We’ve Got the Narrative, Now Don’t Get Cocky
As a conservative though, I can’t help remembering that we’re not all that many years beyond the time when that particular shoe was on the foot of conservatives and Republicans. The Right was dominated by the extremes of the anti-abortion movement, complicated by the ultra-religious conservatives who saw the opportunity to marry together their faith and their politics, and to tie it all onto an important platform plank of the conservative agenda. I recall quite vividly the ‘90′s Summer of Love protests of abortion clinics — I lived in Wichita at the time — when the late late-term abortionist George Tiller was established as one of the key lightning rods for pro-life protests and anti-abortion ecstatic fervor.
But I mostly remember cringing at how the nuts the left were laughing at, and that the media was so gleefully portraying, had effectively become the face of the conservative ideology. No discussion of conservative ideals could occur without conservatives first having to acknowledge and tap-dance around the worst of whatever the worst extremist’s latest rant or action happened to be. Being pro-life meant you had to explain why you didn’t support bombing abortion clinics. Being Christian meant you had to explain how you didn’t really want a theocracy in our government. It was pretty awful, made worse by the simple fact that the blogosphere hadn’t even begun to make inroads into the monopoly that the mainstream media held over the narratives.
Times have changed. That we even have Crying Man to smirk at or that the Occupy movement collapsed so quickly are markers illustrating just how different things are compared to just a couple decades ago. With the power of the internet, conservatives are now in the unique, and ironic, position of being able to capitalize on the newly turned tables. For this election cycle, it’s liberals who are being defined by the left’s craziest of the crazies. It’s liberals who have to explain why the trespassing, violence, drug use, rape, and rioting of the Occupy movement don’t really represent their socioeconomic viewpoints. It’s liberals who have to explain whether or not they really believe that “democracy has ended,” like their unstable Crying Man.
Or why they’re giving money to violent felons who use SWATing and malicious prosecution to silence their opponents.
As much as I love the irony of seeing liberals squirm with the same problems they have for years inflicted upon conservatives, I feel that we conservatives ought to be cautious. It’s way too easy to get complacent and lazy watching liberals implode, foisted on their own petards as the seeds of their self-imposed ideological isolationism have finally taken root to grow a bumper crop of weeds. It’s way too easy to convince ourselves that, given the recent decline in liberalism’s shining star, we don’t really have to push ourselves and stay engaged in our own ideals and values.
The mainstream media still carries the power to offset much of the damage that the left has inflicted upon itself. And yes, the blogosphere and internet are providing a baseline connectivity that conservatives have never really had before, a Fifth Estate to balance against the biases that seem to be so inherent in the Fourth. But it’s important to recognize the notion that as Americans, conservatives and liberals, we should be able to express our ideals without having to resort to mocking the misguided or insane. Remember that fortunes and misfortunes can trade places easily, especially when we choose to ignore important issues in order to laugh at the other side’s buffoons.
Conservatives may be up in this election cycle, but we will only stay up as long as we stay focused on the big picture. And if that means that we can’t wallow in the giddiness of the damage Crying Man and Occupy have inflicted on liberals, well then, so be it. We’ll just have to be satisfied with the knowledge that we don’t have to paint clown faces on our opponents to win our arguments.
“We’ll just have to be satisfied with the knowledge that we don’t have to paint clown faces on our opponents to win our arguments.”
But what if we do? It’s better to be safe. Besides, it’s good for morale. And we can walk and chew gum at the same time.
Since the Libocrats control the vast majority of the media, painting clowns faces on the opposition is a luxury we would be wise to resist. Notice what just happened yesterday when some Daily Caller guy interrupted the neo-marxist usurper as he was announcing the evisceration of our immigration laws. The story has largely become one of the incivility of right-wingers who are picking on the poor victim Black President, as well as, the innocent children of illegal immigrants.
What must be done is a very straightforward attack on the narrative contorting machine that passes for the MSM these days. And the best way to attack these passive aggressive charlatans is with mockery and derision. A constant stream of commercials mocking the Obama campaign handlers as ring leaders of a ten ring circus. Make it an ongoing series with shadowy voices discussing how to spin the narrative into the irrelevant pseudo-controversies that they are shoving on us over shots of the media headlines reacting to their nonsense.
