This witch hunt is going too far.

There are talks about banning The SIMS! Read about it at Gamespot.

A women has sued the makers of GTA.

And Hillary Clinton has already slid to the right in asking for $90 million of taxpayer dollars to study the effects video games on children – something that’s been done quite a bit already.

Like Rafe said, Steven Johnson’s op-ed in response to Hillary Clinton’s call for a $90 million study on the effects of video games on children is a must read.

I have this to say to Mrs. Clinton – You have identified yourself as this generation’s Tipper Gore. The metalheads reading this know exactly what I mean. Reaching out to the right with gestures this hollow and expensive play into the hands of those against you.

To divert resources that can be better used fighting known, real problems in this country – for a dubious endeavor at best – for what appears to be a middle-America vote advertisement – is wrong.

Call me naive but I expect Democratic leaders to represent working and poor Americans who keep this country running every day. To be the party of the American dream. This has NOTHING to do with that.

The New York Review of Books: What’s the Matter with Liberals?:

…The hallmark of a “backlash conservative” is that he or she approaches politics not as a defender of the existing order or as a genteel aristocrat but as an average working person offended by the arrogance of the (liberal) upper class. The sensibility was perfectly caught during the campaign by onetime Republican presidential candidate Gary Bauer, who explained it to The New York Times like this: “Joe Six-Pack doesn’t understand why the world and his culture are changing and why he doesn’t have a say in it.”[3] These are powerful words, the sort of phrase that could once have been a slogan of the fighting, egalitarian left. Today, though, it was conservatives who claimed to be fighting for the little guy, assailing the powerful, and shrieking in outrage at the direction in which the world is irresistibly sliding.

…what Karl Rove called a “mobilization election” in which victory would go to the party that best rallied its faithful. What this meant in practice was backlash all the way: an appeal to class resentment and cultural dread that was unprecedented in its breadth; ingenious state-level ballot initiatives on “values” questions that would energize voters; massive church-based get-out-the-vote efforts; and paranoid suggestions from all sides inviting voters to believe the worst about those tyrannical liberal snobs.

Senator Sam Brownback’s activities at the Republican convention offer us a glimpse of this strategy in microcosm. In his speech before the assembled delegates and the eyes of the world, the godly Kansan came off as a thoughtful, caring Republican who wanted only to heal the sick and halt religious persecution overseas; when he spoke at a private meeting of evangelical Christians, however, he took on the tone of affronted middle-American victimhood, complaining to a roomful of Christian conservatives that “the press beats up on you like there’s something wrong with faith, family and freedom” and exhorting them to “win this culture war.”[4] For the conservative rank and file, this election was to be the culture-war Armageddon, and they were battling for the Lord.

Whenever Democrats play the Republican class-culture war game – it’s a win for Republicans. Democrats need to pursue policies – not cultural politics – that help give a leg up (not a hand-out) – this is the real moral that needs to be addressed – and that what I expect the Democratic party to represent.

From the article linked above:

…the most powerful evocation of the backlash spirit always comes from personal testimony, a tale of how one man came to realize that liberals weren’t the friends of common folks but just the opposite. In the past it was figures like George Wallace and Norman Podhoretz and Ronald Reagan who declared that they hadn’t left the Democratic Party, the party had left them; in 2004 that traditional role fell to Zell Miller, Democratic senator from Georgia, whose thunderous indictment of his liberal colleagues from the podium of the Republican convention caused such excitement in conservative circles. Here was Miller to assure Republicans that everything they’d ever suspected was true: that the real problem with American politics was that the Democrats had swerved too far to the left; that those same Democrats were led by self-hating people who think “America is the problem, not the solution”; that their presidential candidate was so beguiled by Frenchness—a classic stand-in for devitalized upper-classness—that he “would let Paris decide when America needs defending.”[9]

Oddly enough, this same Zell Miller had once been known as a fairly formidable class warrior on the left, blasting Bush’s father in a famous 1992 speech as a clueless “aristocrat” who knew nothing of hard work and then dropping this memorable zinger on Dan Quayle: “Not all of us can be born rich, handsome, and lucky, and that’s why we have a Democratic Party.”

“Not all of us can be born rich, handsome, and lucky, and that’s why we have a Democratic Party.”

I like to believe we still have a Democratic party. We need it now more than ever.