Breitbart Rules of War: If You’re on Defense, You’re Losing – The G.O.-Tea Party Is on Defense, And Dem Polling Is Up

There’s a spoof of a training video at Conor Friedersdorf’s blog at True/Slant titled, “How to Argue with Andrew Breitbart,” in which animated characters trade tips on debating Breitbart, the latest phenom of right-wing racism — the guy behind the smearing of Shirley Sherrod and the bogus but effective destruction of the anti-poverty group, ACORN.

The video is funny, if a bit long, and the instructions go into a lot of specifics. “If Breitbart says ‘x,’ then whatever you do, don’t say ‘y.'” That sort of thing.

But I would say it’s a lot simpler than that. Breitbart is just the latest expositor of Lee Atwater-Karl Rove attack politics, the central precept of which is very simple: If you are on offense, you are winning. If you are on defense, you are losing. To stay on offense, attack, attack, attack, even when — especially when — you are wrong.

A shining example of Breitbart’s technique came on the day that the unedited version of the video of Shirley Sherrod’s speech came to light, and it became clear that Breitbart had screwed up, big time. But did Breitbart apologize for trashing the reputation of Sherrod, a civil rights pioneer from a family of movement leaders?

Of course not. After a moment of wavering during which he reflexively tried to blameshift — he said it was not he who deceptively edited the video but rather the unknown person who sent it to him — Breitbart and his minions attacked the White House for buying into their deceptive reporting on Sherrod’s speech.

Another excellent example is an ad produced by Rove that is running in Nevada in which he attacks Senate Majority Harry Reid, D-Nev., for not delivering enough stimulus money to Nevada — even though Rove vehemently opposed the stimulus. (Rove also lies in the ad, of course, about the level of stimulus spending in Nevada, stating in the ad that it was the lowest of any state, when in fact the level corresponded to Nevada’s population ranking.)

So that’s how it works: Attack, attack, attack. Never give an inch. This is what Republicans have been doing since Pres. Obama was inaugurated. It’s what underpins their “party of no” strategy in Congress, and it is the M.O. of the tea party phenomenon — it’s how they burst onto the scene during their summer of rage at the town hall meetings last year. Attack, attack, attack.

Last month, however, the worm began to turn, if only a little bit, when the entire cabal — tea baggers, their GOP overlords, the GOP propagandists at Fox News and even Mr. Breitbart — found themselves pushed back on their heels.

And guess what? The right wing’s defensive crouch appears to have produced a small blip in public approval for the Democrats. A week ago, a Gallup poll showed Democrats leading Republicans on the generic ballot for the first time this cycle. Now a second poll from Gallup finds Dems still in the lead, and Charlie Cook, a political analyst who is merciless in his prognostications for both Republicans and Democrats, suggests the trend may be moving in the Democrats’ favor:

For the weeks of July 12-18 and July 19-25, the Gallup Organization’s weekly aggregation of daily tracking polls showed Democrats ahead among all registered voters on the generic congressional ballot test question by 6 points (49 percent to 43 percent) and 4 points (48 percent to 44 percent), respectively…

Gallup noted that this was the first time that either party has held an advantage of this size for two consecutive weeks. In the 21 weeks that Gallup has asked the generic ballot test question this year, the two parties have averaged a tie.

So what is that has put the right wing on defense after 18 months of playing offense? For one thing, their incessant race baiting was exposed in ways that the legitimate media could not longer ignore it. For another, Republican leaders were shown to have nothing better to offer voters, should they regain control of the government, than the same old Bush polices that created the clusterfrack that caused current crises in the first place.

Using racism to excite its base is nothing new for the Republican Party — Nixon codified it in his highly successful “Southern strategy” that converted the old Confederacy into a GOP stronghold; Ronald Reagan launched his 1980 presidential bid in Philadelphia, Miss., which is famous only because it was the site of the lynching of three civil rights workers in 1964. But revelations in the last month or so — the race baiting campaigns by Fox News, with the help of Breitbart, against ACORN and Shirley Sherrod, and by Fox alone against the Obama Justice Department’s purported reverse racism in its handling of the New Black Panther Party case — smack of desperation.

In a remarkable development, Fox News Senior Vice President of News Michael Clemente was forced to admit that the network’s coverage of the Sherrod fiasco was strictly from amateur. “There was a breakdown in the system,” he said, “and it is being addressed.” “Breakdown?” Fox ran with the story after Sherrod was fired without doing Journalism 101 due diligence — without bothering to check the entire speech for context. If they had done what any J-school freshman would know to do, they would have seen they’d been had by Breitbart. Whether they would have run the story even if they’d known it was false is an open question.

Of course, lousy journalism from Fox and Breitbart is to be expected. They’re not journalists, they’re demagogues posing as journalists. What makes the Sherrod scandal an utter failure for them is that it exposed their incompetence, not as journalists, but as liars and propagandists. You’d never catch Karl Rove releasing an attack video without watching the entire thing from beginning to end.

