When the Left Borrows from the Right

I’m not a great fan of Cynthia Boaz, but I’ll give her fair due. She’s written a cracking piece which you can see on TruthOut.org’s website, entiled “14 Propaganda Techniques that Fox ‘News’ Uses to Brainwash Americans.”

It’s a pretty inclusive article, but she should have added how elements of the Right, specifically the Tea Party, borrowed principles and techniques from Saul Alinsky and used them to their advantage -the organising and the targeting of communities and people within these communities in order to grow a movement from within. This whole current Republican Party borrowed a lot of organisational methods from the old communist party, in point of fact.

As much as they like to invoke his sainted memory, the Republican Party is not the party of Reagan. These people are the grandchildren of Barry Goldwater and direct lineal descendents from the Birchers of the Fifties and Sixties. The Birchers borrowed a lot of organisational practice from the communist party, from the era when the communists were trying to infiltrate the union movement.

It was from the old communist handbooks that the Birchers learned to infiltrate the lowliest organisations, mingle with the hoi polloi in order that they might see and accept them as people much like themselves (which they were), and then move onto something bigger and better. Start with the PTA, move onto the Town Council, run for Mayor, County Supervisors, State General Assembly etc etc. This might take time, but these people, unlike a lot of people today, understood that incremental change is change that lasts.

Thus, when the Democratic party, under the urbane and suave leadership of Gary Hart and co, newly-minted voters from affluent, professional, white-collard middle class homes, people with no emotional or traditional connection either to the working class or the labor movement, kicked the working class of the rural South, Midwest and other areas of the country to the political curb, the “family values” Republicans, many of whom were people these folks had known all their lives, were there to pick them up, dust them off and turn them in direction Right. Even though a lot of this effort took 30 years to achieve.

Cynthia’s right to emphasize the fear tactics and brainwashing used by Fox News and the Right, in general, in order to keep their vast demographic so pulverised with fear that they’re basically infantilised – hey, it’s always easier to control scared children – and it’s fair to say that a lot of this necessity on behalf of the Right’s public voice arose after 9/11, when we were all pretty much scared cackless. It’s pretty accurate to say that whilst George Bush and Co mananged to keep the country in a heightened state of fear over the spectre of Osama bin Ladin for 8 years, that fear now has been handed on by the Right to focus on the figure of the President, himself.

I’ll grant you, for forty years, the Right has systematically demonised the Left to the point that the Left accommodated the Right and abandoned the use of the word “liberal” as a pejorative – instead, reinventing itself under the guise of “Progressive.”

We watched the Republicans throw various dirty bits at Bill Clinton, mostly in the shapely shapes of women coming out of the woodwork to tell about his sexual exploits. He was also labelled a cocaine trafficker and a murderer. And now we’ve seen the Right vilify and seek to delegitimise Barack Obama in a myriad of ways which are just as bad, and worse, than the way Clinton was morphed into Public Enemy Number One, by the GOP.

He’s been called a Kenyan, a Mau-mau, a socialist, a communist, a Marxist and a Nazi. He’s been accused of being a curious Manchurian candidate, smuggled as a baby into the country by his mother and raised and groomed for the highest office in the Land. Some on the Right have characterised him as an uppity thug; one even called him a liar to his face. He’s been accused of wanting to establish death panels, in order to determine who might live and who might die under his Healthcare program. All of this has been force-fed various tranches of the public to the point that they are convinced and nothing and no information could persuade them that they’ve been fed a tissue of lies.

And that’s just from the Right.

Because as the Right has borrowed extensively from the Left in order to beat them at their own game, so the Left is borrowing from the Right and – for some reason – undermining this Administration.

Let me show you how, using some of Cynthia’s listed propaganda techniques.

