The response from the left should be an equally improvable provocative "facts". For instance; "Republicans use the Patriot Act to spy on Americans who have issues with the IRS. In fact, they have successfully prosecuted over 200 cases of tax evasion using phone tap data from NSA intercepts from American's to their attorneys.
The Administration knew of the British operation for four days prior. They knew that the Connecticut primary was going to be national news that reflected a growing wave of anti-GOP sentiment. So, forearmed with this national security knowledge, they primed the American "psyche" then linked their primer to an event memory using the emotion of fear. To "prime" is to bridge two unrelated ideas into one schema or cognition memory usually using strong emotions such as fear. The primer was "this proves that the Democratic Party has been taken over by extremists, who will allow America to be attacked by terrorists just like 9/11". The Administration (and the GOP, is Ken privy to ultra classified info?) did the primer knowing that an event had already happened, that would be an EPISODIC MEMEORY to a majority of Americans. With the primer in place and being repeated in every media outlet, then the election of Ned Lamont, then the "event" to form an episodic memory to link the primer to the event, a negative memory is solidified. This was a large scale brain washing of Americans using national security secrets for political gain. It is, for want of a better word, heinous.
This is the political reality of the United States 2006. We have an authoritarian political party that is amoral, and as such, will do or use anything it can to win an election. I believe, with a heavy heart, that those in the middle and left are now justified to pursue the some of the same kind of guerilla tactics. We must make the GOP so repugnant to fifty one percent of voters that the idea of a Republican Congress is tantamount to treason.
Ok, it is wrong to pursue rovian tatics. But what should our fight strategy be? Do we go close to the edge? What is the edge?