"The Senate voted by 72 to 25 to condemn an advertisement by the liberal antiwar group MoveOn.org in The New York Times on Sept. 10 that accused Gen. David H. Petraeus, the commander in Iraq, of betrayal."

That's from the New York Times, which also ran the condemnable ad:


I swear some days I fell asleep and woke up ten years after the Soviet invasion. The reaction to the uncontroversial ad has been straight out Uncle Joe's Agitprop for Amateurs. If they'd ignored the thing, it would have gone away. I mean, who but "liberals" reads the Times anyway?

So, you know the fact that they're feigning outrage is because they feel they have something to gain by further publicizing the offending ad.

First and foremost, they would like to discredit and thereby defang MoveOn.org, before the general elections. Eliminating an organization that has millions to spend on ads that are bound to be aimed at the Republican candidate would be a huge help to him. If you want to know what a little money can buy in a tight race, look what the Swiftboaters were able to achieve in the last contest.  And strangely, no one voted to condemn them.

So baldly political was the move to condemn the ad (the content of which is not at all controversial), that the Democrats who went along deserve condemnation themselves. Those who voted with Republicans might argue that the ad was indeed offensive, and that not to condemn it could be used against them in a future race.

The amendment was clearly not about defining Republican values, but was designed simply to force Democrats to capitulate to them. As Fox News put it, "supporters made clear the measure was ... aimed at giving [Democratic] senators 'a chance to distance themselves from the notion that some group has them on a leash, like a puppet on a string.'"

Those Democrats don't want to risk becoming, like the ad itself, objects of "disgust" for our Commander-in-Chief, who has declared the ad—surprise, surprise—"an attack, not only on General Petraeus but on the U.S. military.”

And so it is. Because the Democrats are unwilling or unable to take it to the next level, which is to call the President's comments disgraceful and the Senate's antics purely political, and to make it stick.

How many times have the Democrats been painted into this corner? And now that the media has taken the bait (even the Times is playing along now, calling MoveOn.org "the liberal antiwar group," when none of those words accurately defines MoveOn.org, except to its enemies), the Democrats have little choice but to concede that the ad was an anti-American abomination and that "the liberal antiwar group" responsible for it is a radical fringe group that does not represent American values, and so on and so on, you know the rest.

The transparency of the tactic is what interests me. Nothing could be more transparently political than a condemnation on the Senate floor, which is pure political theater. There's nothing subtle about the GOP's methods, just as there's nothing mysterious about Mr. Bush's modus operandi.  That's what makes it all so outrageous.

I spent the better part of a decade in Eastern Europe just after the fall of the Soviet Empire, and the question I kept asking myself was, how could people suspend disbelief for forty years? Because Sovietism was bolstered by the same truly artless party line the GOP has perfected.

Of course, there was a lot of heavy fire-power behind it, too. Which kind of explains it. 

And which only makes the Republican base's willingness to say, do, and believe whatever its leadership tells it to all the more disturbing, when you think about it. I mean, no one is forcing them to accept a clearly asinine interpretation of reality which goes against their own interests in the end.

That the GOP is more practiced at agitprop and their base more apt to accept it should surprise no one. As that recent study at UCLA showed, conservatives are just wired that way. "[L]iberals were 4.9 times as likely as conservatives to show activity in the brain circuits that deal with conflicts, and 2.2 times as likely to score in the top half of the distribution for accuracy [on the experimental task]."

Not surprisingly, the study's conclusions were not acceptable to conservatives, who either framed the findings as proof of their steadfastness and the flakiness of liberals, or argued that it was just the vast left-wing conspiracy at work. 

Conservative William Saletan at Slate, who challenged the findings, seems to think that being a conservative is all about being "fonder of old ways" than liberals, and thus avoiding "the blips and fads" liberals fall for. But liberalism is not fundamentally about following new fads and fashions any more than conservatism is about being old-fascist—oops, I mean old-fashioned.

Modern American liberalism is about individual freedoms, and a government that expands them by pooling some of our collective resources to enable all citizens to reach their full potential, thus contributing through self-actualization to the betterment of the whole. Public education. Public libraries. Resources for people who weren't born privileged enough to inherit them directly. And workers' rights.  And keeping big business in line. Oh, and the protection of civil liberties—everyone's, not just the haves' and have-mores'.

Those values aren't new-fangled at all—not a one of them. Most have been around since the founding of this nation, in fact. 

Conservatism is certainly not more "old-fashioned" than liberalism. There was no conservatism before liberalism, which has a long, illustrious history of its own.  Today's conservatives were yesterday's liberals, in fact, so don't get me started. 

The larger question that reactions to the MoveOn ad points to will linger for generations: it'll be left to historians in the future to figure out how such a weak and ineffectual personage as George W. Bush could actually lead the nation for nearly a decade, getting more or less what he wanted when he wanted it.

I have a feeling they'll find the answer the same place the GOP found those 23 votes today.