Mercury Rising

From a comment by Magnum on this post by Atrios over at the excellent Eschaton blog:

O'Reilly jumped vertically out of his chair over a foot (with no visible physical means of levitation) expostulating "Media Matters! Media Matters!", and stated that he might as well get his own talking points from David Duke Sorta what they did with Michael Moore. The meme got out there that Moore wasn't to be believed on anything. This meme was embraced by the media at large as well as far too many Dems. Beware that they will try to do this with Media Matters.

Exactly. Republicans may be idiots when it comes to governing responsibly (watch as the dollar continues to fall, thanks to Bush's combination of reckless spending and tax cuts for the rich!), but they've got the divide-and-conquer scam down cold: 1) Find your enemy's strongest ally 2) Falsely demonize that ally 3) Laugh as enemy stupidly backs away from said ally 4) Repeat until dictatorship is achieved. And the DLC DINOs (that's "Democrats in Name Only", folks) just keeping playing the Republicans' game by the Republicans' rules -- and we all are getting our butts kicked because of it. Just look at Peter Beinart's recent babbling in The New Republic(an), and how so many "war liberal" bloggers (most notably Drum and Yglesias gleefully chimed in. These guys all got it wrong on Iraq, so what do they do? Attack the people who got it right. More on this subject from the always-sane David Neiwert, the best researcher alive on the question of terror movements in the US (emphases mine):

...Of course, if the Democrats have any grassroots strength now, it is associated with the MoveOn and Howard Dean factions (and mentioning Michael Moore is just silly, since he is a nonentity organizationally speaking). How exactly does he intend to transform the party at its grassroots by excising the people who are its grassroots? If we jettison these folks, as he's suggesting, who do we replace them with? This sounds like a classic formula for self-evisceration. More to the point, why exactly should we drive out the faction that proved, in fact, to be right about the Iraq war? Perhaps so people like Beinart won't have to be constantly reminded reminded just how wrong they were? MoveOn.org has never indicated anything but support for combating terrorism, and particularly for hunting down bin Laden. What the grassroots antiwar factions objected to was a willy-nilly invasion of another country without adequate assessment in the case of Afghanistan, and in the case of Iraq, the unwarranted invasion of another country, one only marginally associated with terrorism and unconnected to 9/11, under false pretenses and without a well-planned exit strategy. And you know what? They were right in most cases. Very few mainstream progressives opposed the Afghanistan invasion on principle; many questioned its necessity and its planning and execution, questions that remain legitimate in light of the outcome there, with bin Laden and Al Qaeda still at large and the Taliban still a political force. But generally speaking, liberal opposition was very muted and generally limited to the factions that oppose war in any form. Iraq, however, was a wholly different matter. Many mainstream liberals immediately questioned the rationale for invading Iraq (as well as some mainstream conservatives who made similar cases) -- and were pooh-poohed by the New Republic crew as a bunch of peaceniks. Then as now, the essence of their attacks on the antiwar factions boiled down to image over substance. I had some specific experience in this area. I was one of the first journalists to ask whether Saddam was involved in the 9/11 attacks, and based much of my early reportage on interviews with people like James Woolsey and Laurie Mylroie, who it turned out were also the people directly influencing the White House as well. But the more time I spent on the matter, the more clear it became that the case connecting Saddam to 9/11 was utterly ephemeral, as I explained in one of my first posts at this blog. Even later, it was proven beyond a doubt that Mylroie had been selling everyone a bill of goods.

Laurie Mylroie, you will remember, is the loony tune who claimed that Wales -- WALES?!?! -- was a terrorist hotspot. Why the hell should we suck up to nutjobs like her, over any issue? Because Vichy DINOs like Peter Beinart say we should? Sorry, not good enough. Here's what Arianna Huffington -- a former Republican who is now a progressive -- had to say in a 12/08/04 e-mail about people like Beinart, Drum and the DLC:

As cognitive psychologist George Lakoff told me: “Democrats moving to the middle is a double disaster that alienates the party’s progressive base while simultaneously sending a message to swing voters that the other side is where the good ideas are.” It unconsciously locks in the notion that the other side’s positions are worth moving toward, while your side’s positions are the ones to move away from. Plus every time you move to the center, the right just moves further to the right.

At the direction of the DLC, the Democratic party has moved ever rightward over the past decade-and-a-half. And during that time, we have gone from controlling Congress and having a lead in the number of governorships to being a near-permanent minority party at the national level. And all this moving rightward hasn't given us the big corporate dollars that the DLC said it would. In fact, in 2004, corporate America gave ten (10) times as much money to Republicans as it did to Democrats -- the biggest disparity EVER. If the small-donor machinery perfected by Howard Dean, MoveOn.org and the other grass-roots progressive groups hadn't existed, the Democrats would have done far, far worse at the polls in 2004. So, if the grass-roots is what kept the Democrats going in 2004, why the hell do Peter Beinart and the DLCers want us to distance ourselves from it? I can't think of any reasons that aren't connected to cowardice, stupidity, greed, and self-interest. Can you?