The Opinion Journal looks at the new assault on Representative Brian Baird of Washington. Baird, you will recall, is the Congressman who opposed the Iraq war from the start, voted against it and has been a strong critic all along. Until he returned from his last trip to that country and admitted that the surge was working and that the troops need more time. Hence the new attack ad campaign against the Democrat.
By "Democrats" led by MoveOn.org.
In the Hell Hath No Fury sweepstakes, groups like MoveOn.org are gearing up to take on a new set of perceived traitors in their midst–Democrats who have acknowledged some success from the troop surge in Iraq.
Chief among the targets is Washington Congressman Brian Baird, whose indiscretion was recognizing progress on the ground, despite having initially opposed the surge and having opposed the war in the first place. After a recent trip to Iraq, Mr. Baird said: "One of the things that gets very little attention is that virtually every other country I visited says it would be a mistake to pull out now."
We hope he took his flak jacket home from Baghdad. MoveOn is rolling out an ad this week in Mr. Baird's Washington district, in which a former soldier tells of being shot at in 2003 by the Iraqis he had fought to liberate and calls America's continued presence in the country "wrong, immoral and irresponsible." What does this have to do with the wisdom–or lack thereof–of the current strategy? Nada, which tells you something about MoveOn's honesty.
The group doesn't aim to engage in debate, but to punish and silence Democrats who dare to think for themselves. There's a pattern here: When John Dingell contradicted party orthodoxy on global warming and auto mileage standards this year, MoveOn ran ads in his Michigan district calling the 81-year-old Congressman "Dingellsaurus."
Inquisitions have a way of backfiring in the long run. The far left didn't learn that with the Lamont challenge to Joe Lieberman. Hence the current auto de fe politics.
The Inquisition (what a show)
The Inquisition (here we go)
We know you're wishin' that we'd go away.
But the Inquisition's here and it's here to-
"Hey Toquemada, walk this way."
"I just got back from the Auto-de-fe."
Pingback: Blue Crab Boulevard » Happy Anniversary
< ?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> < !DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
So why is it wrong for an interest group to start a letter-writing campaign seeking to influence a local congressman? I went and watched the ad after reading this – that's what moveon is doing.
So the conservative Wall Street Journal publicizes their position, moveon publicizes theirs. That sounds like democracy, not inquisition.
Yawn. Like conservatives don’t pull a muscle rushing to lable Republicans who don’t march in lockstep with Bush as RHINOs.
I see it on nearly every conservative blog whenever Lugar or someone else disagrees with warrantless spying, or the surge, or whatever joke-of-the-day-disguised-as-policy that BushCo comes up with.