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Sir, We Must Not Allow a Contrarian Gap!!

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Coming hard upon the heels of Mickey Kaus’ unsuccessful effort to figure out a way in which the Democrats were responsible for the Foley incident (keep working, Mickey; I’m sure you’ll get there), John Dickerson manages to wrangle a way to excuse the Republican leadership while at the same time blaming Democrats (pre-emptively, to be sure) for stoking the fires of homophobia. In his column (There is a Way Democrats can go to Far), Dickerson writes:

The saga has too much political potential for them to allow that to happen. The narrative is far easier to understand than the Jack Abramoff scandal, and at least in the early rounds, the pressure has caused GOP leaders to point fingers at each other. But for this to become a brush fire may require courting homophobes to generate sustained and impenetrable outrage.

In other words, Democrats should back off of their attacks against a Party that embraces loathing of homosexuals for political gain because such attacks might be perceived as homophobic? I know that pre-emptive war is the big thing nowadays, but shouldn’t we wait until a single Democrat says something homophobic before we assail the party for “courting homophobes”?

This comes in the wake of Dickerson’s take on the Bob Woodward book, which might fairly be titled “Who does Woodward hurt more; Bush or America?” A passage:

As a policy matter, the book undermines Bush’s attempts to strengthen the national will for the long and drawn-out fight ahead. For the last year, the administration has been unsuccessfully trying to get the mix in the president’s public statements right: enough candor to show people Bush is aware of what’s really going on in Iraq but enough optimism to keep Americans behind the fight. “There is a clear distinction between having confidence in your strategy and that ultimate success is achievable while also recognizing it will be extremely difficult to get there,” says a senior White House official. “The president’s speeches during the last year have struck that balance. What was Churchill saying during the middle of the blitz—’have no fear, we’re losing and things won’t get better?’ Hell no; he was honest about the predicament, but confident that they would succeed. By no means am I saying the president is Churchillian, but there is a long history of war-time leaders being optimistic even during the darkest days.”

Dickerson’s been at Slate for over a year, but he’s only recently begun to annoy me. It seems that he’s decided that Slate doesn’t have enough Democrat-bashing contrarians. Always room for one more…

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