Why do People Post Negative Kerry News at DU ?

[stewert]

I am curious as to why Democrats who want Kerry to win, post negative news articles about Kerry here in GD and the breaking news forum.

Can someone tell me why Democrats feel the need to post that crap here on a Democratic/Liberal forum ?

If I want to read negative crap about Kerry I will go to newsmax.com or townhall.com etc. I do not want to see that garbage here or in the Breaking News forum. I come here to catch up on the news and to see what Democrats are reporting on and talking about.

The last thing I want to do is wade through negative articles about Kerry, I want to see negative articles about Bush. If I owned these forums I would delete any negative story about Kerry.

I doubt this will do any good but can we stop posting negative articles about Kerry. Don't Kerry have it hard enough with the entire media against him, why should we post that crap here ?

[The Straight Story]

1. My Take

Is that by posting such things we open them to discussion in a broader manner allowing such things to be debunked (which others will see who lurk here) and will also give more information to people who get confronted with such charges by the right (co-workers, neighbors, et al).

[Vickers]

7. Agreed.

:thumbsup:

[gmoney]

2. Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer.

I think the purpose of DU is remaining INFORMED on what's going on, both positive and negative. Unless you're aware of a problem, you can't take steps to solve it or counteract it.

Blind faith and uninformed cheerleading are the marks of the FReepers.

(on edit: you know, there's only one letter difference between "uniformed" and "uninformed")

[Kierkegaard]

5. Right on the money.

Ignoring a problem won't make it go away. One of the things I admire most about DUers is that they are more than willing to take on the challenge of debunking nonsense, tirelessly ferreting out information and refuting the ignorant mantras of those who are too lazy or partisan to refine their own opinions through enlightenment.

[freetobegay]

3. I have not posted in over a week because of the negativity

& gloom & doom posts. I feel much better now. But in all fairness This just goes to show that we are the better party & can handle criticism, unlike another party I won't mention here that actually will censure their members for dissent.

[Tamyrlin79]

4. Know thy enemy.

Plus, we can then parse that news, discover it's all lies, discredit the author, and send him and his news agency nasty e-mails.

[JusticeForAll]

6. Wow...

Many of us get no other news than what we read here...

Ever hear the saying "Hold your friends close, your enemies closer?" It's really important that people post the negative articles so that we are fully aware of what the general public is soaking up into the general conciousness.

By eliminating all the "bad" news and keeping only the "good" news we would be pathetically unaware of the fact that the media is woefully right-wing-biased, and we would be unaware and unprepared for the stupid arguments we receive in daily conversation from the right-wing whackos we encounter.

In fact when we ignore all the "bad" news out there and trudge forward believing we are without fault, how do we improve, how do we make ourselves any different than the ignorant, holier-than-thou-attitude emanating from this Administration? It seems like they have had their blinders on about all the ill-will their imperialistic policies have caused....yet they "stay the course"

Without "dissent", even if it is woefully untrue, irrelevant or biased we become a propaganda machine - is that really what we want? Censorship of articles posing as news seems as anti-American as quashing dissenting opinions or slants on current events.

[SeekingTruth]

9. Agree.....

the human mind works in such strange ways and if we don't examine how the other side thinks, we will miss many things and not be aware of it. Take the Gore/* debates. I bet if a poll was ran here asking who won those debates, Du'ers would overwhelmingly say Gore won them. But to hear the other side and others, * won them. Clearly, to me, Gore did do a better job, but much of that perception comes from the substance of Gore in those debates and not *'s simply showing up.

Let's face it, Kerry is a tough man - he has to be tough from what he did when he came back from Vietnam (some pundit, can't recall who, even mentioned that - that Kerry coming back and openly criticizing the Vietnam war took as much, if not more, courage, than his actual duty in Vietnam) and he is tough enough to withstand all of this criticism.

[kstewart33]

8. Like it or not, it's freedom of speech

The other posters are right--it's know your enemy, keep informed, and above all at least for me, it's freedom of speech.

Let's not promote censorship at DU.

[onehandle]

10. Whatever the reason, I'm sure none of them are F______s.

F______s here to demoralize us? Unlikely.

A Naderite or two, but never ever F______s.

[unblock]

11. because democrats JUST DON'T GET IT

i'm a diehard democrat and a firm believer in having a fair and honest discussion on the issues.

but that's not what's going on in this campaign, nor was it what happened 4 years ago. instead, we have media discussion of the horse race, the political strategy, which states to speak in, and which "character issue" is to be made the mock issue of the day.

"character issues" are nothing more than high school taunts, much on the level of calling your opponent too short or too fat he's a chess player and so too geeky to be class president. total 100% bu**sh**.

there are VITAL issues this time around, such as:

- how shall we manage the budget, given that their guy has turned record surplusses into record deficits?
- how do we decide to go to war, given that their guy used the same justification hitler used to invade poland, and also had to lie to pull it off?
- how do we defend democracy, given that their guy is eager to suspend the bill of rights for 40 years in response to a single attack?

but we won't hear much debate about those things, because it's far more important to talk about kerry's hair or whether it was ribbons or medals he threw or whether he bled enough more than 30 years ago.



so why do we post negative stories about kerry?
well, our DESIRE, of course, is to be prepared and to defend such attacks. but what we fail to realize is that SIMPLY BY DEFENDING, WE LOSE! because the point of these idiotic attacks is NOT to win the attack itself, the point is to DISTRACT from the real issues, on which our candidate wins easily.

so when people post, "how do we defend kerry against this stupid, pointless, distracting attack?" the best answer is, "by attacking their guy 10 times harder!"

running for high school president, if the other guy called you short or a geek or smelly or whatever, you don't respond with "no i'm not" because then you AGREE THAT THAT'S THE ISSUE TO VOTE ON. no, the appropriate response is to turn it around. "nice try, i'm sure you'd rather talk about anything other than my plan to make this the greatest class in high school history, or your disastrous last year as class president!"

[gratuitous]

12. Because the librul media never tell us this stuff!

Whoops, I'm posting at DU, not trolling at FR. Sorry for the confusion. Never mind.

:hi: