The wrong debate for the GOP

September 10, 2007

Gen. David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker are testifying now before a joint hearing of the House Armed Services Committee and House Foreign Affairs Committee. All three news networks are airing them live, and CNN.com and MSNBC.com both have live feeds online.

There will be plenty to say about the testimony and exchanges, but in opening statements, House Republican leaders decided they didn’t want to talk about the war, or the president’s strategy, or the available data. They wanted to talk about MoveOn.org and Petraeus’ credibility.

“Cooking the books for the White House,” charged the newspaper advertisement by MoveOn.Org — an allegation that Republicans swiftly challenged Democrats to disavow.

Democrats have been critical of Petraeus, but not nearly as scathing — or as personal — as the MoveOn advertisement. “General Petraeus or General Betray Us?” it asked, a wordplay on his name.

House Republicans, including Reps. Duncan Hunter (R-Calif.) and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla.), spent the bulk of their time talking about, and pointing to, the MoveOn ad. At first, I was concerned that the ad would become a life-preserver for the House GOP — instead of having to defend a policy that doesn’t work, Republicans can go on the offensive against one of their favorite boogeymen.

But as Hunter and Ros-Lehtinen continued to whine about an intemperate newspaper ad, I started to believe the opposite.

Kevin Drum’s take was spot on.

Is it just me, or does anyone else think that Republicans are making a big mistake by spending all their TV time this morning complaining about accusations that Gen. Petraeus is cooking the books in his assessment of progress in Iraq? Repeating the accusation, even if it’s only to denounce it, is still repeating the accusation. And it means that everyone watching the hearing is learning over and over and over that a lot of people don’t trust Petraeus, something they might not have known before since Democrats aren’t mentioning it and not everyone reads the inside pages of the New York Times.

This strikes me as a very dumb thing to do.

Exactly right. Republicans were, on their own initiative, creating a controversy about Petraeus’ independence and credibility. Dems weren’t bringing it up; indeed, Dems offered high praise for Petraeus this morning.

But someone just tuning in and listening to the GOP lawmakers were led to believe that there may be reason to believe that Petraeus may be an unreliable source.

It’s as if MoveOn had set a trap for Republicans to fall into.

Methinks the Republicans know that they’re gooses are cooked in about 14 months. That is, unless Bush does something really crazy…

…everyone who has disappeared has questioned whether or not we should be staging a massive attack on Iran.”…

…”anyone who has any doubts is in danger of having a long military career yanked out from under them…

…We are shipping in and assigning every damn Tomahawk we have in inventory. I think this is going to be massive and sudden, like thousands of targets. I believe that no American will know when it happens until after it happens. And the consequences…whatever the consequences…they will have to be lived with…

…We’re gong to hit Iran, bigtime. Whatever political discussion that are going in is window dressing and perhaps even a red herring. I see what’s going on below deck here in the hangars and weapons bays. And I have a sick feeling about how it’s all going to turn out.”

http://www.bartcop.com/iran-invade-mark-f.htm

  • They’ve got to keep Das Base fired up for when it’s time for the brownshirts to hit the streets. Naturally, when the cutover to a one-party state happens, they’re going to need as much insane hatred of non-imperialists as they can get.

  • Thanks for a spot on commentary!

    The latest research validates this point. Our memory is not linear or rational. When we hear false statements and truthful statements our memory loses the ability to sort the truth from the lies over time. Emotionally charged statements stick better than dispassionate points. I wish I had the citations for this research. I heard it on Public Radio yesterday while setting up a new computer workstation desk and didn’t note the source.

    There are several great books that address the topic: ‘Made to Stick’ by Chip and Dan Heath (Chip’s a Stanford Prof., Dan a national education consultant) is an excellent read that’s managed to get everyone I know so excited about the book that they can’t stop reading it. ‘The Political Brain’ by Drew Westen, Professor of Psychology, and seemingly every other counseling discipline, is another paradigm-shifting book. They flesh out many of the points Kevin Drum makes.

  • They’ve got to keep Das Base fired up for when it’s time for the brownshirts to hit the streets. Naturally, when the cutover to a one-party state happens, they’re going to need as much insane hatred of non-imperialists as they can get.

