I placed myself on a Republican mailing list some time ago because I wanted to see the sort of crap they were selling their base.
Today in my Email box I got a particularly succulent piece of tripe, signed by RNC chairman Ken Mehlman, who clearly has taken George Bush's State of the Union call for an end to partisanship as seriously as George Bush has.
Excerpted text and commentary on the flip.
This week, liberal Democrat Russ Feingold called on the Senate to censure the President for a program that is successfully stopping terrorists. After months of searching, Democrat leaders are finally beginning to find their agenda: take away the tools America needs to fight terror. In the last 24 hours, fringe groups like MoveOn.org and Democrat leaders from John Kerry to Harry Reid to Dick Durbin have rallied to Feingold's side, praising his grandstanding as a "catalyst" for the investigation of the President.
Weakening our national security is their agenda. Is it yours? Sign the petition to tell the Democrat leaders to stop undermining the War on Terror with cheap political stunts.
We are a nation at war. Our President has no more basic responsibility than to protect the American people and fight terrorists who want to kill us. It's one thing if a lone Senator wants our government to look the other way when an Al Qaeda terrorist contacts a sleeper cell inside the United States. It's entirely another when Democrat minority leader Harry Reid commends Feingold's censure move for "bringing [the terrorist surveillance program] to the attention of the American people."
So. According to Ken Mehlman, Democrats want to support terrorists and undermine national security. In the world Ken Mehlman would have us envisioned, Democrats are meeting in some secret lair with black robes, plotting the demise of the United States of America and singing the praises of Osama bin Laden.
I don't know what's more disturbing. Is it:
- The fact that Howard Dean gets pilloried for far less obscenely stupid commentary while his counterpart in the Republican Party gets a free pass?
- The fact that Ken Mehlman sends this crap to his base?
- The fact that his base seems all too willing to swallow this codswallop uncritically?
- That the leadership of the Republican Party can decry "cheap political stunts" of the Democrats in the course of making cheap political stunts that put anything the Dems have done to shame?
- That the leadership of the Republican Party is what it accuses the Democrats of being: more interested in political gain than in the future of our country?
Is this the state of politics in America today, where Republicans can make these kinds of outrageous accusations against their political enemies and they go unanswered, unchallenged - un/mocked/, as statements this absurdly outrageous deserve to be?
And where are the Democrats to respond to this, to slap Ken Mehlman down, to make him the laughingstock he so richly deserves to be?