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It's not enough to reply in the negative to divisive remarks-- "no we don't want to cut and run."
"Yes you do."
"No we don't"
If the divisive attack is skillful, it forces the victim to either unite around the attacker's position in order to "disprove" the ad hominum portion of the attack-- Dems agree: "We cannot afford to cut and run in Iraq."-- or it leaves the impression that the victim occupies a ludicrous position or a dishonorable one. That is because it allows the attacker to frame the alternative in ways favorable to his position.
The correct way to respond is to unite around a POSITIVE alternative and to UTTERLY IGNORE the negative response the attack seeks. Let them talk about cutting and running all they want. After a while they will begin to sound pretty shrill if they're the only ones talking about that or responding to it. Instead, dems should unite around alternative ideas that undercut the logic of the opposition, like "American foreign policy creates terrorism, so the best way to fight terrorism is to attack its root causes, not the people who have few alternatives," or "The war against Iraq was ill conceived and wrong -- America admits its mistakes and corrects them."
The real problem is that Americans live a life that is fundamentally based on greed, deception, exploitation, oppression of others, militaristic expansionism, and economic slavery. Most don't realize it, and our politicians don't have the courage to admit the truth and begin acting rationally within that context. We could end the "war on terrorism" tomorrow, and with it the American empire-- the one will not be ended without the other-- but doing so would be a terrible shock to America's economic engine and its self perception. We MIGHT be able to come through it with a couple of decades of "isolationism," but I doubt it-- not without a real revolution along the lines of the original American Revolution.
You're probably wondering what any of this has to do with your OP question. The answer is that at the end of the day, both sides are working toward the same ends. Both are ultimately on the same side, at least from the perspective of the rest of the world, who doesn't care much whether it's Republicans or Democrats whose government is responsible for their misery, or for their enslavement to maintaining Americans' standard of living. The divisions between the two sides of American politics are not all that deep, really. One desperately wants to keep the American people as ignorant of the truth as possible, and the other simply doesn't have any desire to stop riding the peoples' delusions to power. That's why we don't hear democrat leaders uniting around genuine alternative proposals. We've painted ourselves so far into a corner that the alternatives are simply unthinkable. If you doubt it, ask yourself why NOT ONE DEMOCRAT has had the courage to tell the truth about the "war on terror?"
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