1. Panic Mongering. This goes one step beyond simple fear mongering. With panic mongering, there is never a break from the fear. The idea is to terrify and terrorize the audience during every waking moment. From Muslims to swine flu to recession to homosexuals to immigrants to the rapture itself, the belief over at Fox seems to be that if your fight-or-flight reflexes aren’t activated, you aren’t alive. This of course raises the question: why terrorize your own audience? Because it is the fastest way to bypasses the rational brain. In other words, when people are afraid, they don’t think rationally. And when they can’t think rationally, they’ll believe anything.

Do the Left indulge in this? Quite frankly, yes. Not to the extent that the Right do, but it’s there in the Leftwing media, on the web and certainly on MSNBC.

The most obvious proponents of this technique are FireDogLake’s Jane Hamsher and Bold Progressives’ Adam Green. Green is a particularly bad with this technique. If you’re on his e-mail list or even on Jane’s, you’ve probably received e-mails from them, telling you in breathless terms, urgent terms that time’s running out for this cause or that cause, the latest dastardly deed of betrayal that Barack Obama’s about to level on Left. Cleverly inserted inside these fear e-missives is the kind request that if the recipient just clicks on a link to sign a petition and donate at least $5.00 to thecause au courant, of course, Jane or Adam or whoever will be able to fight just that much more securely to ensure that your rights are preserved.

Green’s most recent cause celebre has been haranguing people that the President is about to axe not just Medicare, in cahoots with Paul Ryan’s budget plan, but also Social Security Insurance. If you cast your mind back to April when the President gave his George Washington University speech – the one where he handed Paul Ryan his ass on a platter – I’ll let Joy Reid of The Reid Report, also – like Green – an MSNBC political contributor, tell you how Green man-managed this issue:-

Nobody knows what the president is going to say at 1:35 this afternoon about entitlements. The stories flying around the Beltway about what Obama will announce, including the speculation that he will embrace the recommendations of the Simpson-Bowles “cat food” commission, are jsut that: speculation. The White House often releases embargoed previews of the president’s speeches. I’m on that media list. They didn’t do it this time, and have made it clear they won’t. (Thanks for leaking those prior embargoed speeches, National Journal…)

Green is probably on those lists too.

In other words, he has no more idea what the president is going to say than I do. The president may very well go all Simpson-Bowles on us, and if he does, it will be worth debating how smart that is. But at this stage, no one knows.

But that didn’t stop the “bold progressive” from releasing a dramatic email this morning, quoting a bunch of disillusioned Obama voters who can’t believe he’s selling out Medicare and Medicaid, which they know because … well they just know he’s gonna do it and they can’t BELIEVE it…! And asking the recipient to sign their petition demanding the president not “sell out,” the way they already know he will. From the in-box:

Joy-Ann,

Urgent! The White House announced that in a big speech today, President Obama will do what no Republican President has been able to do: Put Medicare and Medicaid on the table for potential cuts.

Many former Obama volunteers, donors, and voters are deeply disappointed. A Democratic Congressman said on MSNBC on Monday that Obama needs to “act like a Democrat.”

Will you sign this urgent pledge, which we’ll deliver to the Obama campaign?

“President Obama: If you cut Medicare and Medicaid benefits for me, my parents, my grandparents, or families like mine, don’t ask for a penny of my money or an hour of my time in 2012. I’m going to focus on electing bold progressive candidates — not Democrats who help Republicans make harmful cuts.” Click here to sign.

Below are some amazing notes from Obama volunteers who worked passionately for the President in 2008.

Many people still want to believe in President Obama. But the White House needs to understand that their actions now will have real consequences for 2012. The level of grassroots enthusiasm will be determined by whether the President fights for bold progressive change — and takes cuts that hurt grandparents, the disabled, and kids firmly off the table.

The White House will absolutely be watching the progress of this petition. And we’ll deliver the pledge signatures to the Obama campaign headquarters in Chicago.

Please sign today — then, pass it to others who worked to elect President Obama in 2008.

Thanks for being a bold progressive.