As the campaign progresses have them discussing their contrivances over shots of headlines detailing the falling economy. This should be done by the PACs and not the Romney campaign, call it the “Committee For Economic Responsibility”, or such, and once this narrative is established through repetition have Romney himself refer to it in the debates when Skippy tries to dodge responsibility for his ridiculous economic policies. In other words, make the Obama phenomenon of a half-talented fraud propped up by a complicit media machine a central issue of the campaign. Let’s face it, these people are professional liars and we can never beat them at their own game so we might as well hammer them over the head with the truth.
I haven’t contributed any money to the Romney campaign, but set up a PAC that puts out commercials like that and I will gladly fork over my hardly won money. Sorry for the length.
It’s not an either or proposition.
We need multifaceted attacks on the Left. We need a counter-street protest movement. We need our own media outlets (because it will be nearly impossible to retake the ones that Far Leftists have taken over whilst we slept walked).
We need comedians ridiculing Leftwingers and their belief system(s).
And that doesnt mean that we dont have an intellectual assault on their positions. We need those too.
It’s “hoist on their own petards” and you’re a po-faced scold.
Just another French fart joke.
Um, Senior Weasel, it is actually not “hoist on their own petards” either. The quote from Shakespeare’s Hamlet is “hoist WITH his own petard” (emphasis mine). A petard is an explosive device that was used to blow open gates or breach walls. If a military engineer accidentally set it off while deploying it, it would blow him in the air – or hoist him up, hence, “hoist with his own petard”.
So, your argument is that it was hard on the Conservatives when the Liberals made fun of silly Conservatives, therefore it would be really mean and nasty for the Conservatives to do the same thing to the Liberals.
That’s completely pathetic.
Why not just fly a big white flag right now and get it over with? Preemptive surrender. I’d rather have you as an enemy than as a friend.
To quote Michelle Malkin after the 2010 election: “No retreat. No surrender. No compromise.”
The Left’s favorite radical, Saul Alkinsky, said “Make your opponent live up to their own rules.”
They’re the ones who set the civility bar high over a year ago. Now they’re whining because the new media keeps reminding them of it.
My heart bleeds. /s
Let’s not forget what Saul Alinsky had to say about ridicule. It is the most potent weapon of all against your opposition.
Turn them into laughingstocks. Let them be embarrassed to admit that they actually believed all this stupid crap, and that idiots like the Crying Man and the Occutards were their allies.
Indeed.
Use the enemies favorite weapons against them. Play to win. After we win, we can have intellectual conversations about the appropriateness of some wartime propaganda, Japanese internment, and firebombing German and Japanese cities.
More of Ye Olde RINO “Oh, we’d best be careful, lest we *offend* anyone!” CR*P.
I’d put aside the author’s use of the term “anti abortion” rather than “pro life”…except that it exemplifies just what I mean so well:
rather than honestly see the difference between the ignorant and confused OWSers and people who hold to a moral system and – gasp! – actually practice it, the author calls both “extreme.”
DEATH TO RINOy WIMPINESS. THIS IS *WAR*.
If you don’t get it, get the h*ll out of the way.
Ditto!
Awesome!
“This is a revolution, dammit! We’re going to have to offend somebody!”
– John Adams, 1776
Crying Moron has no interest in Democracy because here’s how it normally works: you don’t flee the state and hide to undo the results of an election. You don’t mount a recall campaign to undo the results of an election. You don’t occupy a capitol building by force because an election didn’t go your way.
For this idiot to start whining about Democracy when his own side has shown the least interest in the process is pretty typical of the delusion one finds on the political Left today. The most simple comparisons are a Rubik’s Cube and mystery wrapped in a riddle and shoved under the Sphinx.
“The most simple comparisons are a Rubik’s Cube and mystery wrapped in a riddle and shoved under the Sphinx.”
That is very good!
“up the Sphinxter” even better
When one finds his mortal enemy digging their own grave, there can be no higher moral duty than to hand him a shovel.
When liberals lose, they are over-emotional twits. When liberals win, they are over-emotional twits. But there is nothing wrong when our side wins and we give them a dig such as the likes as they have given us for years for, ours are genuinely justified when we do it.
There’s really no more room for quiet dignity in this contest though there are opportunities when it’s appropriate, such as W’s class and poise during the portrait unveiling in the white house a couple weeks ago while Obama took yet another stab at him.
The left’s Goebbels-like broken record of lie-repeating while increasing the volume may have worked in creating Hitler’s Germany but Americans have tired of the whiner-in-chief constant complaining and the supporters of the regime coming out of the woodwork with their social-justice demands. Racism and discrimination complaints in corporate America are up 200% this past three years. The news won’t report on it but it’s understood that with this clown in office and his porn-stash AG, they are declaring war on WASP’s with fabricated complaints.
