Defending the Moose

I will go on record as defending the Bull Moose. He was attacked over at dKos for his comments after House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi. Don't get me wrong, I am all in favor of getting out of Iraq by the end of 2006. However, I feel that the Moose was taken out of context. I don't see him calling Congressman John Murtha a coward anywhere in his quote yet Kos says he did. I join the New Donkey in defending the Bull Moose.

What did the Moose do to earn this extensive abuse? He provided a short quote to the Washington Post commenting on the likely Republican treatment of Nancy Pelosi's Iraq statement the other day, the point being that the timing of the statement reinforced the White House's effort to frame the Iraq debate as offering a Manichean choice between victory or immediate withdrawal. The Post reporter, sensing an opportunity to make some trouble, tracked down David Sirota and read him the quote, and Sirota dutifully called Marshall an "insulated elitist" who was stabbing the Democratic Party in the back.

I saw Good Night and Good Luck and Marshall Wittman is no Joe McCarthy.

The New Donkey gives us a brief background on Marshall's history and why the DLC employs him.

I don't expect Armando to know that much about Marshall Wittmann's history, but I certainly do. He was a conservative intellectual and activist in the 90s who got to see people like Rove, DeLay, Reed, Abramoff, Norquist, Gingrich, Bush I and Bush II, up real close, and got very sick of what his party was becoming, and started saying so publicly. He was a key figure in John McCain's 2000 effort to take the GOP away from the K Street/theocon crowd, and became if not Public Enemy Number One, then certainly on everybody's enemies list. He was shown the door at two conservative think tanks for his heresies, and finally, when his hero McCain decided to make at least partial peace with the Power Crowd, he walked.