– Adam Green, Stephanie Taylor, Jason Rosenbaum, Keauna Gregory, and the PCCC team.

Now, the beauty part of this, beside the fact that when you go to the petition, the CONTRIBUTE button is nicely highlighted in red, is that no matter what Obama says today, it works out for PCCC.

If he fails to “sell out” Medicare and Medicaid, PCCC will claim credit for making him change a speech that I’m pretty sure was written before they started their online petition drive – much the way they claimed the credit for the popular revolution in Wisconsin. Then they’ll raise money on their “win” in turning the feckless president around, and Green will go on Lawrence’s “Last Word” show to skewer Obama for having to be forced to change his ways when he promised to govern as a liberal.

I received one of these e-mailed screeds from Green, because I used to be on his mailing list too, but that one jumped the shark for me, for exactly the reason Joy outlined: No one knew what the President was going to say.

And know what? The only mention made of Medicare or Social Security was in direct opposition to what Ryan proposed to do, but since the President gave that address 24 hours after Green sent out his desperately urgent e-mail, enough people had sent their five-dollar donations to Bold Progressives, that Green had garnered a cool $300K in less than 24 hours, and he bragged about it.

Nice work, if you can get it. For a grifter. And isn’t that just a little bit illegal? Still, MSNBC, who leans forward, continuously brings Green to the table and identifies him as a political contributor.

Here’s the rub. Green is a graduate of my alma mater, the University of Virginia. We have a stringent Honor Code which precludes any student lying, cheating or stealing. If Green had tried some of the tactics he’s so successful in trying now as a student, he’d be ordered to leave the University within 24 hours … basically for lying, cheating and stealing. He probably studied under Larry Sabato, but I know Larry, and I don’t imagine Larry would have either encouraged or condoned a scam piece like this.

Still, some people have more money than common sense. Let’s plough on.

2. Character Assassination/Ad Hominem. Fox does not like to waste time debating the idea. Instead, they prefer a quicker route to dispensing with their opponents: go after the person’s credibility, motives, intelligence, character, or, if necessary, sanity. No category of character assassination is off the table and no offense is beneath them. Fox and like-minded media figures also use ad hominem attacks not just against individuals, but entire categories of people in an effort to discredit the ideas of every person who is seen to fall into that category, e.g. “liberals,” “hippies,” “progressives” etc. This form of argument – if it can be called that – leaves no room for genuine debate over ideas, so by definition, it is undemocratic. Not to mention just plain crass.

Once again, people on the Left have engaged in this technique – most often against the Right; and though it might make me a hypocrite, I’ve no problem with “my” side giving back to the Right just as good as they give us; but MSNBC – Lean Forward MSNBC – engages in this as much against the President as against the Rightwing. And so do many of the celebrity talking heads, especially against the viewing/listening/reading public who happen to disagree with their particular assessment of the President.

Weeks before he was sacked from MSNBC, Keith Olbermann embarked on a scurrilous “Special Comment” against the myth these celebrity talking heads and several members of Congress from safe, affluent districts, had been pushing about the President “caving” on extending the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy. Never mind the fact that thiscompromise secured notable benefits for the unemployed, the poor and the working poor, the President should have walked on the discussions and allowed the tax cuts to expire. (And sacrificed the repeal of DADT and the passing of SMART and the First Responders’ legislation).

Ne’mind all that. Keith’s special comment wantonly labelled the President a “quisling,” which is the worst sort of traitor, and likened him to a Nazi appeaser.

That same week, appearing on Fareed Zakaria’s Sunday program, Bill Maher – not to be undone – promptly declared the President a “pussy.” He recently reiterated that once again a week ago on his program.

Meanwhile, we’ve seen Hamsher and her cronies on the FDL site refer to the President as “the Affirmative Action President,” “Bugaloo Bush,” and even “the house nigger.”

