The folks who couldn't terror straight

* calipendence:

"Also, Thom Hartmann on his morning show has lately been noting that the Republican talking points have very noticeably dropped back from making an issue of saying that "voting in Democrats will be a vote to impeach Bush". He figures their pullback on this is that they now realize that them noting this might actually cause them to lose more votes than they'd gain because more people in America are starting to favor impeachment now. Now if the Dems would just discover that this being a losing issue for them really translates to it being a winning issue for the Democrats this fall! "

indeed - that was a very weird time when they kept yelling IMPEACHMENT - I couldnt work it out then. It certainly seemed like an odd strategy - and it seemed as though it was a GOTV effort for the Dems. Perhaps we were right - let's hope they did a fair bit of damage to their own efforts at the time.

* norquist via tpmm:

""McCain has misused his chairmanship of the Indian Affairs committee for two years to attack me and Ralph Reed because he thinks we beat him in South Carolina," Norquist said, referring to McCain's primary battle for the presidency. "He has told people I personally spent $12 million to defeat him in South Carolina. He is delusional[.]""

more grover here

* if you wanna watch the right become unhinged re the NYT - see malkin

* bill oreilly called the Sears Errorists "The folks who couldn't terror straight"

* glenn:

"That is significant because a willingness to ignore waves of evidence and assert plainly false facts that they want to believe are true is -- as I have argued many times before -- the predominant mental attribute that has governed our country over the last five years. It is that corrupt dynamic that explains how things are going really well in Iraq; how Saddam really did have WMDs when we invaded; how the chaos and anarchy in Iraq is the fault (and invention) of the news media; how Saddam personally participated in the 9/11 attacks; how terrorists did not know before the New York Times story in December, 2005 that we were trying to eavesdrop on their telephone calls; how terrorists did not know before this weekend that we were trying to monitor their bank transactions; how Bush is really popular and most of the country agrees with him and that data to the contrary is due to flawed and biased polls, etc. A desire for a fact to be true is sufficient to embrace it as true, even with no evidence that it is, and even in the face of abundant evidence that it is false."

* soto:

"Moving away from an incompetence-based defense and towards the more sinister explanation helps explain why supposedly smart people, with years of experience at the top levels of government, can make so many “mistakes” in less than five years. But adopting this line of thinking also inevitably leads one to the most disturbing possibility, if not reality: that 9/11 was the result of outright negligence at best and treason at worst.

I have come to agree with Lakoff on this line of thinking. I think it is far better for Democrats to frame the fall campaign against the Bush Administration not on incompetence, but simply on the message that this string of “mistakes” are by design, and reflect a governing philosophy carried out by people who dislike government, are in it for themselves and their friends, and who don’t give a damn about people who aren't like them."