Cliff May Stands Up For Concern Trolling

Nothing all that terrible on the WaPo op-ed page today: maybe yesterday's events have everyone talking some sort of sense for once. But yesterday I wandered over to The Corner and found this Cliff May nugget:

Helping Hands [Cliff May]

I was just listening to Karl Rove on Fox News Sunday offering serious and, I would think, useful advice to Obama on how to win the election.

And earlier, I was reading this piece by Peggy Noonan telling Democrats the strategies they need to adopt in order to prevail.

I could find other examples without trying hard.

Do Democrats ever do this – offer serious and useful counsel to their enemies?

I don’t think so.

Beyond "abandon your worldview," I'm not sure what advice we could give.

But does Cliff May really believe this is "serious and useful counsel"? Gimme a break.

He doesn't link to Rove, but here's some excerpts from Noonan's piece:

There is no denying that Mr. Obama is in a bad place, that he must now be considered the underdog, that he's wearing Loser-Glo. The slide started with the Rick Warren interviews in August, just as America was starting to pay attention. Verdict? McCain: normal. Obama: odd.

And what color is the sky in your world, Ms. Noonan?

Then Mrs. Palin, and the catastrophe of the Democratic and media response to her. Books will be written about this, but because it's so recent, and so known, we're almost not absorbing how huge it was, and is. Here was the central liberal mistake: They used the atom bomb just a few days in. They used it so brutally, and yet so ineptly, in a way so oblivious to the true contours of the field, that the radiation blew back over their own lines. They used it without preliminary diplomatic talks, multilateral meetings or Security Council debate. They just went boom. And it boomeranged.

The atom bomb was personal and sexual perfidy, backwoods knuckle-draggin' ma and pa saying, Tell the neighbors the baby's ours. Then the ritual abuse of the 17-year-old girl. Then the rest of it—bad mother, religious weirdo. (On this latter it must be noted that Mrs. Palin never told a church that the Iraq war was God's will; she asked them to pray that it was God's will. It wasn't the sound of Republican hubris, it was the sound of Christian humility: We can't know the mind of God, we can only pray we are in accord with it.)

Except that the baby coverup story was nothing more than an internet rumor. Even to this day, the most notable voices publicizing it have been GOP partisans like Noonan. The abuse of Bristol Palin never happened, except in the heads of the Republicans who decided to play the victim card anyway.

And even the prayer - if you aren't open to God's letting you know that he doesn't bless your planned course of action, if you're not going to change what you're doing, no matter how big a clue-by-four God smacks you in the head with - then your prayers are just a bullshitting of God, mankind, and yourself.

But getting back to the main theme: this isn't "serious and useful counsel." This is the usual GOP mudslinging, thinly masquerading as advice. I'm not sure it even rises to the level of concern trollery; it's just simple trollery for the most part.

Anyway, there's a reason Dems don't offer similar advice to Republicans: we don't have any corner on wisdom, but we aren't that full of shit.