« Raging Grannies Prove That Hippies Aren't Getting Any Younger | Main | Howard Dean Exorcism Goes Poorly »
August 13, 2005
NARAL Ad Shows Liberals Have Yet to Reach Bottom
Posted by Dave Blount at August 13, 2005 7:04 PM
When I heard that even Lanny Davis — the poor guy who logged about 10,000 hours on cable news flacking for Bill Clinton during his impeachment — had condemned the cartoonishly demagogic NARAL ad accusing John Roberts of complicity in acts of violence against abortion clinics, I thought: here it is at last — the bottom. There had to be a bottom, a point below which liberals simply would not go. At last we had found it. Not only was the ad pulled off the air, David Seldin, NARAL's director of communications, left his job with a clearly visible shoeprint on the seat of his pants.
A true milestone, I wistfully thought. From here, maybe Democrats could turn around and start moving toward honor and self-respect. Maybe we could one day have two legitimate parties again, so I won't have to worry about being forced to vote for someone like John McCain.
My naive daydreams came crashing to earth when I read the Washington Post's take on the NARAL story. It seems Davis is the exception, and liberals' search for the moral equivalent of zero degrees Kelvin continues.
"Has the opposition lost its nerve?" WaPo asked. My jaw dropped when I realized they were pushing the idea that NARAL's preposterous calumnies should never have been withdrawn. (I'm not going to get into why the NARAL ad was outrageous. By now you already know. If not, Power Line's summary is as good as any.)
The Post then went on to huff righteously that Republicans never backed away from the Swiftboat Vets' allegations regarding the phoniness of John Kerry's loudly touted war hero status. The obvious difference — that the NARAL ad was indisputably false and the Vets' allegations weren't — was pointedly not acknowledged.
"Republicans don't mind running an ad that's entirely false, but Democrats have never learned, and I'm not sure many of them want to learn, how to play that kind of politics," opined Robert Shrum — who is to Karl Rove what Al Franken is to Rush Limbaugh. The ad had to be pulled because "they weren't getting support from any substantial quarter."
The fact that the ad was vicious and false was not seen as relevant by either Shrum or the Post.
Democratic strategist Chris Lehane said the NARAL ad "was great, and exactly the type of offensive that breaks through in the modern age."
Displaying the Left's remarkable talent for moral equivalence, WaPo then compared Karl Rove's pointing out the obvious fact that liberals don't exactly have their heart in the War on Terror with Dick Durbin's comparison of US troops with genocidal Nazis and communists. Rove didn't apologize (why on earth would he?), whereas Durbin supposedly did (whether it was really an apology is debatable; mainly he blubbered like a baby in an attempt to portray himself as a victim). Without a hint of irony, the Compost attempted to spin this as evidence that Republicans won't play nice like Democrats.
While Lanny Davis shows some awareness of the reality out there beyond leftist rhetoric, other Democrats cling desperately to the empty and increasingly absurd snobbery that has to serve their party in the place of self-respect.
"The problem is our politically impractical insistence on always residing on the moral high ground," sniffed Kerry advisor Jim Jordan. "A large part of our ethos goes to what we perceive to be moral superiority and the sad truth is in politics that's sometimes inconvenient."
A more radical disconnect from reality would be difficult to imagine.
But I have faith. There is a bottom; once liberals hit it, they will wake up and realize what they have let themselves become, they will jettison some of the vile individuals who have come to dominate the Democratic Party, and they will work to recover the respect they have lost. The bottom is there, they just haven't reached it yet.
