Maher and Me

At OneGoodMove, there's an excellent clip of Bill Maher being interviewed on Hardball. About Bush's 9/11 speech, Maher says: He tried to jam down our throats one more time that the war on terror is about the war in Iraq. And I think most Americans have heard that...we listened to the speech and we said, "You know what? We get it. That's your opinion. You think the war on terror is the war in Iraq. We've made a judgement: it's not. So, shut up about it. I watched this clip the morning after I wrote about the rhetorical incompetence of most liberals (including me), stemming from our reliance on reason. Lo and behold, Maher makes a similar point that the opposition to Bush just isn't encapsulating its view percussively enough: They (ie, the Democrats) have all the facts on their side. All they would really have to say to the American people is the Republicans chose to fight the wrong war, and then they lost it. They lost the war. How about that? The interviewer then opines: The Democrats can't make a case based on the facts. The Republicans don't need the facts. ... Despite everything you say being true, perhaps. Everything could be objectively true about the case being misled for war, and how they didn't have the facts about anything right, and yet the people, half of them, are ready to vote Republican now. What's it say about the Dems? What's it say about the Republican case?" Then Maher again makes a case very similar to my vented frustration yesterday: The Democrats do not know how to fight back to the fear argument. The Republicans keep winning the elections based on the idea that there is a werewolf out there in the woods, and we're the only ones who have a silver bullet. If you don't go along with their idea that indefinitely occupying the country of Iraq is the way to fight terror, then you're one of the Al Qaeda 'types' ... But the Democrats don't seem to know how to make that counter-argument, and say to the American people, "You know, we're patriotic too. We want to fight the war on terror, but we just don't think this is the right way to do it." ..