They actually reached code red a long time ago.
Here’s some video of code red at a Karl Rove book signing in Los Angeles on Monday:
Much to my dismay, after watching this I had to side with Rove. It’s hard to throw in with angry, red faced lunatics no matter what they’re saying. It’s hard for me to throw in with them, but I fear that it’s not hard for everyone. You wanna know who posted this video on youtube? Well, several people posted it, but the copy that I embedded was posted by Michael Moore. Given that Michael Moore has been prone to this type of behavior, I took his posting of this video as an implicit endorsement of the behavior contained in this video.
In my opinion, condoning this type of behavior, implicitly or otherwise hurts the message. It turns the conversation away from the facts and moves the focus to the tactics. Karl Rove’s response to what code pink did, “…this goes to show the totalitarianism of the left.” was 100% correct. There’s no arguing against the point that he made, given what everyone witnessed. They managed to turn a calculating liar into a victim. Nice job code pink. Not only didn’t anyone hear what you have to say, but you managed to make anyone else that says it into a whacko.
They should have made an attempt at civilized discourse. Ask him a question and then politely wait for him to answer it before asking the next question. I’ve watched Karl Rove twist himself into a pretzel trying to “explain” the enormous amounts of evidence against him and the Bush administration. It’s not pretty, and he’s not very good at it. He does very well when confronted by angry people. As you saw in the video, he had to summarily dismiss the downing street memos. How much more effective would progressives have been if they then followed up by asking him about Lawrence Wilkerson’s account of the Colin Powell speech, making the case for the US to go into Iraq? And then a follow up question about General Eric Shinseki’s dismissal? How many sources do you think Karl Rove would have to dismiss before sounding like a jackass? Don’t you think that would have been a more effective approach? It would have made Karl Rove the subject of the reporting. What we ended up with was yet another story about crazy extremists.
It’s a slippery slope to extremism. People don’t start off as extremists. It’s something that happens slowly over time so that people don’t realize that they’re becoming radicalized. It starts by condoning crap like this.
Don’t let yourself fall into that trap. Republicans have boxed themselves in by doing the very same thing with the tea party racists. It’s not possible to speak out against the tea partiers while remaining silent about code pink without being a hypocrite.
You have to denounce this from the inside if you have any hope of stopping it. You don’t have to support everyone that agrees with you. So go out there and comment and denounce from the rational left! Let the right deal with their own crazy. If they dismantle it on their side, then good for us! If they don’t, we need to trust that cooler heads will prevail.
