It’s a shame we can’t have people like Digby working in the traditional media
We saw it with the ridiculous General Betrayus meltdown which caused the Democrats to pretty much give up Iraq as a political issue. From Whitewater to Monica Madness to Sore Lieberman to drone planes to Schiavo to amnesty and on and on. This is the most powerful weapon in their arsenal. They tie the Democrats up in knots, making them cautious and frightened, just like the exhausted mothers you see on the TV show “The Supernanny” who are completely at the mercy of the miscreant children who have total control over the household by threatening tantrums if they don’t get their way.
We just saw it with the shrieking case of the vapors over the stimulus bill, which I suspect is coming down exactly as the Republicans wanted it to come down — watered down by their hissy fit, passing with only three Republicans and setting them up with talking points for the next five years. But it passed because they wanted it to pass while inflicting as much damage as possible to the new president. (I have no doubt they could have held back Specter and peeled off a couple of Dems if they’d had the Big Boyz put the screws to them.)After all, if Obama effectively guides the country through the crisis, they are dead anyway. If he doesn’t, they can say they had no part of it.
America has always loved witch hunts, which is perhaps the ultimate fake outrage. They like to ritually punish a designated flouter of some moral or ethical value. They particularly like to do it when it is a common, human transgression so that they can hide their own hypocrisy. It’s a remnant of our puritan roots (which are also part of our conservative heritage.) But I don’t know that anyone has been as successful at marketing and selling this propensity for fake outrage as the modern Republican Party. It’s their operational principle.