It’s not just the President for whom they’re aiming. Olbermann and Joan Walsh, inveterate Twitterers, regularly engage in punching down at followers from the Left who disagree with their opinions. Olbermann’s favourite tack is to address these people as “morons.” Joan tells people to “get help” or she opines that their lives must suck (to be so stupid as to dare disagree with someone so far elevated by appearances on television that they must know the subject about which they discourse).

In fact, quite recently, Joan reckoned that anyone who vigorously defended the President was actually a GOP troll, most likely paid by Andrew Breitbart, and that these people would do more damage to Barack Obama than anyone else.

Pardon me, but I was raised a Democrat, by parents who’d voted Democratic since Roosevelt and beyond. I was raised to support the party, especially if there were a Democrat in the White House. Criticize the President, yes, that goes without saying; but wantonly and in the fashion of the radical chic the way this President has been criticized for absolutely everything, by the Right as well as the Left, it goes without saying that his supporters are many things, but not underminers.

And it’s these selfsame supporters who’ve been labelled “Obamabots” by those morally superior purists who follow every word, deed and thought of the likes of Hamsher and Green as truth, when – in fact – like many on the Right, including Hamsher’s political bedfellow, Grover Norquist – they’re pushing the propaganda technique of the Big Lie to the fullest.

3. Projection/Flipping. This one is frustrating for the viewer who is trying to actually follow the argument. It involves taking whatever underhanded tactic you’re using and then accusing your opponent of doing it to you first. We see this frequently in the immigration discussion, where anti-racists are accused of racism, or in the climate change debate, where those who argue for human causes of the phenomenon are accused of not having science or facts on their side. It’s often called upon when the media host finds themselves on the ropes in the debate.

This is something the Left doesn’t like to here, but it’s there and it needs addressing: racism. On the Left, the tack has been rather like the old Fawlty Towers episode about German guests in the hotel: Whatever you do, don’t mention the war.

In this case, it’s whatever you do, don’t bring race into it, even when it’s really all about race. How could it not be about race, when we have the first African American President in the White House?

No, he doesn’t have to bring it up, anymore than I would have expected Hillary Clinton to have played the gender card, had she won (and which Sarah Palin does remorselessly and without compunction); but some of the remarks and the attitudes emanating from certain quarters on the Left have had a particular whiff of subtle racism about them.

Walsh, two months ago, uttered an inadvertantly racist remark in a Twitter feed, and had her posterior portion served up to her on a platter by several African American bloggers, articulate and intelligent people who were offended. Did she apologise for the way she worded her sentence? No. Show remorse? Never.

Some of these remarks have been foolishly inane, like Chris Matthews getting over-excited and blurting out that he sometimes forgets Obama is a black man. Others are blatantly ignorant and provocative, such as Bill Maher’s referring to the President as “President Sanford and Son” or wondering why we didn’t elect a “real” black man, one who embodied all the characteristics Bill ascribes to ghetto gangstas, including carrying a gun concealed on his person.

But if anyone points these items out or questions the appearance of racists attitudes on the Left, the argument is turned around to imply that the person introducing the subject is, themselves, a racist.

I’m a white woman from the South. I grew up just when segregation was ending and integration was the norm. I lived through the high age of deliberate Affirmative Action in the Seventies. I’ve seen kneejerk liberals welcome minority employees into the fold and then proceed to patronise and raise the performance standard as an excuse to tut and to criticize. People like me just don’t hear dog whistles, we see the mutts being herded across wide expanses of fields.

Nobody likes to be called a racist, but more and more African Americans are recognising the subtle form of patronising racism amongst the Progressive Left and are calling them out about it – whether it be Cornel West and his personal vendetta against the President in implying that Obama inherited too many white traits from his Kansan mother, to Joan Walsh’s ladylike vapours at the thought that African American supporters of the President would dispute that people of Joan’s ilk make up the Democratic base.

(They don’t.)