Again, they are simply angry…and they have never been taught how to put their anger to productive use; Instead being fed that they are all victims and they whine incessantly to get their cookies.
Therefore, when we get to shut them down and snark at them when doing so, nothing is lost because they will hate us no matter what. We will not change their minds. Your article is akin to appeasing muslims who want to kill us, as if it’s our fault for their hatred toward us.
Illogical. They deserve as much ridicule as can be mounted against them.
Another simple comparison is taking a look at the 8 murders and 40 wounded in Chicago alone last weekend. Any press releases from the NBA Players Assoc.? Any pronouncements from Al Sharpton or the NAACP? Any call from the families of the victims to civil rights attys. and from them to CBS News and Reuters? No.
That’s because it doesn’t fit the narrative that black folks, who are murdered 94% of the time by other black folks, are in fact being killed by non-whites and the police. It doesn’t fit the narrative that black folks are under assault in a racist America. An America where the New Jim Crow stipulates that whites in fact commit as much crime as black folks but aren’t caught as often or sentenced as harshly. The black Left uses drug arrests to make this case even while not mentioning similar levels of crime across the board that have nothing to do with stop and frisk or driving while black. It’s similar to the middle east: if Israelis kill two Arabs it gets fairly equal space to hundreds killed in the Arab Spring.
In Wisc. the Left has consistently portrayed an assault against unions when in fact the issue was public unions and not private. There are no profits to use to bargain with in public unions, only taxpayer money which is used more and more, going up 500% in some American cities in only a few years until 20% of a city’s budget is going just to pay pensions. You can’t do that.
I don’t see this going to a good place. In the last 5 years alone I’ve probably heard more stupid things come out of the mouths of journalists and academics on the Left than in my whole life. I can’t even recognize American history any more. It’s not moon landings and D-Day and the Berlin Wall but only slavery, Jim Crow and genocide while stealing Mexico. Liberals are nuts and that’s all there is to it.
You’d better keep Crying Man away from all razor blades when Romney becomes president. Can you imagine, just IMAGINE, what’s going to happen to the far left if Obama implodes and losses to Romney? I think Barbara Boxer will go on a week-long bender, Nancy Pelosi’s face will freeze for good (just like the Joker’s in Batman), Harry Reid will lose what little blood he has left in his head, and Barney Frank will immerse himself in Judy Garland ballads. It will be bad because it could be liberalism’s last gasp in this country. Never again will they control both Congress AND the White House. Well, at least not for a generation or more. People have long memories and just remember how long it was before another Democrat got into the White House after Carter lost.
We have a golden opportunity to turn everybody on the far left into Crying Man. Let’s keep our eye on the ball, get everybody out there to vote in November, raise money for Romney, and keep the focus on beating the worst liberal that ever inhabited the White House. And on election night in November we’ll supply the Democrats with the Kleenex tissues.
GREAT POST! I have to admit that I didn’t have any problem with the article, and can sympathize with the points made by the author, but I have to admit that I like the comments much more. The real lesson from this is that even though many of us may be the same players who were around back in the days of the Moral Majority and the Christian Coalition we are not the same in other respects. Those times were probably a necessary prelude to this point in time and taught all of us some important lessons about what works in politics and what doesn’t. I, for one, can both see how the acts of anti-abortion extremists helped bring the issue to the fore, and how a more enlightened and perhaps incremental and constitutional approach will be more effective in achieving an ultimate goal in this battle. The enthusiasm of the day led me and others to begin a learning process involving the re-reading of the founding documents and related literature and commentaries, including The Federalist, and much of the ancient and enlightenment background and philosophy (I now have entire walls of Liberty Fund books, Cambridge series, economics texts, and Penguin paperbacks, along with tons of related miscellany), the result is a more libertarian-leaning and more intellectually entrenched conservative movement that can look at an Occupy movement in it’s incipient stages and shrug it off knowing that it won’t have staying power from the get-go. I hate to be Whiggish, but I really do think history is on our side now.
“Can you imagine, just IMAGINE, what’s going to happen to the far left if Obama implodes and losses to Romney?”
Same thing that always happens. After a brief moment of purported self-reflection, Democrats will conclude that they lost because they’re just too good to get down in the gutter and play the kind of dirty politics that Republicans do.
Then they’ll loudly and boldly proclaim that the election was all about ‘the people’ wanting politicians to reach across the isle and working with the other side.
