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Wednesday, February 01, 2006

Late Nite FDL: Let Us All Now Listen to Digby



This afternoon the AP had a few cooperative words on the Sheehan arrest:
Sheehan's T-shirt alluded to the number of soldiers killed in Iraq: "2245 Dead. How many more?" . . .

Young's shirt had just the opposite message: "Support the Troops — Defending Our Freedom."
Glenn Greenwald (and others from the comments) were on this earlier, and Glenn emailed the article's author, Laurie Kellman. I feel like the friggin' revision police these days, but I just went back to the article for the link I found that it had been changed. It now reads:
Young's shirt had this message: "Support the Troops — Defending Our Freedom."
Nobody wants to be the next Deborah Howell. Score one for the team.

But it's amazing what a bunch of trained monkeys the press have become, so effortlessly repeating right-wing talking points that they truly seem to have internalized them and made them their own. Peter Daou and Steve Benen have begun to chronicle the frequency with which this happens and it's quite something to behold when you see it all lumped together in one spot. The words "steaming pile" come to mind.

I have to confess I am guilty of some of the same behavior, however. I am trying to practice what Digby preaches:
People are more reluctant to identify themselves as liberals or progressives than they were in 1988 and one of the reasons is that people like Al From and his boys helped the Republicans degrade the label to such an extent that people don't want to be associated with it. It is one thing to criticize your brothers; it's another to sully the family name. They continue to do this by talking about purging Michael Moore and Move-On and generally showing such a lack of respect for the grassroots that you wonder why they don't just call us all filthy rabble and tell us to eat cake. The lesson here is to never employ GOP rhetoric about the Democratic Party, ever. This is one thing that simply has got to stop.
Digby's right -- do not reinforce Republican narratives, ever. It's hard when you want to point out that certain Democrats seem to be...ouch...lacking critical anatomical parts, but the much harder task is to find another way to criticize them. The GOP does a bang-up job characterizing the Democrats as weak, they sure don't need us to do their job for them.

Hey, aren't those some manly, rugged hairplugs on Joe Biden?

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