Surrender Does Not Work. Just Ask Pres. Kerry

If you think Democrats in Washington are on high alert and in rapid-response mode, readied for the inevitable barrage of Republican Swiftboat attacks, think again. The sad fact is the GOP successfully deployed just such a campaign this month right under their noses, and the Dems fell for it, folding their tents at the Republicans’ first suggestion that they are anti-military.

The smear campaign had the standard Swiftboat profile — a concerted, tightly scripted roll out of disinformation designed to discredit an otherwise credible opponent. But maybe the Dems didn’t recognize the attack as Swiftboating, per se, because the target was not a person. It was a newspaper ad published Moveon.org.

Sure, the opportunity fell into the Republicans’ laps, but their rapid-response seized the moment, turned it around and eventually won the day. (Meanwhile our rapid response team is still hiding under the bed.)

The GOP had its talking points together within a few hours. They slammed Moveon for having the temerity to criticize the general, thus shutting off discussion of the charges they’d made against him. If liberals criticize uniformed officers, the talking points said, it proves they disrespect the troops.

In reality of course, criticizing Petraeus proves nothing of the sort. He was sent to Capitol Hill as Bush’s political proxy to defend the president’s policies in Iraq, because Bush is too weak politically to defend them himself. To suggest that Bush’s surrogate can’t be criticized, or that this military man performing an unprecedented political role is emblematic of the entire military is a ridiculous attempt to close off debate.

Ridiculous or not, it worked.

What the Ad Actually Says

It’s the headline — “General Petraeus or General Betray Us? Cooking the books for the White House” — that has gotten all the attention, but the text of the ad contained very serious and well-substantiated charges against Petraeus:

General Petraeus is a military man constantly at war with the facts. In 2004, just before the election, he said there was “tangible progress” in Iraq and that “Iraqi leaders are stepping forward.”

And last week Petraeus, the architect of the escalation of troops in Iraq , said “We say we have achieved progress, and we are obviously going to do everything we can to build on that progress.”

Every independent report on the ground situation in Iraq shows that the surge strategy has failed.

Yet the General claims a reduction in violence. That’s because, according to the New York Times, the Pentagon has adopted a bizarre formula for keeping tabs on violence. For example, deaths by car bombs don’t count.

The Washington Post reported that assassinations only count if you’re shot in the back of the head — not the front.

According to news reports, there have been more civilian deaths and more American soldier deaths in the past three months than in any other summer we’ve been there.

We’ll hear of neighborhoods where violence has decreased. But we won’t hear that those neighborhoods have been ethnically cleansed.

Most importantly, General Petraeus will not admit what everyone knows; Iraq is mired in an unwinnable religious civil war.

We may hear of a plan to withdraw a few thousand American troops.

But we won’t hear what Americans are desperate to hear: a timetable for withdrawing all our troops. General Petraeus has actually said American troops will need to stay in Iraq for as long as ten years.

Today before Congress and before the American people, General Petraeus is likely to become General Betray Us.

As noted, the Republicans made no effort to dispute these assertions — probably because they couldn’t. All these charges are rigorously sourced on the Moveon.org website.

The ad’s predictions about Petraeus’ testimony also proved to be correct. As Bill Curry at Huffington Post put it, the general’s performance was right out of “Karl Rove’s White House Iraq Group playbook”:

Craft sentences that imply more than they say. Deliver them with conviction. When found out, reveal the artful parsing that proves you never said what everyone heard.

The Swiftboat Campaign

The ad ran in the New York Times on Sept. 11, the day of Petraeus’ testimony in the House and, of course, the sixth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. (Why Speaker Pelosi permitted this scheduling and its subliminal connection between Iraq and the 9/11 attacks is another question.)

Political junkies outside the Beltway first heard about the ad on C-SPAN’s “Washington Journal” early that morning, but the first real rumbling came during Petraeus’ testimony in the House, when Republicans used their Q&A time with the general to taunt the Dems about the ad.

Fox News quickly entered the fray, of course. Newshounds, the steely-stomached folks who monitor FNC so you don’t have to, filed this report:

I almost didn’t need to watch [Sean Hannity’s] show last night because I knew the ad would be the subject of at least one, probably two discussions. Any doubts were dispelled when I turned on one of the daytime FOX News shows only to find that the ad being discussed and then saw the subject again on the O’Reilly Factor. That may be more than the Iraq war has been discussed all year on the “real journalism” network.

