Atrios and Ogged apparently don’t watch enough sports. Atrios wrote,
Who here thinks Howard Dean can beat Bush? Why Ted, you ignorant slut, Fred Flintstone could take Bush with Barney Rubble as his campaign manager. Wesley Clark should stop saying that he needs to be the nominee because someone needs to be able to match Bush at foreign policy. What Clark should say is that Joey Tribiani could match Bush at foreign policy, though he, Clark, has the most experience. Stop acknowledging that Bush is strong on anything. He’s a big loser. He’s a miserable failure. He’s lost 3 million jobs. He got us into a screwed up war. Our soldiers are being killed by terrorists. The Middle East is a mess. Afghanistan is a mess. OBL is alive. Hussein is alive.
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Koppel asked them to raise their hands if they thought Dean could beat Bush. They didn’t. Idiots – you should be willing to say that a SLUG could beat Bush.
Ogged says this is “Exactly right.”
Leaving aside the factual basis of the Democratic talking points–every one of those things except the 3 million jobs could have been said about Bill Clinton in 1996–that would be a strategically inept position to adopt.
As anyone who has watched good sports coaches knows, you’re supposed to poor-mouth yourself and talk up the opposition. When Bear Bryant was facing a pitiful opponent, he always talked about how great the other team was and how tough it would be. “That Vanderbilt, they sure do have some mighty smart football players. And, after losing 43 in a row, you know they’ll be up for this game. The Good Lord willing, we might be able to keep it close.” Lowering expectations is simply smart strategy [Democrat for “strategery”? -ed.].
Plus, on the not exactly implausible chance that Bush is reelected, one wouldn’t want to have been defeated by someone who ostensibly could have been beaten by a slug, no?
