Taking umbrage
Many Democratic leaders worry that Dean’s renewed insistence that the war was wrong could prove disastrous in a general election.
“There are a lot of Americans who are going to take umbrage with the argument that all those lives were lost in vain and it was in some manner a hoax,” said Will Marshall, president of the Progressive Policy Institute, a centrist Democratic think tank.
-from an L.A. Times story about the double-edged sword of criticizing Iraq
Yeah, people don’t like getting taken. But you would think they would be smart enough to take out their anger on the guy who took them, not the one who pointed out the swindle.
Killing the messenger is a common pasttime.
Average American is presented with two options:
A) You’re a citizen of the greatest nation ever! We should go kill people because we deserve it!
B) Your king lied to you and people died so that he and his friends could make even more money, when they already have more than you and everyone you know will ever have. You fell for it.
There’s a river in Egypt.
If message B) could be presented in a way that makes people feel even better about themselves than message A) there wouldn’t be any difficulty.
Yeah, making people feel good about admitting their own past error is a neat trick. Great religious prophets are usually pretty good at it, though to date they seem kind of few and far between on the national political scene.
As a body, people just aren’t that rational. It’s far easier to denigrate the person with the unpleasant message than it is to actually listen to them.
Very sad, but true, I think. Not, I hope, of me as an individual, but of the public at large.
Rather than angrily calling out Bush to answer for his lies (as the conservatives did to Clinton), I’d hope that today’s progressives could find a better way. For instance, why not start lobbying for U.N. involvement in Iraq peacekeeping. Mend fences. Salve egos. Don’t paint Bush as a divider — just give him an opportunity to demonstrate that and let his actions speak for themselves.
Give people the opportunity to be decent.
I personally would like to see a little more anger from progressives. It seems pretty clear to me that what the American public respects these days is strength. Nobody wants to “mend fences,” and those who do get steamrolled.