Well, well, well, elections actually do have consequences, don’t they? Millions of Americans are indeed suffering the real consequences of the Republican Party’s mealy-mouthed, yellow-streaked performance during campaign ’08.
Oh sure, both the Democrats and the willfully myopic media are most to blame for the Obama presidency, but it is high time that the Republican Party hotshots do a little introspecting of their own.
How is it that the American electorate knew so little about Barack Obama that they could stay stoned on hope-dope all the way to the voting booth? How is it that Jeremiah Wright’s racist, anti-Semitic tirades had not been heard by every man and woman in America before election day? What yellow-bellied nincompoops permitted the Democratic Party to turn the presidency of the United States of America into a garish, iconographic, messianic ego trip for a single individual with no qualifications but a teleprompter and a real-world resume fit for the back of a postage stamp?
Election ’08 was a clear case of Republican abdication. It was a propaganda war fought banana-republic style and John McCain was all but missing in action. Barack Obama didn’t have to win. All he had to do was show up for his coronation. Heck, the guy didn’t even have to put an American flag in his lapel or lift hand to heart during the national anthem. He just had to show his face, remind Republicans at every weak moment that he was black and the whole lot of hotshots sang his praises almost as much as his Democrat enablers.
Now, we’re clinging to the cliff’s edge with one chance to pull ourselves back from the brink of history’s dustbin. We can all see Greece from our bedroom windows and Republicans must get their act together and start winning the propaganda war. PDQ.
Here are five essentials that will turn the tide.
Illustration courtesy of Bosch Fawstin. See more of his art, comics, and writing at his blog here.
5. Acknowledge the darned war, stupid!
One would really need to be a ninny living under a rock buried in the Potomac River for 50 years not to be aware of the Left’s propaganda machine. When Hillary Clinton famously used the phrase “vast right-wing conspiracy” in a 1998 interview to distract and confuse the public regarding her husband’s lying and Oval-Office debaucheries, it was pure projection.
A lie, yes, but the phrase so served its purpose that both Clintons were able to portray themselves as hapless victims rather than ruling-class criminals. Their rehabilitation has been so thorough and effective that Bill Clinton remains the publicly glorified godfather of the Democrat Party and Mrs. Clinton is the liberal-regaled secretary of state.
The phrase – though it’s been used by the Right to great mockery benefit – also allowed much of the Left’s politics of personal destruction a la Alinsky to come out into the open. Hollywood came through with a documentary depicting The Hunting of the President and the Clintons’ propaganda coup was utterly complete.
The so-called “vast right-wing conspiracy” is such a joke that Republican candidates often fare worse within their own party than they do in the judgment of the broader public.
The Alinskyite polarization of George W. Bush was one of the most successful propaganda campaigns in history. It was so complete that by the end of his two terms, prominent conservative writer Peggy Noonan declared in print and on TV that “George W. Bush has destroyed the Republican Party,” and many others agreed with her. No mention was made of the fact that for eight years, GW Bush had been openly referred to as the second coming of Adolf Hitler and that films about his assassination won awards from the same groups that had hailed The Hunting of the President only a few years prior.
When Sarah Palin lifted her pit-bull-in-lipstick foot to the Republican stage in 2008, it took all of five minutes for her to get the rhetorical bulls eye on her forehead. The same Peggy Noonan declared on an open mike that with Palin’s nomination, the election was “all over.”
That’s your “vast right-wing conspiracy” in circular firing squad action.
And now, in 2011, it’s already begun in earnest. Republican candidates are falling all over themselves to attack their intra-party competition, giving fodder to the Democrat Party Noise Machine that will be used nonstop in 2012 to bring Obama to a 2nd term.
If Republicans don’t acknowledge that this is a war for the future of America and learn to fight back, then this country is headed for the dustbin of history.
4. Embrace Tea Party principles or prepare to perish.
There really ought not to be a single Republican, whether on a town council or in the U.S. Congress, who would not boldly and rightly declare his support of Tea Party principles: government according to the Constitution on the morally right footing of prudence and frugality.
The Tea Party is a pure gift from heaven for the Republican Party and any of them that haven’t recognized this reality are truly not fit for public office.
