Let Loose the Dogs of War

"Cry Havoc, and let loose the dogs of war" -- Shakespeare

NEVER CALL OFF THE DOGS

Barack Obama's campaign manager, David Plouffe, wasted no time in attempting to rally Obama supporters to respond to the vicious attacks by the foaming-at-the-mouth rabid dogs who treated us to non-stop sarcasm, condescension, and juvenile insults at the Republican convention last night. His email to supporters took issue with the speakers' attempts to demean and discount Obama's achievements, and even snobbishly suggested that the job of community organizers is somehow undignified, worthless, and beneath a "real" public servant.

"I saw John McCain's attack squad of negative, cynical politicians. They lied about Barack Obama and Joe Biden, and they attacked you for being a part of this campaign.

But worst of all -- and this deserves to be noted -- they insulted the very idea that ordinary people have a role to play in our political process.

Both Rudy Giuliani and Sarah Palin specifically mocked Barack's experience as a community organizer on the South Side of Chicago more than two decades ago, where he worked with people who had lost jobs and been left behind when the local steel plants closed.

Let's clarify something for them right now.

Community organizing is how ordinary people respond to out-of-touch politicians and their failed policies." ...

Throughout our history, ordinary people have made good on America's promise by organizing for change from the bottom up. Community organizing is the foundation of the civil rights movement, the women's suffrage movement, labor rights, and the 40-hour workweek. ...

It's now clear that John McCain's campaign has decided that desperate lies and personal attacks -- on Barack Obama and on you -- are the only way they can earn a third term for the Bush policies that McCain has supported more than 90 percent of the time.

Enough is enough.

Between the disingenuous, hypocritical rhetoric of Mitt Romney, the shameful self-righteousness and mockery of Rudi Giuliani, and the arrogant snark, insults, and cynicism of a smirking Sarah Palin, the convention hall bore less resemblance to a positive political gathering than to Orwell's "Two Minutes Hate," in which all good patriots were compelled to gather together each day to watch propaganda videos of Goldstein, a hated subversive "Enemy of the People," on ubiquitous TV screens.

Orwell:

"He was the primal traitor, the earliest defiler of the Party's purity. All subsequent crimes against the Party, all treacheries, acts of sabotage, heresies, deviations, sprang directly out of his teaching. ... an attack so exaggerated and perverse that a child should have been able to see through it, and yet just plausible enough to fill one with an alarmed feeling that other people, less level-headed than oneself, might be taken in by it."

McCain:

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