    What brownshirts? The wingnut base is not organized in any coherent way for anything other than eating Cheetos and listening to Rush. They would need a disciplined militia numbering in the millions if they wanted to try an armed takeover, especially since they’d need to also overcome local law enforcement. These bozos can’t manage to suppress downtown Baghdad. They’ve not the slightest hope of taking over a very large nation of 300 million. Enough with the silly fantasies.

  • Well, I’ve figured out the strategy…Petraeus comes in hard, then Crocker puts everyone to sleep so the questions that follow (if he ever stops talking), will be appropriately meaningless. “Gumming it to death” as a strategy comes to the Congress in the form of Crockett and Tubbs…I mean Petraeus and Crocker.

    I almost think that the Demcrats may have overplayed their hand on the whole issue of a “report,” since Petraeus and Crocker must have pulled all-nighters writing these lengthy “statements.” Maybe it would have been better had they showed up with just a few charts and let the Dems go after them.

    I wish I could stop thinking that this is just a dog-and-pony show, that we know there will be another 6 months, another 50 billion dollars, and we”ll be right back here in March – assuming we haven’t launched some kind of attack against Iran.

  • I think you’re right.

    Basically, it doesn’t matter how masterful of a job the WH does spinning the press on this one. The public has been lied to before. They’ve been told, over and over, about extremist anit-war folks who turned out to be right, and have been promised, uncritically, by cable news shows things were turning found next month, but never this month. They’ve been lied to again and again and again by the GOP and thier press, and they just ain’t buying it any more.

    It has nothing to do with stage management, but Pavlov’s dog. You ring a bell every time you feed him, and eventually, he’ll salivate at the ring of a bell. The public has been whacked in the head every time they believe their TV when they give them Bush spin. Now when they hear something’s going great in Iraq, they duck.

  • Did MoveOn.org set a trap or are the ReThuglicans self-destructing yet again?

    Methinks it’s the latter.

    If you left a bannana peel in the middle of a deserted warehouse five seconds later a ReThug would come along and slip on that sucker.

  • Well, the General did betray us when he betrayed both his oath as a West Point Cadet – “we will not lie, cheat, or steal, or tolerate among us those who do” – and his oath as an officer to “…defend the Constitution of the United States of America against all enemies, foreign and domestic.”

    Let the morons rave and rant – the more they do, the more they prove they have nothing to say and the more they prove what moron losers they are.

  • Gen. David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker are testifying now before a joint hearing of the House Armed Services Committee and House Foreign Affairs Committee.

    But it doesn’t matter, nor does his appearance on Fox News, later on, matter, because we’ve already seen the numbers and we already know that when Petraeus claims progress has been made, he’ll be lying.

  • This is not the right person to be discussing the way forward in Iraq. Military expansionism is not addressing the primary Iraq issues of jobs, energy, schools, hospitals etc. Rebuilding the infrastructure and employing the nation means undoing all that Paul Bremmer’s team did when they eliminated Iraq’s economy and placed it all in the hands of private, foreign, profiteering contractors. Petraeus and Crocker should not be before congress today, it should be those charged with helping Iraqi’s rebuild Iraq and develop their own economy. It should be those charged with dealing with the massive corruption in Iraq instigated by America’s money.
    Petraeus and Crocker or ‘Petrocker’ are not credible since they have demonstrated they are following a political agenda and pushing a campaign for Bush’s policies rather than giving any kind of objective report. Congress should just dismiss them as Bush campaigners. Many in Congress predicted what they would say 6 mos ago and now here they are saying it…no surprise there except the enormous effort of the PR campaign.

    The bigger the lie the more effort it requires to sell it

  • Re: 4. On September 10th, 2007 at 2:30 pm, jimBOB

    They’re just a few steps and an unconstitutional Executive Order away from officially labeling political dissent against American Imperialism as treason and King George leading the activities of the Federal Government for ensuring constitutional government. Just look at the Reich Wing rhetoric talked about today here at TCR.

