As Ronald Reagan once said, "There you go again."
I dream of a day when we will stop falling into the Rove traps. We have been handed evidence that this administration is allowing the Taliban to regroup in Pakistan and rather than attack, we just let it go and stay on the defensive, trying to prove a negative about Clinton or playing right into the Presidents framing of the debate on Guantanimo. The president is just sitting there! He's like a bunny, and we've got these claws, and he keeps shaking his poofy tail and we keep getting distracted.
We must stop letting them reframe the debate and change the issues from the bully pulpit.
Watch Republican pundits on T.V. Yes I know it is stomach turning, and I know it's hard not to throw things, but watch what they do. They frame the debate. They don't respond, they ignore whatever the topic is at hand and attack. While this is a horrible strategy for foriegn policy, it is how you win at politics.
We were handed, on a national news broadcast, information that Pakistan is giving the Taliban a free training ground area on the border of Afghanistan and what is on the front page here and on every national news program is that a mini-series is misrepresenting what happened 10 years ago.
WAKE UP! It plays into their hands to turn the debate to Clinton and not talk about Bush. Yes I understand that is the point of why we must fight to stop this broadcast, but we also must push to get current information out and front and center. If we can't change the mini-series, at least let's have every pundit and every letter we send include what Bush not only did wrong then, but is doing wrong now.
It is no coincidence that Bush gave a rare afternoon speech about moving high profile prisoners to Gitmo the day this story ran. He interupted the news cycle and got it off the front page.
We need to put it back on the front page. We need to stop playing defense and take the questions to Bush. Otherwise, Karl Rove has shaken the poofy tail and whitewashed over yet another administration failure thanks to our short attention span.