4. Rewriting History. This is another way of saying that propagandists make the facts fit their worldview. The Downing Street Memos on the Iraq war were a classic example of this on a massive scale, but it happens daily and over smaller issues as well. A recent case in point is Palin’s mangling of the Paul Revere ride, which Fox reporters have bent over backward to validate. Why lie about the historical facts, even when they can be demonstrated to be false? Well, because dogmatic minds actually find it easier to reject reality than to update their viewpoints. They will literally rewrite history if it serves their interests. And they’ll often speak with such authority that the casual viewer will be tempted to question what they knew as fact.

Yes, sorry to say the Left is guilty of this as well. Not on such a grandiose scale as we’ve seen on the Right, with Palin’s version of Paul Revere’s ride or Bachmann’s making John Quincy Adams one of the Founding Fathers when he was still wet behind the ears, and their respective supporters scurrying onto Wikipedia in an effort, actually, to rewrite events, themselves. And not with the odious David Barton pushing his revisionist history of the United States as a nation founded on a vision from God. But our side does its fair share of rewriting history.

Here are some facts we rather conveniently ignore about our various saints:

• Theodore Roosevelt, founder of the Progressives, was a Republican. He coined the phrase “bully pulpit,” but it didn’t mean what we interpret it to mean today. In Roosevelt’s time, “bully” was slang for “great” or “good.” So when he described the Presidency as a “bully pulpit,” he really meant it was a great platform by which to communicate and not one by which a leader could forcibly impose his will upon Congress or the public.
• Woodrow Wilson, whom the Righwing revile and whom the Leftwing revere, was a notorious racist. Fact.
• FDR was a pragmantist, more at home in the world of industrialists and finaciers. His best friend was Bernard Baruch. Once he’d got his social justice schemes in place, he dropped the Progressive Midwest Democrats and joined up with industrialists to promote production for what he perceived to be the upcoming war. He interned the Niseii, not because he wanted to, but because the public demanded it. He interned them in concentration camps. That’s right. He tried to stack the Surpreme Court and got smacked by Congress. He wasn’t afraid to send in National Guard troops to bust union strikers during the war and argued heavily with John Lewis of the CIO about unionising WPA jobs to the extent that Lewis endorsed Wendell Wilkie in 1940.
• LBJ went from hero to zero in two years. Whilst he was an effective Senate Majority Leader, he wasn’t that successful a President. He managed to sign the Civil Rights Act, but was helpless against the onslaught of white backlash that erupted in the North. He lied about the Bay of Tonkin disaster in order to get us more heavily involved in Viet Nam. Until his dying day, he never ceased to refer to a person of African American heritage by anything other than the awful n-word.
• Barack Obama did not run as a Progressive, but as a Centre-Left pragmatist, who never advocated single-payer health insurance or, really, a public option. He always said he’d bring down action in Iraq, whilst concentrating on upping the ante in Afghanistan.
• John Edwards, prior to 2008, was a triangular Clintonian Democrat. He only decided to run as a Progressive in order to hit Hillary Clinton from the Left in the primary campaign of 2008. He has never and still doesn’t approve of same sex marriage.

5. Scapegoating/Othering. This works best when people feel insecure or scared. It’s technically a form of both fear mongering and diversion, but it is so pervasive that it deserves its own category. The simple idea is that if you can find a group to blame for social or economic problems, you can then go on to a) justify violence/dehumanization of them, and b) subvert responsibility for any harm that may befall them as a result.

This is a regular tactic of the Hamsher Firebaggers as well as Queen Ratfucker Arianna Huffington. If it’s Wednesday and the economy’s bad, blame the President or one of his advisors, usually Tim Geithner. Huffington pushed the big lie last year that Geithner was viciously opposed to Elizabeth Warren being appointed to head of the Credit Protection Agency. The other big lie she promoted up to and including the eve of the Midterm election, was that the President “just wasn’t that into the Middle Classes” – as if she were such an expert on the middle class, itself.

