The Bat Is Back

The Bush attack ads have started, and Joe Trippi has responded in the best way we know how, with McBat.

McBat is aimed at raising $360,000 to knock Bush' silly "soft on terrorism" charge out of the park.

Feed the goal. The goal is beating Bush, not Gephardt.

As usual, Joe knows how to pitch. Do we still remember how to hit?

SWING...batter batter batter!

UPDATE (Aziz) - updated the sidebar... Matthew Yglesias takes on the new ads over at TAPPED:

In the context of a presidential campaign ad, it seems reasonable to assume that "some" refers to the people challenging Bush for control of the White House. But the Republicans can't very well come out and say that because the fact is that, of the Democratic contenders, precisely none is "attacking the president for attacking the terrorists," just as none is calling "for us to retreat." If the president wants to run on his foreign policy differences with the Democrats, then that's a perfectly legitimate campaign issue, but instead he's decided to run against a strawman. Naturally enough, the article doesn't bother discussing the ad's accuracy.

Perhaps even more disturbing, however, is the implication from RNC communications director Jim Dyke that the failures of the Bush Iraq policy should be blamed not on those who proposed and implemented the policy, but rather on those who opposed it, a tactic reminiscent of John Ashcroft's "aid and comfort to the terrorists" remark regarding opponents of the PATRIOT Act. This combination of scapegoats and strawmen makes it essentially impossible to have a rational debate about anything, and truly gives the lie to the alleged conservative enthusiasm for civility.