One of our fine fellow posters up above said this: 'The Moveon add wasn't a rookie mistake, the rookie mistake was the Democrats weaseling away from it'.

If that wasn't a 'rookie' mistake, then we're in deeper shit than I thought. It wasn't the content of the ad, it was the tag 'Betrayus'. Which makes you think of 'Betray', which then takes you on to 'treason'.

So, we're saying this Gen. Petraeus is guilty of treason. He may be guilty of many things, but 'treason' is very hard to stick on anyone (and the points of the ad don't add up to 'treason').

That tag, IMO, takes all the shine off the rest of the ad & allows the Right Wing Jackasses to pitch a bitch fit about this unseemly, military-hating propaganda from the commie left.

There are enough hard hitting FACTS to club them over the head with (for the next decade or so), without resorting to 6th grade name calling. Since the media is about 80% in their pocket anyway, we have to be extra careful in our wording (not fair, but that's the lay of the land right now).

Bill Timberman said: 'No, we don't. General Petraeus may not have meant to betray anyone, but his willingness to act as a front for a malicious and failed policy, one which is destroying his own soldiers, not to mention hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, for no purpose other than his bosses' vanity, can nevertheless rightly be described as a betrayal of both his country and his oath.'

Yes we do. Because the media is not an objective partner, it is mostly controlled by our enemies & it will allow them to change the conversation, if we give them an easy opening to do so (like 'Betrayus').

Let the ad viewer come to the conclusion that Gen. Petraeus is betraying us. Cite the stats & the General's misleading/false spin & they (media, not the viewer) will have to acknowledge that (because that will be the sum total of the ad).

When you chuck in the Betrayus jibe, you handed them something they could jabber about & thus NOT jabber about the ad's content.

Kitt posted this (snipped some of it, it got repetitious): '"Seasoned" Senators, Congresspeople, and pundits of the Republican bent have called many, many current and former soldiers and Marines Treasonous. The latest - as of this writing - being Rush Limbaugh calling all soldiers and Marines who oppose the Administration's direction regarding the Iraq Occupation "phony soldiers".'

Maybe you haven't noticed, but we're not working with a level playing field when it comes to leftwing snark vs. rightwing snark. You may look to my response to Mr. Timberman up above for some omre analysis on this.

However, I would like to illustrate my views here with a little history lesson: A couple hundred years ago the American Indians were locked in a struggle with European settlers. The indians were never able to ascertain the type of battle they were in or the true nature of their enemies.

The settlers would massacre some indians & then the indians would massacre some settlers (basically the same kind of tit-for-tat warfare the tribes had engaged in for hundreds of years). Problem was, whenever the indians would have a retaliatory attack, rather than settling the score (in an eye-for-eye way) their attack would produce many more attacks by the even-more-determined settlers.

The indians NEVER seemed to realize that in the settler's media (i.e. newspapers & broadsheets), the massacre committed against them would NEVER GET PUBLISHED, and their retaliatory strike would be INCESSENTLY YAMMERED ABOUT. Thus the poor indians never realized that there was a non-military aspect to their fight against the settlers & that they needed to be more circumspect when retaliating, because the truth of the who was killing who & who did it first would never get to the populace at large.

The same thing is happening here. We are the Indians. The rightwing assholes are the settlers. Most of the slanderous attacks by them don't get the media airplay. All of ours do. Therefore, it would behoove us to stick solely to the facts (of which there are many, many that illustrate our points), and leave out the name calling.

Aren't you sophisticated enough to see that? Hit them with all the evil things they have done, but leave it to the viewer of the ad to come to the decision that they are evil, else the RWNM will change the subject EVERY FUCKING SINGLE TIME.

Kitt asked: 'Are the Democratic Congress and their constituents as shut out of the debate as the Indians were?'

How long has the chattering class been wailing about 'Betrayus'? Since the ad came out. We're as shut out when we assume we can be as snarky as some of their hit people are (because we can't).

It's like when you get a chance to ask Bush a question & you have the hardhitting question you should really want him to answer, yet you also throw in a secondary question too(I'm sure you have seen that in action).

He (and he's not the only one) will take your golden parachute & answer or dissemble on the throw-away question & in process ignore the question you really wanted answered (or that you really wanted him to lie about). That's what the 'Betrayus' jibe did, it allows them to get ignore the substance & focus on the snark.

I know it infuriates you (it infuriates me as well), but our side can't spout off in this media climate like the other side can. We are trying to appeal to potential voters. That's a special subset of the electorate-at-large and that subset (IMO) is more conservative than every citizen in U.S. age 18 or older.

By the way, what is a 'concern troll'?