But she’s still out there, still commanding the media attention of the sociopath she is and still being identified as a Progressive voice, even though she’s now a part of the corporate Kochmeister social swirl. MSNBC and Bill Maher treat her like a goddess when she’s more like a gorgon. Why?

6. Conflating Violence With Power and Opposition to Violence With Weakness. This is more of what I’d call a “meta-frame” (a deeply held belief) than a media technique, but it is manifested in the ways news is reported constantly. For example, terms like “show of strength” are often used to describe acts of repression, such as those by the Iranian regime against the protesters in the summer of 2009. There are several concerning consequences of this form of conflation. First, it has the potential to make people feel falsely emboldened by shows of force – it can turn wars into sporting events. Secondly, especially in the context of American politics, displays of violence – whether manifested in war or debates about the Second Amendment – are seen as noble and (in an especially surreal irony) moral. Violence become synonymous with power, patriotism and piety.

Whilst the Left in no way identifies with violence in the way the Right does, there is, with this Presidency, a penchant of people on the Left to use various epithets and phrases that, unconsciously, have a pejorative historical value when applied to this seminal Presidency.

I’ve noted before that Bill Maher regularly refers to Obama as a “pussy.” He has also stated that the President was weak, without spine and not a leader in the least. So have many other people from the Left. It doesn’t matter that each time these accusations get bandied about, the President proves there’s more than one side to strength than swaggering like Bush or chest-beating, which is what people like Maher with Big Daddy issues seem to expect from this President. They long for the stereotypical angry Black Panther of a man, and the moment the President loses his temper, which is always done in a calm, cool and rationally cold sort of way, they either go running for cover or they whine some more that this isn’t enough.

There’s such a sort of strength as quiet strength from within. As far as throwing temper tantrums, my Sicilian grandmother always used to remind me that “revenge is a dish that’s best eaten cold.”

7. Bullying. This is a favorite technique of several Fox commentators. That it continues to be employed demonstrates that it seems to have some efficacy. Bullying and yelling works best on people who come to the conversation with a lack of confidence, either in themselves or their grasp of the subject being discussed. The bully exploits this lack of confidence by berating the guest into submission or compliance. Often, less self-possessed people will feel shame and anxiety when being berated and the quickest way to end the immediate discomfort is to cede authority to the bully. The bully is then able to interpret that as a “win.”

I think we saw a fair amount of this recently, especially at NetRoots Nation 11, when Lt Dan Choi, the latest Hamsher tool, ostentatiously confronted the bisexual OFA volunteer in a humiliating fashion for all to see. It happens when someone disagrees online with the Alpha man likes of Glenn Greenwald, David Sirota or John Aravosis (he, who’s pronounced on Twitter that “all blacks are insane”). It occurs in the commentary sections from The Daily Kos toHuffington Post to Salon, where people name-call and bait others. It happens on phone-ins from the Right and from the Left, and it’s inexcusable.

8. Confusion. As with the preceding technique, this one works best on an audience that is less confident and self-possessed. The idea is to deliberately confuse the argument, but insist that the logic is airtight and imply that anyone who disagrees is either too dumb or too fanatical to follow along. Less independent minds will interpret the confusion technique as a form of sophisticated thinking, thereby giving the user’s claims veracity in the viewer’s mind.

Favourite tactic of Glenn Greenwald and Keith Olbermann. When in doubt, tell the person who disagrees with you how stupid they are and that they simply cannot follow your logic. Greenwald’s a particularly bad sock puppet, who trolls websites where he’s mentioned, often under the guise of someone else, to bait and bother.

9. Populism. This is especially popular in election years. The speakers identifies themselves as one of “the people” and the target of their ire as an enemy of the people. The opponent is always “elitist” or a “bureaucrat” or a “government insider” or some other category that is not the people. The idea is to make the opponent harder to relate to and harder to empathize with. It often goes hand in hand with scapegoating. A common logical fallacy with populism bias when used by the right is that accused “elitists” are almost always liberals – a category of political actors who, by definition, advocate for non-elite groups.