I may have been missing something, but I do not recall a Conservative analogy to the OWS movement. I don’t recall any church or group of Christians that advocated establishing a theocracy. I do recall protests at abortion clinics, but do not recall any movement that wanted to hunt down and kill abortion providers. I do not recall any mass protests on the part of the Right that bear any similarity to the protests that the Left mounted in Wisconsin. If you read about them I’m fairly confident that they were the fevered imaginary constructs of the Left in the media. As a matter of fact, I have to go to the Internet to learn that there were recent pro-life rallies across the country even as the press publicizes a handful of Leftist protesters at some campaign event. To summarize, I believe that you have simply gotten some old straw men built by the press out of the closet and used them to build a false equivalence. It is true that “the narrative” is no longer totally dominated by the MSM, and that we are no longer at the mercy of the NY Times and the alphabet networks. But I reject the notion that the Right had the same type of crazies as the Left has fielded for the last century.
“Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon.”
“A good tactic is one your people enjoy.”
“Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon.”
That might work – if the target is Crying Man. But he’s not the target.
“A good tactic is one your people enjoy.”
As a retired Army officer, I can say that this is utter nonsense. A good tactic is one that will likely lead to success. Ridicule is not likely to win the battle that we are fighting.
And…. Why all this love and admiration for Alinsky? Do we not have any way to combat his ugliness other than to become him? If not, then the country is doomed.
What success has the U.S. Army had in the last 20 years?
P.S., I don’t call getting stuck in very lengthy quagmires a “success” even if they seem to start out well.
Silly kitty – the army’s job is to break things and kill people. They did their job well and did it quickly. POLITICANS mucked up the victory by trying to nationbuild afterwards. In my view we should have left them to dig their selves out of the debris we left them.
Maybe you never noticed, but among the very biggest advocates for “(Islamic) Nation Building”/”Winning (Muslim) Hearts and (Muslim) Minds”/”COIN” was, and still is, the U.S. Army. Never heard of the name, Petraeus?
During the Cold War, I used to wonder if the Russians had an American equivalent of Bullwinkle’s Boris & Natasha to point and laugh at. And remember how, before the Wall came down, it was an absolute truism that *all* Russian women were beefy and had mustaches? We made it a habit to laugh at 51% of the Russian population … what a nation of Mean Girls.
I think ridicule is an extremely potent weapon. If the rest of the world wants to call us ugly Americans and snark about our inner-looking egotism, then fine. But I don’t see them pointing at us and laughing … until now when Obama is doing smart diplomacy, and then there’s fear of the psychotic unknown mixed in with their laughter.
It was once said that when the British went abroad they acted as if they owned the World, and when Americans went abroad they acted as if they didn’t care who owned the World. Those days are gone. The self-annointed elites of both countries have determined that we of the Anglosphere should apologize for our very existence. The remedy for that is to extirpate the self-annointed elites. The communists weren’t all wrong when they started with putting the college professors out to work the fields.
Laughing matters:
http://bedroomrepublik.wordpress.com/2008/11/06/potential-problems-with-obamas-presidency/
“During the Cold War, I used to wonder if the Russians had an American equivalent of Bullwinkle’s Boris & Natasha to point and laugh at.”
Don’t you remember? Boris and Natasha WERE Russians. It would have been interesting to air Rocky and Bullwinkle in the Soviet Union and see how people there reacted to these supposedly Russian characters….
They were from Pottslyvaina not Russia.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pottsylvania
Pretty sure those are Saul Alinskey quotes.
Ol’ Saul had some nice quips, but “Rules” is pretty much useless to conservatives/Republicans. Alinsky tactics typify the Left’s belief that the Left’s leadership cadres are truly superior people whose role is to lead the mind-numbed robots and useful idiots of the proletariat and fellow-travelling bourgoisie. It is really hard to get a group of independent, free-thinking people to gather for a bean dinner before going to a city council meeting or a legislative hearing, but the useful idiots of the left think that sort of thing is fun.
Conservatives/Republicans should be familiar with “Rules” as it is pretty much the Left’s only playbook – Hell, they’ve been using the same stupid chants for a hundred years – and you need to be able to read the play and defend, or offend, against it, but really the only Alinsky-style tactic that is useful is ridicule and confrontation, and even that has to be carefully done to avoid being off-putting to valuable constituencies. The key lesson from Alinsky for a conservative/Republican organizer or officeholder is to make sure that the Lefties can’t have fun and, especially, can’t have their “Kent State Moment.” Alinsky tactics are predicated on overloading decision and control systems and forcing normally rational, intelligent people into doing stupid, violent, or both things. You can’t give them what they want.
