"Altering" The Dems

This column by Jonathan Alter appeared in the Bucks County Courier Times today, partly because Patrick Murphy was featured prominently in it; though I think Steve Benen made good points in his response here, I think he was a bit too kind to Alter.

(I’m not going to offer a point-by-point response, but I’ll only say that Alter is doing some serious navel-gazing as opposed to screaming to get our people out of Iraq and calling for the executive branch of our government to start acting like adults and engage in ‘round-the-clock negotiations with all “involved parties,” something which everyone in this country should have been calling for by now - merely saying "Iraq is President Bush's war" is the typical "corporate-media-slap-with-the-wet-noodle" approach that is partly responsible for the miserable status quo).

Alter also uses the term “surrender monkeys” when describing the Dems, which is nothing more than Repug code, pure and simple; when used it in this fashion, it merely propagates their talking points (I’ll admit I used that describing Mitt Romney, who, based on this Atrios link, must be running for the president of Revlon instead of the President of the United States, but I felt I was being completely unambiguous about what I was trying to say, and for a good reason).

Besides, I’m sick of corporate media types like Alter dropping the Iraq war squarely into the laps of the Dems without even a hint of recognition that a Republican president was responsible for lying this country into war above everyone else (oh, as if it is supposed to be impolite for me to point that out for some reason – God, Doomsy, that’s soooo 2003 of you).

And it’s not as if Alter hasn’t gone out of his way to slam someone based on a misunderstanding before, as noted here.