-group liberalism at home. That wing lost the party 49 states in two elections and turned a powerful national organization into a much weaker, regional one. ....."END SNIP

..."SNIP.."But the great myth of the current cycle is the misguided notion that the hopes and dreams of activists represent the heart and soul of the Democratic Party. Real Democrats are real people, not activist elites. The mission of the Democratic Party, as Bill Clinton pledged in 1992, is to provide "real answers to the real problems of real people." Real Democrats who champion the mainstream values, national pride, and economic aspirations of middle-class and working people are the real soul of the Democratic Party, not activists and interest groups with narrow agendas.

One of their bloggers called us lefty loonies and chattering nutroots.

I don't have the wording of the House censure but here is a paragraph from the Senate resolution.

The "sense of the senate" measure "strongly condemns any effort to attack the honor and integrity of General Petraeus and all the member of the United States Armed Forces; and to specifically repudiate the unwarranted personal attack on General Petraeus by the liberal activist group Moveon.org."
First Read MSNBC

That came after the Republicans stopped them from admonishing the right wing groups for their attacks. This article agrees it was not a good moment but excuses it on the grounds of the power of the right wing noise machine.

The furor over MoveOn.org’s silly “General Betray Us” ad – which led to a bipartisan Senate condemnation of MoveOn after Republicans blocked a move to include right-wing smears against military veterans like Democrats Max Cleland and John Kerry – carries a bitter lesson for the American Left.

The author excuses the Senators who voted for the condemnation because the machine would have been after them.

Yes, it’s true that many Democratic senators behaved spinelessly, but a leading reason for their political cowardice is the Republicans’ extraordinary ability to whip up national frenzies over anything that can be portrayed as an affront to them or their allies.

Hard Lessons

Mr. Parry, we have a pretty good sized noise machine on the left that can fight very hard. There is only one problem. The big boys of the blogs chose not to stand with MoveOn. It was a choice they made to not take sides. So in effect they were really of no good at all. That happens a lot with the major bloggers. One can only surmise the reason.

I think we need to stop excusing and start fighting back. Speak to the people in real terms in true terms.

Here is some text from the message part of the ad...maybe it stung a little to read it since so many were advocates of the war from the beginning in 2002 or earlier.

The Petraeus ad

Every independent report on the ground situation in Iraq shows that the surge strategy has failed. Yet the General claims a reduction in violence. That’s because, according to the New York Times, the Pentagon has adopted a bizarre formula for keeping tabs on violence. For example, deaths by car bombs don’t count. The Washington Post reported that assassinations only count if you’re shot in the back of the head — not the front. According to the Associated Press, there have been more civilian deaths and more American soldier deaths in the past three months than in any other summer we’ve been there. We’ll hear of neighborhoods where violence has decreased. But we won’t hear that those neighborhoods have been ethnically cleansed.

Most importantly, General Petraeus will not admit what everyone knows: Iraq is mired in an unwinnable religious civil war. We may hear of a plan to withdraw a few thousand American troops. But we won’t hear what Americans are desperate to hear: a timetable for withdrawing all our troops. General Petraeus has actually said American troops will need to stay in Iraq for as long as ten years.

Maybe too much truth and too painful.

George Lakoff really spoke well on this issue at Huffington Post. He put it in clear words.
Whose Betrayal

MoveOn's "General Petraeus or General Betray Us?" ad has raised vital questions that need a thorough and open discussion. The ad worked brilliantly to reveal, via its framing, an essential but previously hidden truth: the Bush Administration and its active supporters have betrayed the trust of the troops and the American people.

Lakoff asks another vital question, one that gets to the heart of why so many in both parties could not deal with the words "betray us".

The issue is this: Who has been betraying the trust of the American people -- including our troops -- in bringing about the American invasion of Iraq and in continuing the occupation? What were the acts of betrayal and with what consequences? And is a betrayal of trust still going on, and if so where, how, and by whom?

There is no one in the party speaking out for the major part of the Democratic base. No one. They talk about being on message, but their message seems to be more of what the right wing desires. They all parrot words...all of them.

Some here say we should not criticize our party, that it is tiring. I agree. But what is the alternative? The GOP did not criticize their own when they could and look where they are.

Being on message means nothing if it is the wrong message.