I'll open this diary with an insightful comment by Jeffrey Feldman:
Stop dumping on MoveOn
This is not about MoveOn. The right-wing has been accusing progressives of treason, hating the troops and wanting the terrorists to win for the past 6 years. They do it no matter how we word our ads.
The goal of the right-wing is to silence debate--compliance, obedience. We need to stop thinking that their whining and moaning about what we say is about the "wording." It's not. They don't give a crap what we say. Whatever's in our ads, if it gets airtime, they come at us like we're an enemy invasion.
Don't help them by turning on MoveOn. They perform an invaluable service and need our support--even more so in these moments when the right is foaming at the mouth and using the full-weight of their media ownership to try to intimidate us.
Head over there and give him some love, then come back over here.
His comment says it exactly. No matter what we do or say, we will get attacked. For the past 6 years, we've been assaulted by coordinated attacks in print, television and radio. It doesn't matter what wording we use, it doesn't matter what font type, what size, what cartoons, nothing.
What does that mean?
It means, as Feldman said, that it's not about the wording. It never has been and never will be about our words. It's about us.
We are not slaves to the President's policies. We fight against them.
We are not obedient little soldiers participating in his warmongering. We actively work against it.
We do not blindly accept and believe whatever he says or whatever his media drones say. We look for the real truth.
We represent a threat to the President and to the neo-con movement: free-thinking and critical minds finding our own political paths.
So, it doesn't matter what we say or how we say it, because that is irrelevant to their attacks. They will always accuse us of being terrorist sympathizers, or of hating America and the troops, or of crassly turning events into political gains.
If MoveOn -- instead of "BetrayUs" -- had written an insightful argument against the war and included all sorts of facts (like many suggest they should have), the right would have accused us of manipulating data to serve crass political agendas because we hate the troops.
It doesn't matter if they accuse us of truthful things or blatantly false things. As long as they repeat it often enough through their coordinated media fronts, it becomes commonly-held truth to their already fanatically loyal followers and to those who simply don't know how badly they're being shafted by the media. The Right rejects reality and substitutes their own, friendlier "reality" and then simply pretends their reality has always been.
All this internal debate about "They should have been nicer" or "They shouldn't have been so juvenile" is irrelevant and detracts from what's really important here, especially when people conflate the MoveOn ad with calling Petreaus a traitor, which was not in the ad.
The real story here is just how frantically we were assaulted by all corners of Traditional Media after the ad ran. When pundits compare leftist bloggers to Osama bin Laden, nary a peep. When an internet movement takes out an ad in a newspaper, it's a medai blitz with 24 hour coverage and scrawling updates, courtesy of your friends at Fox News.
That is the real story. Everything we do is scrutinized, criticized, and then demonized. The wording we use in anything doesn't matter to them, all that matters is that they destroy our messages.
They are not interested in debate, they don't want to defend their positions. You can't defend the indefensible. They're not interested in calm, rational debate or a respectful exchange of ideas. If we speak, they attack. It's that simple. We can bring all the facts on earth to the debate and they'll just scream that we hate the troops. Then they'll repeat that over and over, on every outlet they have because that, to them, is all that matters.
Facts don't matter.
Logical arguments don't matter.
Reality doesn't matter.
All that matters is that we've dared speak against their precious leader, and for that grave offense, we must pay.
Stop doing their work for them. Stop buying into their talking point of "the ad was mean." They don't care if it's mean, all they care about is that we spoke up and maybe some people saw it.
MoveOn is a wonderful ally to the progressive movement, yet some on DailyKos have chosen to take the side of Republican talking points instead. It's shameful, and it makes no sense because the Republicans don't give a shit what we say.
All they care about is that we are saying something.
And that simply won't do.