The MoveOn ScrewUp

Washington Post:

A few weeks before Army Gen. David H. Petraeus's much-anticipated testimony on Iraq, the leadership of MoveOn.org, the Internet-based liberal group that has rallied its 3 million members around the country to oppose the war, decided on a change in strategy.

Rather than making another appeal to moderate Republicans to join Senate Democrats in passing an antiwar resolution, they would take on the credibility of Petraeus himself. Their weapon, they decided in conjunction with Fenton Communications, its Washington-based public relations firm, would be an ad in the New York Times that provocatively played off his name with this question in large letters: "General Petraeus or General Betray Us?"

Yesterday, an organization so small its 17 employees don't even have a central office, found itself under attack by not only President Bush, who said the ad was "disgusting," but also by the Democratic-controlled Senate, which passed a resolution 72 to 25 expressing its own outrage. Many Democrats blamed the group for giving moderate Republicans a ready excuse for staying with Bush and for giving Bush and his supporters a way to divert attention away from the war.

In an e-mail to its members last night, the group acknowledged that the content of the ad might have angered its allies but argued that a larger issue is at stake. "Maybe you liked our General Petraeus ad. Maybe you thought the language went too far," they wrote. "But make no mistake: this is much bigger than one ad."

And it turned its criticism squarely back on the Senate, accusing it of "spending time cracking down on a newspaper ad" after failing on Wednesday to pass a bill lengthening the home leaves of U.S. troops fighting in Iraq, a bipartisan measure that some regarded as pressuring Bush into limiting the redeployment of U.S. forces.

Many Democratic strategists were privately furious at the group for launching an attack on a member of the military rather than Bush, arguing that it gave Republicans a point on which to attack the Democrats and to rally around the administration's war policy. The displeasure underscores the uneasy alliance between MoveOn and the party. MoveOn, after its rather guerrilla start, has increasingly become part of the Democratic establishment in Washington. It has donated money and lent its Washington director, Thomas Mattzie, to a coalition of liberal groups with major funding from wealthy donors that organizes in an office on K Street to promote opposition to the war.

The group's conference calls often include aides to House and Senate Democratic leaders, and executive director Eli Pariser and Mattzie have also had meetings with some of the party's 2008 presidential candidates, although MoveOn is not likely to endorse in the primary process. Sen. Barack Obama (Ill.) and former vice president Al Gore have spoken at MoveOn events.

But, Pariser said: "We're not accountable ultimately to the Democrats. We're accountable to people who want a swift end to the war, and that's the end goal here."

...

It is interesting that a group dedicated to losing a war is in fact losing itself. Its group has always consisted of people who have confused insults with logic and it is only fitting that the logical conclusion to that kind of fight is a rejection of its insult against an honorable man. They have done more t rally opposition against their cause than any of the groups who oppose them.

What they have done is gotten people to focus on the venality of the group which postures itself as righteous. The arrogance of the phony anti war left has always been apparent to me. That is why I often call them anti war pukes. Not enough people yet have focused on their phoniness. If you are going to be anti war, you can't be just against one side of a war. If they were honestly anti war they would be against the enemy too, but you want see any ads criticizing even the war crimes of the enemy.

Lately, they have begun to find genocide by the enemy as an acceptable price for losing. Clearly killing does not bother them. Mass murder does not bother them. What bothers them is the US fighting back against the killers. MoveOn is completely unworthy of any respect. Now more people are beginning to see them for the odious operation that they represent.