Yes. To restate your point, we need to know enough about alinsky (small ‘a’ intended) to be able to get inside the left’s OODA loop. (Orient, Observe, Decided, Act (Attack)). For example, the Romney campaign is getting kudos for its rapid response efforts; immediate, thoughtful, accurate and direct replies to O’s foolishness…or not when it is a red herring or an attempt to pull the laser beam off target. That then breaks the flow of opponent’s efforts and forces a real time revision, offering more opportunities to hammer the left.
The OODA loop was developed by an Air Force fighter pilot to describe air combat success, but it is effective in many fields.
As old soldier Jeff said, tactics are what works…breaking OODA loops work.
ta
Old Sailor.
Almost all public employee union reps and activists are Alinsky disciples; some of them even know it and have read “Rules” and other communist tactics manuals, most just went to some union workshop or to the Meany School and don’t know the source but are good with having the time off from real work.
I found the key for dealing with their guerilla theater and mau-mau tactics was to never do what they expected you to do. The fatal flaw in most lefty/union planning is predicated on their absolute contempt for their opposition, so they sit in their circle and decide what you’re going to do in response to their plan; they NEVER have a Plan B and since they’re so heirarchal have no ability to react on-scene. The same centralized command that cripples Soviet-style militaries also cripples all lefty activities so long as their opposition is free to improvise.
So, since you can expect the lefties to have had a bean dinner before the legislative hearing, you open all the windows if possible or just install some fans before the meeting; never say anything, never publicly gloat, just bask in the satisfaction of having thwarted their plan and kept them from having fun.
The right thing for the Walker Administration to have done was restrict access to government buildings BEFORE taking the legislative actions against the unions. As a matter of law, the unions have at least as much access as you grant the public, so if the public can endlessly loiter in your capitol, so can the union. But, since they didn’t do that they were stuck with the unions and their minions misbehaving in their capitol. Of course the instinctive thing for a sane person to do when they start stinking up the place is to call the cops – assuming union cops would come – and have them removed, but that’s what they want and they’ll provoke or fake violence and howl about “police brutality,” so, you can’t give them what they want. The key then is to let them be themselves and as sure as the night follows the day, they’ll overplay it and do something disgusting, stupid, or both. The follower cohort in unions or other leftist aggregations suffer from severely arrested development. One of our analytical tools for analysing union complaints was, “would you believe this if your six year old said it.” They are children with no impulse control and little ability to make decisions. That’s the reason the lack of a Plan B is almost always fatal to their cause; when Plan A fails nobody can decide what to do next so the children start playing in the dirt and playing grabass with each other and lose all interest in the intended action. Whomever is on site to lead the masses against the barricades is never more than some powerless and expendable apparachnik, the important people aren’t going to expose themselves to violence or arrest, so nobody on site has the authority to make a new plan. Generally, if you ignore them, they just melt away and if you get lucky some small group will do something really stupid and you can have the cops arrest them and beat Hell out of them in the process – but watch out for the video cameras.
Good points, but also remember the truism about “giving your adversary enough rope to hang himself”. I don’t think for a moment that it was planned, but the occupation of the Madison capitol, and associated actions that flowed along behind that occupation, is what woke millions of people across the country to what public employee unions are about, and why they matter. I never once gave them a second thought before the Battle of First Madison – now I see them as an implacable enemy that should be banned in all 50 states.
I am only one American a thousand miles away from Madison, but that is very true for me. Depending on just what the absolute number is of people who are reacting exactly as I am, the Madison occupation ranges somewhere between a dumb tactical mistake and an unrecoverable act of catastrophic suicide for the public employee unions. Couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch.
@AndrewX
If I thought the Walker Administration purposely gave them enough rope to hang themselves I’d feel better about it all. Really, only the fact that the recall got Nationalized saved the Walker Administration. There are very few people in America who have actually been in an adversarial situation with public employee unions and Walker’s advisors allowed him to make two fundamental mistakes: As was the case with Swartzenegger’s ill-fated initiatives, Walker left the unions’ dues income intact before beginning to confront them, usually in itself a fatal mistake, and, second, he didn’t take the necessary steps to get building access and such in place before the fact. As it turned out well, I fear those lessons will be forgotten. I would NEVER force a pitched battle with a union unless I had a firm grip on their dues income, and its easy enough to do if you know how, but lots of Republicans can’t stand the thought of being called a union buster so they won’t do it. Well, Hell, if you do anything a union doesn’t like you’re going to be called a union buster, so you might as well get your money’s worth and do some union busting.
