WHAT?! NO PLEDGE TO TEAR ACORN MEMBERS LIMB FROM LIMB?

Some of the reaction on the right to the GOP's "Pledge to America" is surprisingly negative. And I don't mean just Erick Erickson, who was bashing the damn thing even before it came out ("what will be missing will make it a wasted exercise by a party that still shows little sign of getting exactly why it lost power in 2006") and now declares it "Perhaps the Most Ridiculous Thing to Come Out of Washington Since George McClellan" ("it is full of mom tested, kid approved pablum that will make certain hearts on the right sing in solidarity. But like a diet full of sugar, it will actually do nothing but keep making Washington fatter before we crash from the sugar high"). This Freeper laments that the text of the Pledge wasn't literally taken from Barry Goldwater. Commenters in this Freep thread grumble:

Just pieces of paper. I don't care what it says, only what they do.

****

This is encouraging, but the real way to go is what Mark Levin said (pretty sure it was him), which was that the pledge to Americans should simply be to uphold the Constitution as intended by the framers.

****

Strikes me as establishment pandering......gives Dems a moving target at wrong time....

Doug Ross echoes Levin in responding to the tedious document:

21 pages? How about starting with two words: THE CONSTITUTION?

(Sudden thought: When do we start calling this "constitutional fundamentalism"? It almost seems as if right-wingers have substituted this for religious fundamentalism -- namely, an interpretation of a sacred text, formerly the Bible, now the Constitution, that jibes with their political prejudices, but which they think is a strictly literal reading.)

Oh, and Ross goes on to demand a more red-meat version of the dull manifesto:

• We will repeal the Democrat health care bill and, if vetoed by the President, will de-fund every aspect of that bill until such time as the American people have input into a sensible health care reform process.
• We will slash the size of the federal government bureaucracies (Commerce, Education, Energy, the EPA, Labor, etc.) by 20% in 2011 with a goal of reducing each by 50% over the next three years, thereby saving hundreds of billions of dollars.
• We will secure the border with physical fencing suitable to repel drug smugglers, human smugglers, and terrorists, while encouraging legal immigration and enforcement of the law.
• We will confront the entitlement crisis -- Social Security and Medicare -- by preserving benefits for those who depend upon them and moving to privatized options for younger workers. Anything less condemns future generations to mountains of debt and economic catastrophe.
• We will strengthen our armed forces, space and missile defense programs to retain our unparalleled superpower status.
• We will begin the process of paying down our debts, spending within our means every year.
• We will ban public sector unions, which exist solely to wage war against the taxpayers who fund their operations.

That's not as bloody as the usual winger red meat, but at least it talks about hurting people (unions, border crossers, etc.). The real Pledge seems to promise hurt only to Obama and Democrats. Real conservatives hate way more people than that!

I think substitute Pledges are going to be generated all over the wingnutosphere, and they'll get bloodier and bloodier.

I'm not saying the actual Pledge is weak tea -- it's a scary legislative agenda, although it's the same agenda Republicans have been talking about for a year (essentially, a rollback of the entire Obama presidency and lots of tax and spending cuts). But there's not enough hate in it.