Dan from MI
Member
The leftists from Eric Alterman's crowd are at it again. This time it's Drew Westen, a "Professor of Psychology and Psychiatry." I thought Emory University was a high rated school, but I wonder after this tripe. It's still a good read, from a "know your enemy" standpoint.
http://www.alternet.org/rights/55094/?page=1
It's the same thing the DLC is pushing on us. Mark Mellman, Mark Penn (Hillary's pollster), etc.
http://www.alternet.org/rights/55094/?page=1
Democratic leaders offered the requisite condolences. But that's all they offered. They didn't mention that the Republican Congress had let the Brady Act, which banned the sale of semiautomatic weapons, sunset in 2004. They didn't mention that in the decade or so after the passage of that act, 100,000 felons lost their right to bear arms, but not a single hunter lost that right. Instead, the Democrats ran for political cover, waiting for the smoke to clear.
This wasn't the first time Democrats scattered when threatened with Republican gunshots. They were silent as the Beltway sniper terrorized our nation's capital a month before the midterm elections of 2002. And they have been silent or defensive on virtually every "wedge" issue that has divided our nation for much of the last 30 years. When the Republicans tried to play the hate card again in 2006, this time under the cover of immigration reform, Democrats scrambled to pull together a "policy" on immigration, instead of simply asking, "What's the matter, gays aren't working for you anymore?"
(snip)
Although most Americans were much closer to Gore than Bush on guns in the 2000 Harris poll, they thought Bush was stronger on gun control. Although Kerry had hunted all his life, Bush was the overwhelming choice of American sportsmen, even though he'd purchased his Crawford ranch as a prop only two years before running for president -- something Democrats never thought to mention in two presidential campaigns. Nor did they mention, as James Carville and Paul Begala have pointed out, that Bush had stocked his ranch's man-made lakes with fish because the river running through it was too polluted.
These are just the kinds of facts and images that win elections. And they are just the kinds of facts and images that should win elections, because they tell where a candidate really stands, not just where he stands for photo ops.
(snip)
With the polls strongly at their backs, Democrats had a historic opportunity to turn the Republicans' indifference to the suffering at Virginia Tech into a moral condemnation, and to put every Republican in Congress on record as caring more about the blood-soaked dollars of the NRA than about the lives of our children. Instead, they turned tail and ran, fearing they'd be branded as "anti-gun" and pushed down the slippery slope the NRA has used to pick them off at the ballot box for years: "They want to take away your gun."
But you only have to worry about getting branded and being pushed down slippery slopes if you're playing checkers while the other side is playing chess -- worrying about their next move when you should be anticipating six moves ahead. Democrats didn't do what they knew was the right thing because of their concerns about the political fortunes of red-state Democrats like Heath Shuler in North Carolina. But they wouldn't have had to worry -- and they would have picked up a lot of "security moms" and plenty of dads -- if they had simply put Shuler in front of the camera, flanked by a couple of pro-gun Democrats like Montana Senator Jon Tester, with a hunting rifle over his left shoulder and an M-16 over his right, armed with a simple message:
This [pointing to the gun on his left] is a rifle.
This [the gun on his right] is an assault weapon.
People like you and me use this oneto hunt.
Criminals, terrorists, and deranged teenagers use this oneto hunt police officers and our children.
Law-abiding citizens have the right to own one of these.
Nobody has the right to threaten our kids' safety with one of these.
Any questions?
If you can't speak the truth and win elections, you need to learn another language. The language that wins elections is the language of the heart.
It's the same thing the DLC is pushing on us. Mark Mellman, Mark Penn (Hillary's pollster), etc.