“No God and no religion can survive ridicule. No political church, no nobility, no royalty or other fraud, can face ridicule in a fair field, and live.” – Mark Twain
“my good friend” and the “spirit of comity” got us to Obama The Traitor. Time to take note tactics which this obscene enemy of The People has used so effectively to subvert America:
Rules for Radicals:
5. “Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon. It is almost impossible to counteract ridicule. Also it infuriates the opposition, which then reacts to your advantage.”
6. “A good tactic is one your people enjoy.”
…
8. “Keep the pressure on, with different tactics and actions, and utilize all events of the period for your purpose.”
…
10. “The major premise for tactics is the development of operations that will maintain a constant pressure upon the opposition. It is this unceasing pressure that results in the reactions from the opposition that are essential for the success of the campaign.”
and most importantly:
13. Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it. In conflict tactics there are certain rules that [should be regarded] as universalities. One is that the opposition must be singled out as the target and ‘frozen.’…
These a$$holes have been waging subversive war against America. Time to pay them back in their own coin.
Yes, the weapon people often fear the most is the main one they themselves use.
Which is why, by the way, if the US announced we are scrapping two entire aircraft carriers and plugging every dollar saved and more into just two defenses – against cyber attacks and against enemy drones – I would stand up an applaud.
If such funds do not come from carriers, the had G–d–d well better come from somewhere, and fast.
The trouble with “their coin” is that Trotsky/Alinsky tactics assume a pig-ignorant group of followers. If you haven’t read Alinsky’s “Rules for Radicals.”, let me commend it to you for an excellent if unintended look at just how haughty and racist a great hero of the oppressed like Alinsky really was. If you’re not leading people who are fundamentally childish and stupid, most lefty tactics simply won’t work and in dealing with Comrade Obama even ridicule based on factual assertions is dismissed as racism.
The key to dealing with today’s lefties is usually to ignore them. Since everything they do is intended to get sane, rational, problem-solving people to do something stupid, if you don’t react, they do ever crazier things trying to get you to react, shedding off support each time they do something crazy and they finally do something so undeniably and indefensively crazy that you can smash them like a bug and not be criticised for it by anyone who matters to you.
Hmmm… I didn’t see anything that calls for a “surrender.” What I did see is a call to keep focused on persuading swing voters that we have better answers – including a better answer to the divisiveness that progressives have created. That means eschewing the satisfaction of mocking, personal assaults. It does NOT mean we have to pull punches in relentlessly attacking what progresses believe, what they do, and their results. The most effective way to persuade the target audience is marshaling facts, logic and reason – coupled with PASSION and CONVICTION – rather than resorting to invective and personal ridicule. Anyway, that’s what I took away from the article, and I think it’s exactly right. The goal is to persuade the uncommitted, and we can’t afford to let fleeting personal satisfaction muddle the message.
Reason? Oh come off it. It’s damned near impossible to reason someone out of a belief he was never reasoned into. I’m sure that there are a lot of rational people out here in flyover territory, more than we’ll ever be given credit for… but a dangerously large percentage of issues in this country — including presidential elections — are still decided by blatant appeals to emotion.
To the uncommitted, your “blatant appeals to emotion” are _at least_ as much a turn-off as a turn-on. It’s only useful for whipping up the committed partisans.
Mock on!
Especially with Mockahantas Warren.
It’s the Alinsky thing to do.
#4 Make your enemy live by their own rules.
“#4 Make your enemy live by their own rules.”
As far as I can tell, the Leftists have only one real rule: “The ends justify the means”. They’re already living by that one and have been for a very long time.
“No discussion of conservative ideals could occur without conservatives first having to acknowledge and tap-dance around the worst of whatever the worst extremist’s latest rant or action happened to be.”
I remember oh-so-well doing just that. Here’s the thing: Am I missing the sight of every “discussion of liberal ideals occurring with liberals first having to acknowledge and tap-dance around the worst of whatever the worst extremist’s latest rant or action (i.e. CryBoy, OWS, Madison Maniacs) happened to be”? Does the left, even at their most moderate, feel at all obligated to point at such people and say, “of course they are damned fools, and I hold them in contempt, but just because there are crazies out there does not discredit my, more moderate, liberal ideas”?
Are they saying this? Anywhere? ‘Cause I sure as hell ain’t seeing it. And the vaunted DNC soldiers of the MSM haven’t even come close to asking, demanding, or expecting that of anyone, no matter how moderate they may say they are.