    We all know that the “support the troops” mantra has been conflated to mean support the President and his policies, right or wrong. And look at the politicization of the military and the apoliticization of ordinary American life. So just how far fetched is my “silly fantasy”?

  • I hope you are right, CB. I am probably a lone wolf here, but I did not like the Move On ad. I think Petraeus is a very ambitious and very political actor, and I had hoped that he would be called out as such. My worry is the Move On ad innoculates him from challenge. I’ve been listening to the coverage on NPR. No one is challenging the charts and graphs of the good general in any meaningful way. Duncan Hunter also will grab mic time and spin the issue, whereas Ike Skelton will remain his low-key self. I heard people say it was despicable for Move On to try to spin what Petraeus would say in advance. As if the other side has not been doing that very thing for weeks! But, I think a lot of folks will be put off by the insinuation that a General Saviour Petraeous is somehow betraying his country as he serves in Iraq. That could cause them to spurn the doubts others put forward about Petraeus’s veracity / independence. I wish Move On had just made straight forward points about the General’s investment in the plan he supposedly designed AND about his rosy forecasts in the past that were at best overly optimistic. As I say, I’m sure others here will not share this view, but this is my take.

  • JKap, if Bush tried to overtly suspend the constitution for no reason then it wouldn’t work. Executive orders mean squat if there’s no way to enforce them. The chimp can declare anything he likes, but since there’s no federal police force it wouldn’t mean anything. Law enforcement is a local responsibility, and local police don’t answer to the president. The army is too small to use for this, and anyway they are stretched thin already from existing commitments. Bush simply hasn’t got the legitimacy to pull something like this off, not now.

    OTOH if we see another mass casualty attack, then that’s a whole other ball of wax. But even then I don’t think it’s obvious that Bush would be able to get people behind him. Too many would be asking what good is this doofus, and I don’t know that he’d get a rally out of it the way he did with 9/11.

  • I guess I skimmed over the part about the headline on that MoveOn ad when I read this post earlier. I thought it was “Cooking the Books for the White House.” I was just poking around network news sites to see how the Patraeus thing was playing and I ran across a PDF of it and O.M.G. I really think Steve’s first instinct was correct. Leave it to MoveOn to spend $65,000 on yet another “Kick Me” sign for progressives. This is exactly why I took myself off their mailing list three or four years ago.

    The hell of it is, it was even a pretty decent ad except for the headline — no doubt ripped straight from the comments section somebody’s blog — and there was a much better headline buried right in the very first line of copy. If they had run it with something along the lines of “A General at War with the Facts,” they might have even changed a few minds with it. As it is though, the term we used to use back when I worked in marketing would be, “talking to yourself.”

  • Nah, I haven’t seen the ad. Nobody will see the damned ad. All they will hear is “the criticism is that Petraeus is lying”. Which, he is. So, good job MoveOn.

    Well surprise surprise. After 6 years of this, most people assume that if someone from the WH’s lips are moving, they are lying anyway.

  • Taking the Republic party’s perspective, for a moment , I think they’ve been Roved.

    MoveOn, (about whom I’m ambivalent, though I joined for a while for the 2004 election), has pulled a classic Rove move on Bush by attacking directly and harshly what was supposed to be Bush’s strong point in this debate: Petraeus and his credibility. Hunter and Ros-Lehtinen should probably just have shut up, but politicians (and especially reporters) are no more able to ignore bright cognitive candy like this ad then addicts can avoid crack. Moreover, by talking a lot about the ad, they’ve put the White House in a worse position — if the White House ignores the ad, now, they tacitly admit that it has substance; if they attack it, they just bring more attention to it. It’s exactly the dilemma Kerry faced with the Swift Boat attacks: he tried the ignoring technique, but the tropisms of his fellow democrats and the media ensured that the attacks were discussed, and the effect was to seriously damage him.

    I’m not sure whether I’m happy that someone on the progressive end is learning from Rove, but in light of the costs to our troops, our reputation, and the US position in the world if we continue the hopeless tactics now applied in Iraq, something has to change.

  • The Democrats can finally point out that the Republicans are lying, after all this time… Took them long enough.

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