No Labels and the Killdeer Strategy

As 2013 drags itself out of bed, pounds a handful of Extra Strength Tylenol and begins to face the depressing reality the Republican Party is still a stinking albatross around the neck of American democracy, the No Labels crew is once again doing what it does best: spend an assload of other people's money to try and make people forget that it is a billionaire vanity project designed to A) slap a "Both Sides Do It" fig-leaf over the fact that he GOP has lost its damn mind and, B) provide full-employment make-work for all the usual Beltway Centrist douchebags,

A couple of the hundreds of the "We're not Centrists!  We're Serious Problem-Solvers!" rah-rahing to be found on The Twitter:

Dave Walker ‏@DaveWalkerCAI

#NoLabels - NL is not about the middle. It's about bringing people together to engage in principle-based compromise to solve problems. DW

Retweeted by No Labels

'No Labels' Adds Washington Muscle to Reform Washington

Centrist and squishy no more? Grassroots advocacy group shifts focus in bid to fix political system.

National Journal @nationaljournal · Follow

From Yahoo News:

No Labels enters new era by shedding ‘centrist’

By Beth Fouhy | The Ticket – Sun, Jan 13, 2013 

"Patronizing." "The Kumbaya Caucus." "The most boring political movement of all time." And those were some of the kinder jabs lobbed at “No Labels,” an organization formed in 2010 by a handful of well-connected but disenchanted political activists to encourage problem solving over ideological gridlock. Such earnestness seemed laudable but a tad incongruous in an era where the passions of the Tea Party and Occupy movements dominated the political conversation.

Despite a splashy New York launch, No Labels lacked a clear agenda and grassroots support and was largely dismissed as irrelevant. But with new leadership and a sharper focus, the group, which is redeploying with another New York conference on Monday, has shed some of its early idealism in favor of a more pragmatic acceptance of the partisanship that has divided the country and embroiled Washington in recent years.

"We started off thinking there was a broad group in the middle, but quickly realized that wasn’t productive. People have very different notions of what the middle is,” said Mark McKinnon, a longtime adviser to former President George W. Bush and a No Labels founder. “So we grew beyond that, and now have strong conservative and strong liberal partisans who want to participate.”

...

Sure.

And as Dr. Julius Hibbert once noted: “...hillbillies prefer to be called 'sons of the soil,' but it ain't gonna happen.”

So what's really going on here?

From me in 2005:

So this honey-bucket full of Dobson/Robertson/Falwell marionettes run the courts, the press, the government and the corporate structure of the richest most powerful nation on the face of the Earth...but on the rare occasion that the stink of their moral decomposition catches the wind and gets noticed by the Neutered Press, the GOP is forced to scuttle out into the light and thus begins The Killdeer Strategy: Attack and distract.

...

If this sounds familiar to you, you probably saw it on the Nature Channel:  "Unique characteristics of the Killdeer” (courtesy of the Hinterland Who’s Who website.)

Killdeer are adept at distracting intruders from their nests or young. They employ one set of tactics against browsing animals that stroll unintentionally toward the nest of young and a quite different set against those that may wilfully do real harm, such as dogs, foxes, and people. An adult bird will run with outstretched wings or fly directly toward any browsing animal that appears on the verge of walking into a nest or stepping on a chick. There are recorded instances of a cow being struck on the muzzle. Once the intruder has been turned away, the Killdeer will allow it to graze peacefully nearby.

A different defense must be used against a deliberate threat, and this defense can be used by either parent. If flying around and calling loudly does not drive the intruder away, then one or the other of the parents performs a distraction display, commonly called a broken-wing act or injury feigning. The bird crouches on the ground with one wing spread and hanging as though broken. It flops about in a piteous manner, at the same time crying kill-dee-dee-ee as though in mortal pain. The intruder is drawn towards the seemingly wounded or helpless bird, which always manages to move away, decoying the intruder farther and farther from the nest of young birds. When the enemy is well away from its intended prey, the adult Killdeer miraculously recovers and flies off. During this display, the young will have stayed perfectly still or will have scattered in all directions. In either case, they will be almost impossible to find.

However much money this Bad Idea Caucus flings at marketing -- at relaunches, graphics, websites, buying "bipartisan" spokesmodels, conferences and getting their bumper stickers treated as "news: -- the fact is that their desperate, fraudulent message never changes:

Never, ever, ever allow the blame for wrecking this country to fall squarely on the Conservatives (and their Centrist enablers) who did the wrecking.

UPDATE:  This crackling, intellectual interplay between irrelevant political footnote key "No Labels" spokesman John Huntsman and Mrs. Alan Greenspan from today:

MAG:  So, John, are you considering quitting the GOP. 

IPF Huntsman:  Oh Heaven forfend!  The GOP is just full of awesome! 

MAG:  But didn't Colin Powell say the GOP a cesspit of racist assholes? 

IPF Huntsman:  Well...we are where we are.

Yadda, yadda.

Both Sides Do It.

World with out end.

Amen.