Off Limits

Digby is absolutely and completely right about the hissy fit that the Village is getting ready to throw over MoveOn's hard-hitting but completely fair and vital ad about John McCain wanting to consign our children to perpetual wars:

Geist: It might be fair, it might be effective, I just opposed dangling babies.

Todd: I think it was a borderline shameless ad, using a baby like that. It just seemed like a sledge hammer on the message…

What's shameless, actually, is using a baby as cannon fodder because his commander in chief doesn't want to admit a mistake. What's shameless is using a baby as infantry because you never met a problem that didn't have a military solution.

Chuck Todd is a squishy Village protégé who has nothing to add to the larger debate but numbers-crunching. He's sadly probably the best we'll get out of these clowns. The bloggers who hailed Todd in the past because he hewed to the numbers that promoted an Obama candidacy are seeing it from the other side now. It was totally obvious that they would try to set the boundaries of debate as they always have.

War costs lives. We don't want to talk about it because it makes us feel all icky, but those statistics that flash across the TV screens represent somebody's kid. It's immoral to discuss invasions and military actions WITHOUT thinking of those babies who will grow up and perhaps become another statistic in a catastrophic mistake. And if the kid is lucky enough to survive his tour of duty, he'll come back home and have suicide drugs tested on him.

We know that both the current President and his would-be Republican successor want to stay in Iraq for a long, long time. There are soldiers fighting there right now who were 12 or 13 when war was declared. Under the McCain-Bush plan babies will be fighting there, and to set that outside the lines of the political debate is unacceptable.

But it's very acceptable to the Village, who wants to wash the blood from this debacle off their hands and never let their beautiful minds wander to thinking about someone's son or daughter giving up his life for nothing. They're culpable and that's why they want this off limits.