Umbrage Fatigue

Ed Gillispie must be chortling right now. Ed is Karl Rove’s replacement at the White House. He is not really Bush’s brain but more like his spleen. The recent manufactured outrage over the Moveon.Org ad is the wunderkind of modern political pugilism. The Senate actually took a vote yesterday to denounce the ad! And 22 Democrats had to vote with the Republicans to repudiate it.

With the relentless carnage and misery, political stalemate and low-grade civil war in Iraq, what is the most important issue at hand? Whether or not Moveon.Org’s ad was objectionable.

Ed knows that his job over the next 18 months is to divert attention from the Iraqi morass. Bush is going to hand over this fiasco to the next President. Ed’s and Republican “sound bite gotha” machine’s job is to fill up talk radio, cable news and internet blogs with any white noise that blocks out substantive discussion and debate about what are we going to do to extricate ourselves from Iraq.

It really is manufactured umbrage when I hear all these talking heads, bloggers, and right wing pundits picking on the Moveon.Org for taking on Gen. Petraeus. And tired umbrage at that!

This is a classic example of how the beltway DC bottom feeders get their panties bunched up over irrelevant crap. Accusations and then counter-accusations are all about a stupid newspaper ad. The news cycle feeds on it because it provides good one-liners and the pretense of conflict. All good for ratings and leads.

Bush and sycophants have given up on most of their unrealistic goals when they invaded Iraq. Fundamentally, the Iraq debate boils down to when and how we will leave. This vapid, false outrage over a newspaper ad is only a distraction. While Ed is chortling and Rush Limbaugh is branding Moveon.Org as a fellow traveler with Osama, Iraqis and American soldiers are dying.