The extreme Left, the Progressives, do this in reverse. Yes, we know the Rightwing is suspicious of anything smacking of elitism – Northeastern or Coastal liberals educated, often privately, but having degrees, if not from Ivy League institutions, then mostly from well-established institutes of higher education.

Make no mistake. This is a divide and conquer technique employed by the Rightwing. The Rightwing wants an uneducated or undereducated populace, poor and unsuspecting,whilst at the same time, suspicious of anything redolent of sophistry. It’s to the advantage of the Republicans and their corporate Kochmeisters that there be an underclass of peasants, for lack of a better word, willing to work for whatever rate of pay offered, under the belief that their employer would look after their interests better than any union could ever seek to do. Suck the workers in and entertain them on a diet of Rightwing and religious talk radio pumped through the tannoy daily from dawn until dusk of the working day.

But instead of reaching out to these people, instead of trying to dispel the notion that the Left is the Devil in disguise and out to ruin their way of life as they know it, we ridicule them. David Carr did as much last week on Real Time with Bill Maher when he referred to inhabitants of Kansas and Missouri as having sloping foreheads, indicating low intellect.

Well, Mr Carr, time was, Missouri and Kansas were blue states. And Virginia. And North Carolina. And Montana. And the Dakotas. And Texas, for that matter. These people need to see and hear people, from our side, who sound and act like them, not to deride or denigrate them, but to convince them that the real party fighting for their interests is actually the Democratic party. Or, at least, it should be.

10. Invoking the Christian God. This is similar to othering and populism. With morality politics, the idea is to declare yourself and your allies as patriots, Christians and “real Americans” (those are inseparable categories in this line of thinking) and anyone who challenges them as not. Basically, God loves Fox and Republicans and America. And hates taxes and anyone who doesn’t love those other three things. Because the speaker has been benedicted by God to speak on behalf of all Americans, any challenge is perceived as immoral. It’s a cheap and easy technique used by all totalitarian entities from states to cults.

Again, the Left does this in reverse, and it does no one any good. Just recently, the Rightwing came out with a new meme to push in the run-up to the next election: Liberals hate God.

That’s it. We hate God. Not only are they painting us as weeping-Nellie atheists in a culture war, but we’re the enemies because we are perceived to hate God.

I can’t possibly think where they got that idea.

Oh, wait … once again, maybe Bill Maher comes into the equation.

Look, I’m a non-believer, but I know that our country was founded on the principle of having the freedom to woship, or not to worship, as one chooses. And I know that most of the Founding Fathers were elite members of the ruling aristocracy, educated during the Enlightenment, and that most were probably Deists. Thomas Jefferson not only had a copy of the Koran, he even edited his own Bible to suit his own tastes.

I also know that most non-believers are found on the cultural Left – with the exception of S E Cupp and Karl Rove (and Cupp is suspect, whilst Rove flipflops on his atheism depending on the audience). But I hate proselytisers of any stripe, and I abhor the raving atheist who propagates his opinion that anyone who believes is demented as much as I abhor the fundamentalist who exorts me to repent or burn in hell. Whatever floats your boat, the Left is supposed to be the side demonstrating tolerance here. Deriding anyone’s religious beliefs is as bad as dismissing anyone’s lack of belief.

11. Saturation. There are three components to effective saturation: being repetitive, being ubiquitous and being consistent. The message must be repeated cover and over, it must be everywhere and it must be shared across commentators: e.g. “Saddam has WMD.” Veracity and hard data have no relationship to the efficacy of saturation. There is a psychological effect of being exposed to the same message over and over, regardless of whether it’s true or if it even makes sense, e.g., “Barack Obama wasn’t born in the United States.” If something is said enough times, by enough people, many will come to accept it as truth. Another example is Fox’s own slogan of “Fair and Balanced.”