Every single Republican, when begged by liberal commentators to denounce or distance himself from the Tea Party “extremists,” ought to respond boldly:
Of course, I support the Tea Party. It would be downright un-American not to support this citizens’ movement for constitutionally accountable government. The Tea Party is as all-American as it gets. Tea Party patriots stand for government according to the Constitution and have risen in response to the current administration’s “Can we get away with it? Yes, we can!” style of authoritarian rule that is killing our economy and guilefully stealing our freedom. Liberty lost is no small thing and I applaud these citizens for their valiant stand.
Period. No argument. No dallying or mealy-mouthed responses that the Left uses to divide and conquer every chance they get.
Tea Party extremists? I’ll tell you what’s extreme. Passing a one-party health-care takeover without a single thought as to what horrors will ensue when businesses and families and state governments actually get to read the damned bill. Now that’s extreme. And anyone who doesn’t recognize that tyrannical power-grab ought to hang his head in shame and exit the public square posthaste.
The Party of Emancipation had best remember its freedom root or prepare to go the way of the Whigs. If Republicans can’t elucidate the principles of equality of opportunity as the underlying principle of both their own founding and of the U.S. Constitution, then they really have no business continuing as a political party. Liberal-light only gets us to the cliff’s edge a bit slower. Socialism is a proven country-killer and only a ninny would support it even in watered-down fashion.
Image: Minerva Studio /Shutterstock
3. Establish a message-war office and find a general able to see clearly and talk plainly.
When the Republicans took back the House in 2010, it should have marked the beginning of the end of not only the Obama presidency, but also the Democrat propaganda victories. But that hasn’t happened.
Less than one year after the Tea Party wave of 2010, the Republicans are once again battered and bloody — clobbered in the propaganda war. Democrats have already effectively employed their vicious propaganda machine to great success.
Republicans are now branded as “hostage-takers,” when they fight for prudent spending cuts. Republicans are now called “terrorists” by the #2 Democrat in the country. The Tea Party has been smeared as “extremist” for supporting government accountable to the Constitution instead of accountable to ACORN. The Congressional Black Caucus is variously employing racialist scare tactics to tar and feather anyone who opposes anything they want. The “they’re all a bunch of racists” ploy is trotted out to protect the president from valid criticism.
And where are the Republicans?
They should be running help-wanted ads around the country for a General Patton of messaging.
Instead they regularly line up in public to wring their hands in their political aprons as though they’re waiting for mommy to come in and put the Democrat ruffians in the corner for time-out. Speaker Boehner lets go with a few tears and then romps off to play golf with his arch-enemy, the tyrannical power-grabbing president.
If you want to win, people, you had better learn that in a propaganda war for hearts and minds, there is no room for off-message gadabouts. Show the people you mean business and show it often and together as a united front.
There should be aggressive message-points sent out to every single Republican every single day. No Republican office-holder ought ever appear on television without an aggressive plan to counter Marxist propaganda. There is no one to bail out the American people. We’re it. We go down and Western civilization is history.
So find yourselves a general and learn to follow his lead.
2. Defeat Alinskyite political ridicule with unvarnished truth.
Saul Alinsky is not only the father of community organizing for leftist revolution. He is also the progenitor of the politics of personal destruction, using ridicule as a propaganda weapon.
Alinsky posited that “ridicule is man’s most potent weapon,” and in his 1971 treatise, Rules for Radicals, he gave examples of using hyperbolic taunts to frame a political opponent as a racist or extremist. He had done this effectively in his “people’s organizations” all over the country by the time he wrote his infamous rules – the rules we now see ubiquitously employed by every professional leftist whether they realize he came up with them or not.
Alinsky was quite a simpleton, in my humble opinion. So, what does that make the generation of Americans who have fallen for his tacky lures? Well, never mind. That will take historians to figure out later.
The point is that Alinsky derived his whole belief in the potency of ridicule from his own childhood experiences with neighborhood bully-boys. Saul was small and without an athletic bone in his fragile body. Pudgy and soft, the little Saul was often the target of neighborhood thugs. With no father residing at home, Saul had no man to teach him how to withstand the hard knocks of childhood. Alinsky saw the taunts of the neighborhood bullies work for them time and again. Eventually these tormentors set the whole paradigm for his future program of ideological warfare. (My complete “Defeating Political Ridicule” column is here.)