Deep down, I think the “moderate” left looks at their own crazies in a rather Bolshevik manner. That is to say, the crazies will shatter the barriers and the current order, and then the wise, “moderate and learned” left will roll over the crazies and rebuild on the ruins. (It is of course, all too likely that the moderates will have their throats cut by the revolutionists/anarchists, when push comes to shove. Standard Operating Procedure.)
So yet again, advantage, left. Conservatives have to bend over backwards to disassociate themselves from the nuts and racists, the left will never have to answer for their own Stalinists and outright totalitarians. They can use them and back away from them at their leisure, depending on convenience.
We should be sure we answer the argument being made. Crying man wasn’t saying democracy died because his side lost (well not just that.) He was saying that because his side was outspent, Citizen’s United spelled the end of democracy. Forget that it is not true he was outspent, the common refrain from liberals is that if they lost an election, it was only because they lacked the money to make their case. They cannot admit that their case was heard and rejected.
Now we can get out the clown paint.
There is always a fringe–by definition. It cannot be avoided. It never will be avoided. It is stupid to argue that it can be eliminated. It is a waste of time to think it can be eliminated. It should be accepted. This author seems to think that the anti-abortion movement is dead. Hardly. The crisis we are facing at the moment is fiscal. It is an existential crisis. Other issues take a back seat.
I made a couple of comments on a blog post. You wrote a whole column. Stuff like this is good for morale.
“It’s just that Crying Man’s amusing angst probably isn’t worth the time that’s been devoted to it — he’s just another nut, and will not very likely be in a position to make policy decisions for the liberals or the unions anytime soon.”
Two Words – Van Jones.
Dang, and just when I was going to sign up for @RomneyBus twitterfeed to catch the next honk-fest!
I really don’t get the point of this article. The only thing I know when your competitor/adversary/enemy is on his way of hanging himself not only you get out his way, you also give him more rope to expedite his death. You like it or not Politic is blood sport.
What you say would be a valid argument if we were talking about conservatives and liberals.
But we are not.
After the long march through the institutions, the subversive left has conquered the media and the universities and has succeeded in electing a president who is maiming the Constitution, the free-market economy, our military might, the power of the dollar.
The traditional media applaud this subversive project, the democratic party seems unable to denounce the mutation that it has suffered.
These clowns, and dangerous clowns, are trying to destroy this country.
There is no serious debate with someone like that.
We can only denounce the treason and mock the fanaticism of these dangerous imbeciles who have learned absolutely nothing from the last 100 years of history.
And this is not gonna change from election cycle to election cycle: the subversive mob that is polluting the Republic must be denounced for what it is. Today, tomorrow, in any foreseeable future.
Indeed. Informal enforcement of socio-political norms via public ridicule and stigma. Discrimination is good.
What a lame article. This guy’s a proselytizer for the “No Lables” pseudo movement.
Nobody but a few political junkies like us knows who “crying man” is. The people who will decide this election CERTAINLY don’t know or care about who he is. The election starts for real in September.
There’s a problem with this argument, and it’s similar to the problem with Rick Moran.
The underlying premise is that, although politics seems a bit extreme at the moment, in actuality we are just in one of the many cycles of liberalism and conservatism. This too, so the argument goes, shall pass; so let’s not get to bent out of shape about it, and let’s not, God forbid, over-react.
The problem is that the underlying premise is dead wrong. Maybe Crying Man is just a silly overblown fool, but he isn’t the danger. I agree that he too SHALL pass. But the architects behind him aren’t normal, they aren’t a part of the normal ying and yang of American politics, they don’t have the slightest good intention, and they aren’t going away.
So I can’t see cutting them or their lap-dog followers a micro-meter, no matter an inch.
It’s war, and the well-being of humanity is at stake.
And before Naden or Moran, or some other “reasonable man” jumps in and claims my comments are nonsense, think about this. Throughout the history of mankind, tyranny is NORMAL. In fact, it’s more than normal, it’s what people have lived under for all but about 230 years of the ten thousand plus years of human civilization. The freedom we have is unquestionably under assault, from every angle and by people who are dead-set, violently dead-set, on putting things back like they had always been before this country was founded.
It’s not a game and people who act like it is (I’m talking about YOU, Jeb Bush and Romney’s political operatives who don’t really give a shit about anybody but themselvs) are nearly as big a problem as scumbag obama.