Do we do this? Yes, we do. How about endless, endless repetition of the fact that:-

• The President is weak
• The President is a corporate tool of Wall Street
• The President just isn’t into you
• The President is just like Bush
• The President isn’t a good negotiator
• The President caved
• The President caved
• The President caved
• The President caved

Get the picture? There are people out there right now on our side, who won’t believe anything else, other than the most pejorative talking points about this President; and some of them are people who should know better.

13. Guilt by Association. This is a favorite of Glenn Beck and Andrew Breitbart, both of whom have used it to decimate the careers and lives of many good people. Here’s how it works: if your cousin’s college roommate’s uncle’s ex-wife attended a dinner party back in 1984 with Gorbachev’s niece’s ex-boyfriend’s sister, then you, by extension are a communist set on destroying America. Period.

You know, the old Blue Dogs have taken some knocking in the past three years. So much so to the extent, that I had a very unwise sould from the Commonwealth of Virginia tell me that she was glad a Tea Partier had unseated Rick Boucher, an established, moderate Democrat of 30 years’ standing in the midterm elections. If you’re going to vote for a Blue Dog, she reckoned, you may as well vote Republican.

Rick Boucher was not Ben Nelson or Joe Manchin. He was a loyal Democrat who voted with the party, but because he was centrist and veered centre-Right, he was deemed a Blue Dog, and therefore, unworthy of serving, even if that meant losing a Democratic seat in the House of Representatives.

The Hamsherites think that way too. In fact, they’ve put together a group who are looking to find someone either to primary the President in 2012 or to run a third party candidate; and you know what? They don’t give a rat’s ass that such a tactic would literally hand the White House front door key to a President Bachmann or Perry or Pawlenty, because they reckon that the Democratic party needs a shakedown like this to reform along more Progressive lines. After all, a Presidential term is only four years, right?

Wrong.

The last time a serving Democratic President was primaried, we got 12 years of Republican rule – those 12 years which set us firmly on the road to hell from which we’re desperately trying to find an exit. Peeps, this current Republican party isn’t the party of the smiling Gipper. It’s people are, at best, Goldwater’s grandchildren; at worst, they’re the natural successors to the Koch-funded John Birch Society. They’re Dominionists, intent on turning this country into a Christian theocracy. They come with Ayn Rand in one hand and thumping a Bible against their hip with the other. They want to control women’s reproductive rights, ditch the Department of Education and public schools and live by states and property rights. This is back to the future, big time!

Anytime we label any Democrat pejoratively, we lessen the strength of the Democratic party.

Cynthia Boaz listed 14 different propaganda tactics employed by Fox and the Right to brainwash people. The Left, aided and abetted by MSNBC and other entities, is guilty of following 12 of those 14 propaganda techniques, albeit modifying them to suit their own agenda. But the difference is that the Right is using those techniques in order to demonise the opposition – us – whilst we on the Left, some of us, at least, use these techniques less effectively against the Right, but – perversely – more effectively against ourselves.

Admittedly, the plebescite of the Left is often led by the short and curlies by professional hacks who masquerade as Leftwing pundits – Huffington comes to mind, and she’s anything but. Yet consider that Hamsher owns a public relations firm who represents and advises Republican candidates, that Greenwald has been connected with the Cato Institute and the Koch brothers and that several of these celebrity talking heads have a past history of being neocon Republicans, themselves. Even Bill Maher, who repeatedly and incorrectly labels himself a Progressive, is far too cosy with the likes of Darrell Issa and Andrew Breitbart.

So going into the 2012 election and aiming for a Democratic President securing a second term, all we seem to have managed to do is create a house divided against itself, whose foundations, the base, are anything but strong.

And, please, don’t patronise me by pushing the old chestnut of the President abandoning his base. His base abandoned him the minute they ceded their capacity for critical thinking to those who profit from dividing and conquering. Or maybe it’s just more comfortable being morally right in Opposition with no responsibility to govern?