But Alinsky was really just a rabble-rouser with an audience of gullible Boomer leftists eagerly eating out of his rhetorical hand.
Ridicule is not man’s most potent weapon.
The Truth is.
It always has been and always will be. The only time ridicule wins is when the target of it is weak, cowardly, and won’t stand his ground with the truth.
Every time – every single time! – any Republican gets ridiculed for being a “granny killer” or a “racist” or a “child-hater,” he needs to forcefully rebut that ridicule with the unvarnished truth. He needs to know those are fighting words and warrant only the most vehement response possible:
Racist? Are you out of your mind calling any Republican a racist? Barack Obama is president of the United States of America for one reason and one reason only. Because the Republican Party was born, elected Abraham Lincoln, and fought a civil war to make it possible. If the Democrats had had their way, no black man ever could have even voted, much less run for president. Stop this nonsense of calling Republicans racists. Democrats are still keeping most blacks down and dependent and one president with a D in front of his name won’t change that. Only restoring economic opportunity will.
If modern Republicans, the heirs of Lincoln’s liberty legacy, want to know how to fight this propaganda war they need to take a lesson from black conservatives. Here’s how some of the most prominent black conservatives tell it:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jxEYfKWqZ-w&feature=related
This is not a movie or a child’s game. And until Republicans learn to stop taking the ridicule-bait, they are toast.
1. Republicans must stop asking, “What would Ronald Reagan do?” and start asking, “What would Vince Lombardi do?”
The Republican team is getting pounded in the propaganda war. It’s fourth quarter and the economy clock is ticking at double-speed. Democrats have the ball on our twenty-five yard line and are bringing in every media special-team star in their deep-bench lineup to ensure another touchdown.
When Ronald Reagan began his bid for the presidency, the ball was back on the Democrats’ 20 yard-line, due only to quarterback Carter’s record-setting number of snap fumbles and the Iranian interception. The Democrats tried to put in a substitute quarterback – Ted Kennedy – but Carter successfully lobbied his forces to remain in the game. Teams divided don’t stand a chance and Carter lost that one to the amiable Reagan.
That was then; this is now.
Using their propaganda prowess in one amazing political jujitsu after another, the Democrats have now got possession of the ball deep in our territory and only a fully united, fully fired-up total adrenalin push can score a save-America touchdown for 2012.
What would Vince Lombardi do? Well, he wouldn’t go all soft on us, now would he? He wouldn’t countenance half-hearted efforts to get the ball back to the fifty yard-line. Lombardi wouldn’t go with a quarterback known for buckling under pressure or handing off to the other team with insouciant amiability.
No, Vince Lombardi only respected all-in efforts and single-minded focus on winning. Some of his “winner” quotes have been household expressions in my house for as long as I can remember:
- Winning isn’t everything; it’s the only thing.
- If winning isn’t important, why do they keep score?
- Winners never quit and quitters never win.
- The dictionary is the only place where success comes before work.
- Perfection is not attainable, but if we chase perfection, we can catch excellence.
- People who work together will win, whether it be against complex football defenses, or the problems of modern society.
So, what would Vince Lombardi do in a Republican debate? He would at least remember which damned team he is on! He wouldn’t attack his own teammates. He would know that quarterbacking means having your whole team with you if you are the one who gets put in the game.
What would Vince Lombardi do in a propaganda war? He would chase perfect attainment of constitutional small government and thereby attain excellence. He wouldn’t start the game giving the other team half of its own needed touchdowns.
What would Vince Lombardi do if asked by a liberal media special-teams Dem player to condemn his teammate? He would remember that the goal is to win, idiot. And he would stick together with his own teammate. Boldly. With fire in the belly. And a take-no-prisoners attitude.
Amiability and congeniality might be enough to win when the other team is back on their 20-yard line and the country has all the time in the world to save its economic backside, but that just won’t cut it in 2012. Republican candidates had better get in touch with their inner Lombardi, or prepare to hand the game ball once again to Barack Obama.
Only complete victory for the Republican liberty party can save America now.
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