And now, a quick dispatch from the other side of the aisle, with this week’s ill-conceived metaphor alert: at the HuffPo, Amitai Etzioni writes, “Liberals: Take the gloves off”:
The looming defeat of a progressive health care bill is a much greater disaster than meets the eye. The right wing will learn, as they already surmised from previous skirmishes, that they can blow the Democrats out of the water. They will use the same smear tactics, emotional lies, and talk radio campaigns to defeat whatever other progressive moves of any significance are left on the diluted and impoverished Obama agenda. And they will further water down whatever laws have been passed, the weak cap and trade bill for instance. Moreover, the right wing will use the same tactics during the forthcoming mid-term elections, as a dry run for 2012. By that time they will have convinced the masses that Obama was born on Mars, is a Soviet agent, and will take away the people’s right to shoot each other.
The liberals in response have been lame beyond belief. They have set up web pages that clarify the facts and provide corrections to misinformation—as if this was some kind of scholarly debate and the right and its followers will yield to the kind of corrections editors of scientific publications are prone to make. Liberals have called for a “stable, quality care” system, a phrase which has less appeal than last week’s dish water. They favor “evidence based policies,” a term that may excite a handful of policy wonks in a handful of think tanks. And they have been “negotiating”: making grand concessions to the other side without getting anything in return, just to show how conciliatory, bipartisan, and reasonable liberals can be.
The time has come for liberals to take off their gloves.
They already did — just ask Kenneth Gladney.
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