Immediately before the Sherrod scandal broke, Mark Williams, the outgoing chairman of Tea Party Express — the group operated by Republican Party PR consultants Russo Marsh & Rogers that organized the three nationwide tea party bus tours — created a firestorm for Republicans by attacking the NAACP in a letter in which he used the term “Colored People” about a dozen times and attacked African Americans by accusing them of being lazy and not being able to think for themselves.

As a result, Tea Party Express was expelled by the Tea Party Federation. Then, in a late Friday news dump on July 23, Mark Williams quietly resigned from Tea Party Express, having announced earlier that he planned to devote all his time to stopping the construction of the Park 51 Islamic center in Manhattan’s Financial District.

The other factor that has the GO-Tea Party on its heels is that its policies are unpopular. It’s easy to stand on the side flinging monkey poo, but as the midterms approach, the party’s leaders have had to start saying what they would do if they win in November. Problem is, voters got a belly full of Republican policies — tax cuts for the wealthy; deregulation of food, water, energy and banking; and privatizing Social Security and Medicare — during the Bush era, and no one with any sense wants to try that nonsense again.

The Democratic National Committee mocked the Republicans’ attempt to sell recycled garbage last week when it released the Republican Tea Party Contract on America that mocked the Republicans failure to come up with practical solutions for resolving the crises their policies created.

Tea bagger candidates’ support of these same old Bush policies prevents them from taking advantage of “free media” because they have to duck interviews with legitimate reporters, who, unlike the cheerleaders on right-wing propaganda outlets, will ask them to defend their unpopular positions in favor of killing Social Security and Medicare and the rest. Kentucky tea bagger Rand Paul has been under complete radio silence for months — ever since he attacked the media for broadcasting interviews in which he stated his opposition to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Nevada’s Sharron Angle, the other leading-light tea bagger candidate, was caught on tape fleeing her own news conference, refusing to answer reporters’ questions.

But it’s not just GO Tea Party candidates who are on defense. Rep. Joe Barton, R-Texas, who would become the chairman of the House Energy Committee, caused the GOP House leadership no end of agita when he apologized to BP CEO Tony Hayward after the Obama administration forced BP to put its promises to pay for cleaning up after its oil disaster in writing.

And it’s unlikely voters are happy to learn that Republicans are planning to revise their McCarthyite Clinton-era strategy of investigating rather than governing — the low point of which had to have been when Oversight Committee Chairman Dan Burton, R-Ind., investigated the Clinton’s cat, Socks.

In May, Rep. Darrel Issa, R-Calif., who would take Burton’s old chair on Oversight, signaled that his goal as chairman would be to impeach Pres. Obama, not for any particular high crime or misdemeanor he was aware of, but — as with Clinton’s sex lie in a deposition for a civil lawsuit over a matter that allegedly occurred years before he was president — for whatever bogus pretext Issa’s committee can dig up. Issa has already sent plans for doubling the Oversight committee staff to Speaker-in-Waiting John “Orange Man” Boehner of Ohio.

And now Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., the loudest tea bagger in the House, has doubled down Issa’s persecution plan: “Oh, I think that’s all we should do,” Bachmann said on a right-wing propaganda radio show earlier this month. “I think that all we should do is issue subpoenas and have one hearing after another. And expose all the nonsense that is going on. And it’s very important when we come back that we have constitutional conservative leadership because the American people’s patience is about this big.”

It’s hard to imagine that sensible independent voters, even as unhappy as they may be with Democrats’ progress toward ending the Bush recession, really want to revive Bush economic policies and relive the endless persecutions of the Clinton era.

Emboldened by all this, it’s Democrats now who are on offense. Last week, New York Democratic Rep. Andrew Weiner delivered an impassioned pasting of House Republicans for killing a measure that would have helped 9/11 first responders. And earlier in July, Rep. Alan Grayson went to the House floor to decry the GOP’s stalling of unemployment benefits saying, “…I will say this to the Republicans who have blocked this bill now for months and kept food out of the mouths of children. I will say to them now, may God have mercy on your souls.”

Yes, it’s possible, even probable, that the uptick for the Democrats in the Gallup generic is a fluke. On the other hand, the polls may have tapped into something. The Democratic base is hungry for red meat, and maybe, just maybe, normal Americans are sick and tired of tea baggers’ constant complaining and whining without offering any practical alternatives for resolving the Bush recession and moving the country forward.

If Democrats are looking for another chance to keep the GO-Tea Party on its heels, there is a prime opportunity coming up on Thursday, August 12, when RNC Chairman Michael Steele is holding a fundraiser at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, in the heart of Beverly Hills, for which the featured speaker is none other Andrew Breitbart. Think about it: The RNC’s first African American chairman is hosting a fundraiser keynoted by the David Duke of new media.

Attack, attack, attack. It works for Democrats, too — and, even better, Dems don’t have to lie and use racism and fear to make their points.

Update: In a classic weekend news dump, the RNC announced that the Breitbart fundraiser had been canceled — yet more evidence that they are on defense.