In ye olden days Democrats liked the KKK and Jim Crow. After the civil rights movement, the dumbest people I met seemed to be in the GOP, now they seem to be in the Dem Party – the Dem Party is still racist. It’s hard to follow the evolutions and flip-flops and being on the right side of history. The good news in 2012 is that Dems stand between me being perceived as a complete moron and not. It’s a Marching Morons approach I guess but I’ll take the uplift.
The bawler man is no surprise. Liberalism is defined and driven by emotionalism and hysteria. Everything from “I’m offended” to “being compassionate” to “I hate…”. That is why they never foresee the consequences of their actions and why they narcistically cannot respect nor even understand another point of view.
Most ‘liberal/commie/progressive/pinko/useful-idjit’ bastids will use whatever propaganda to lie/deceive/cheat our Republic.
It is NOT our job to play by THEIR rules…but to shine a light on their inherent idiocy, lying bullcaca so that people WAKE UP.
If we play by THEIR rules…we have allowed them to dominate the narrative. Let’s make NEW rules…a huge rule being TRUTH.
Shine the light on them so that the cockroaches scurry.
They are far more terrified by truth than they are by people playing by their piteous playbook.
Their faith in the infallibility of their belief system, to wit, the left side of the left-leaning media, prevents them from even conceiving that there are other perspectives or — gasp — other truths than their own.
Then you’ve got this smug, teasing member of the SCOTUS, a woman who has acknowledged she doesn’t think too highly of the single document she’s sworn to uphold.
Honey, I’ve got some sharp disagreement of my own
And, that is SCARY as all hell.
Poking fun at Crying Man isn’t just fun, it’s a way to hang him and every other nut like him around Progressive’s necks like an albatross, a good tactic in the campaign against them and what they stand for.
There is no such thing as a fair fight, something our side is just coming to understand and make use of. When the other guy is down, don’t wait for him to get back up, stomp on him. Shame and ruin them so badly that they will flinch at the thought of trying their crap ever again.
Next I’d like to see Crying Man pee his pants. Maybe when Obamacare goes down?
I don’t frame any of this as competing ideologies, as conservative v. liberal or as truth v. lies.
There is only one truth, there can’t be competing versions of truth.
We have a system of governance, a structure of governance.
Who wants to support and preserve that structure and who wants to irrevocably alter (“fundamentally change”) the relationship between the citizen and the government ?
Which President has admitted finding the United States Constitution an antiquated document placing unenlightened limits on the powers of the federal government ?
Case closed.
So if the President decides not to follow the law and uphold the Constitution, is the next step for those he is governing to also decide that laws against murder are antiquated, and maybe assassination might be a valid reply to treason? After all, the Secret Service seems to be doing everything in its power to have its agents distracted and unfocused in an open invitation to Mayhem.
Rediculing the gross excesses of your opponents is a good thing, and can do much to undermine their legidimacy. We should never make humor the sole provence of the left. The only caution the author makes that is right is it should not be the only thing we do. We also have to make sure we win the war of ideas, and that our solutions are better than theirs. Comics and intelictuals both have their place, and both should be used.
It’s plenty good to let the liberals hang themselves by their own ropes, but we don’t want to be holding onto the other end when the liberal media remembers that they used to control all the narratives. As stupid as Obama has made liberals look lately, the media’s been knocked for a loop. That won’t last. They’ll remember who they hate and every cheap shot we take will be exploited tenfold against us.
Besides, why in the world would we want to play by the liberals’ rules? Isn’t the whole point about being conservative that we’re *not* liberal and don’t have to act like them? If all we’ve got is childish name-calling, we should just give up and become liberal. Save ourselves the time of fighting like liberals on their media home turf and being made to look even more stupid for doing so. You can’t win, arguing with a three year old.
In the end, if we really believe conservatives the better answers, shouldn’t we trust those answers to win on their own?
I reject the author’s notion of some weird sort of moral equivalency between the old “moral majority” and ows. All you have to do is look at the condition of the DC mall after a rally to know the difference between us and them. Or the media reporting on a conservative rally (or lack thereof) vice a liberal one. “Play nice” when you are being poked in the eye with a sharp stick is never good advice.
I’ve been using fact-based ridicule against Progressive nonsense for nigh onto 10 years, and I s.a.s. ain’t gonna stop now! The last thing I said to my sister on the night of the failed Wisc. recall election was, “I can’t wait to see them start crying.” And, of course, “blame the e-vill Koch Brothers.”
Oh, so Crying Man isn’t Glenn Beck.
‘Don’t spend so much time mocking lefties like “Crying Man.”‘
Hey, do I try and tell you how much time you should spend on YOUR hobbies?