And I could almost recite what Hannity was going to say. “I see a hero being slandered, an American war hero being slandered,” he declared grandiloquently. Then, of course, he proceeded to do exactly that to veterans John Kerry and John Murtha. For the zillionth time, chickenhawk Hannity distorted their criticisms of the Iraq war and either pretended that the two vets had been criticizing the troops or else was so willfully ignorant of the truth that his distortions amounted to actual malice.

Classic.

Three days after the ad ran, GOP frontrunner Rudolph Giuliani bought an ad in the Times in which he accused Hillary Clinton of a “character attack” against Petraeus in his Senate hearings when she said reading his progress report on Iraq required a “willing suspension of disbelief.”

On Thursday, just as the controversy was settling down, the president stepped up to deliver the coup de grace. He held an impromptu news conference on Thursday, at the end of which, by pre-arrangement, rightwing reporter Bill Sammon asked him about the ad. Dan Froomkin at the Washington Post describes how Bush used the question to decimate the Democrats, a move that would bring them to their knees in the Senate hours later:

“I thought that the ad was disgusting,” Bush told reporters. “I felt like the ad was an attack, not only on General Petraeus, but on the U.S. military. And I was disappointed that not more leaders in the Democrat [sic] Party spoke out strongly against that kind of ad.

“That leads me to come to this conclusion: that most Democrats are afraid of irritating a left-wing group like MoveOn.org — are more afraid of irritating them than they are of irritating the United States military.”

The White House had put together a prequel to his little scene earlier in the day. Froomkin reports that before Bush went out to meet real reporters, his staff staged a pep rally at the White House with members of his rightwing propaganda squad:

Not enough sycophants and enablers in the West Wing? Bush called in reinforcements yesterday, inviting a slew of conservative columnists to the Roosevelt Room for a 90-minute group grope in which he tried out a lot of the sound bytes he ended up using at today’s press conference…

Among the participants yesterday afternoon: Michael Barone (U.S. News), Tony Blankley (Washington Times), David Brooks (New York Times), Ron Kessler (NewsMax), Charles Krauthammer (Washington Post), Bill Kristol (Weekly Standard), Larry Kudlow (CNBC), Morton Kondracke (Roll Call), Kimberly Strassel (Wall Street Journal), Kathryn Lopez and Kate O’Beirne (National Review).

The Democrats Caved Within Hours

Taking a cue from Bush, the Republicans’ faux outrage over the ad moved to center stage in the Senate. John Cornyn of Texas introduced a shamefully written resolution that condemned the ad without mentioning it and was couched so that to oppose the amendment was to reveal oneself as anti-military. It read:

To express the sense of the Senate that General David H. Petraeus, Commanding General, Multi-National Force-Iraq, deserves the full support of the Senate and strongly condemn personal attacks on the honor and integrity of General Petraeus and all members of the United States Armed Forces.

Hard to vote against that — which may explain the fact that the vote was 75-25 in favor. Among the presidential candidates, Hillary Clinton, to her credit, and Chris Dodd voted against it, as did John Kerry. Less creditably, Barack Obama scooted out just in time not to be present during the roll call.

Democrats who caved included:

Max Baucus, Evan Bayh, Ben Cardin, Tom Carper, Bob Casey, Kent Conrad, Byron Dorgan, Dianne Feinstein, Tim Johnson, Amy Klobuchar, Herb Kohl, Mary Landrieu, Pat Leahy … Blanche Lincoln, Claire McCaskill, Barbara Mikulski, Ben Nelson, Bill Nelson, Mark Pryor, Ken Salazar, Jon Tester, and Jim Webb.

If past is prologue, we can predict the contours of how this shameful episode will play out. Events and revelations will reveal the general’s duplicity and, after a time, he will apologize for his role in misleading the country. As Bill Curry at Huffington Post put it:

Today he’s a Republican kitchen saint but when the truth catches up with him he’ll look like George Tenet, Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice and everyone else who disgraced themselves lying for Bush.

For the rest of us, the abject surrender by the Democratic leaders in this attack does not bode well. What is so difficult about defending fact-based truth against half-truths and lies? Did we learn nothing from 2004? Surrender is not an option — just ask Pres.
Kerry.

Deserve to Lose

In his new book, “The Age of Turbulence,” Alan Greenspan, the Republican former chairman of the Federal Reserve, writes that his party mishandled the economy so badly when they controlled Congress that they deserved to lose it last year.

If the Democrats can’t put up a better fight against the GOP’s fear and smear tactics than this, perhaps the same could be said about them in 2008.