Playing with puppets

He who pays the piper calls the tune....another one of those quaint old sayings that my dear old grandma used to say to me at odd (to my addled teen-aged brain) times. That saying came to mind as I was catching up on a week's worth of reading today.

In the Hell Hath No Fury sweepstakes, groups like MoveOn.org are gearing up to
take on a new set of perceived traitors in their midst--Democrats who have
acknowledged some success from the troop surge in Iraq.
Chief among the
targets is Washington Congressman Brian Baird, whose indiscretion was
recognizing progress on the ground, despite having initially opposed the surge
and having opposed the war in the first place. After a recent trip to Iraq, Mr.
Baird said: "One of the things that gets very little attention is that virtually
every other country I visited says it would be a mistake to pull out now."
We hope he took his flak jacket home from Baghdad. MoveOn is rolling out an
ad this week in Mr. Baird's Washington district, in which a former soldier tells
of being shot at in 2003 by the Iraqis he had fought to liberate and calls
America's continued presence in the country "wrong, immoral and irresponsible."
What does this have to do with the wisdom--or lack thereof--of the current
strategy? Nada, which tells you something about MoveOn's honesty.
The group doesn't aim to engage in debate, but to punish and silence
Democrats who dare to think for themselves. There's a pattern here:
When John Dingell contradicted party orthodoxy on global warming and auto
mileage standards this year, MoveOn ran ads in his Michigan district calling the
81-year-old Congressman "Dingellsaurus."

Emphasis mine. It is obvious that the lessons are being heard as Congress gets back to work.




That is New York's Senior Senator Charles Schumer speaking in the Senate on Wednesday. Oh to be sure it was part of a much longer speech (Sweetness and Light has the transcript) but the key - the shout out to his Move On puppeteers was this:

And let me be clear: the violence in Anbar has gone down despite the surge, not
because of the surge. The inability of American soldiers to protect these tribes from al Qaeda said to these tribes, “We have to fight al Qaeda ourselves.”
It wasn’t that the surge brought peace here. It was that the warlords had to create a
temporary peace here on their own. And that is because there was no one else
there protecting them.

Emphasis mine. It is obvious that Senator Schumer (as head of the DSCC) recognizes that he who paid the piper is indeed calling the tune and that is something that should worry us all.....