Doing it right: the Dallas Tea Party answers Keith Olbermann’s charges of racism with reason, civility, media savvy and snark.
No yelling, no getting upset, no name calling: the Dallas Tea Party is too smart too play the Alinsky game. Are they going to win over Keith Olbermann with this? No, of course not, but that’s not the point. The point is that moderates and independents see a positive depiction of the Tea Party addressing Keith’s accusations with calm and a sense of humor.
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What has been interesting to me about Obama’s attempts to marginalize Fox News is the casual, pseudo-reasonable words the administration is using. It interests me because this is one of the most subtle and ruthless uses of Alinsky tactics I’ve seen.
Deuce Geary over at The Skepticrats has rightly pointed out the “wolf’s words in sheep’s clothing” aspect of the administration’s position and how this is being glossed over by many in the main stream media.
Where he and I part company on this one is on attributing this offensive against Fox to Obama being thin skinned about criticism. I don’t think that’s the issue at all: I think what we are seeing is a very powerful use of Alinsky tactics in a very well choreographed way.
To show what I mean, let’s talk about the polarized world view that the Alinsky acolytes on the far left are pushing:
When I pull out this diagram, anyone’s eye is immediately drawn to the over simplification and depiction of everyone to the right of the Mean Green New Left as on the Far Right but what is interesting, and applicable here, the Mean Green do not speak of themselves as any farther to the left than the classic Democrat party.
When you hear the Mean Green speak, they invariably describe their opposition as having moved to the “extreme Right” or the “radical Right,” when they are not actually calling their opposition Nazis or American Taliban, but the Mean Green do not speak of themselves as the “Far Left” or “Extreme Left” or “Radical Left.” Instead we hear the term “Progressive.”
This is a subtle and clever exercise in NewSpeak. Remember that one of the goals of Alinskyism is getting moderates who were leaning to your side to join forces with you. This is done in part by portraying the opposition as extreme, and thus scaring people into joining you for protection, but it is also done by masking your own extremism.
Think about yourself as a moderate, centrist liberal who is concerned with the horrifying rise of extreme, radical, far right, Nazi-Taliban-Fundamentalists that the Mean Green and their Main Stream Media allies keep telling you about. Which sounds more appealing to you:
Of course the two alternatives aren’t alternatives at all, they are the exact same Mean Green, far left. This is what we are seeing here. Which advice to country is more likely to appeal to moderates and independents:
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Who’s fault is it that it looks like we’ll get health care transmogrification (transmogrification because it is change but it is not reform)? The Republicans. Olympia Snowe is only the tip of an iceberg of RINOs that have failed conservatives on this issue but at least she is standing up for her RINO beliefs and that makes her more honest than most of her brethren.
Just as an aside, I was looking for some word meaning change that did not carry a positive connotation and I found Transmogrification. It means “the act of changing into a different form or appearance (especially a fantastic or grotesque one).” Thus I think that many of the current Obama proposals should not be referred to as proposals for “change” or “reform” but rather as proposals for transmogrification. But anyway, back to the theme of the post.
Steve Chapman of The Chicago Tribune wrote an extremely perceptive column awhile back where he pointed this out:
But for four years under President Bush, we had not only a Republican president but also a Republican Congress. And what happened? Nothing. Republicans left health care reform to wait until the Democrats regained power, and now the Democrats have. One reason the president has a good chance of getting ambitious legislation passed this year is that so many health care failures have gone unaddressed for so long.
The CATO Institute has provided a good summary of free market health care reform ideas, all of which should have been pushed hard when Republicans had the chance.
Think of how different the debate would be now if the Republicans had attempted this, even if they had failed to pass it:
Perhaps most importantly, the Republicans had a chance to break the linkage between employers and health care since anytime there is a recession people will rightfully be extraordinarily concerned about their access to health care as long as it is linked to their employment.
It doesn’t take a political genius to see that as soon as there is a great increase in unemployment and job insecurity any party that runs around talking about a public option is going to get major traction for it. Did the Republicans put any thought into this? Oh hell no.
What did we get from the Republicans under Bush instead? The fantastically expensive Prescription Drug Entitlement program. With this program, Republicans told the nation that:
When this was the Republican position just a few years ago, is it any wonder that Republican opposition to Obama’s plan now is seen as hollow? The Republicans have reaped what they sowed and, while the Republicans posture, conservatives and conservative ideas get screwed. Let’s close with another great quote from Steve Chapman:
The truth is Republicans just can’t muster an interest in the subject until a Democratic president comes along and offers legislation, which is their cue to wake up and scream in horror. They solemnly agree the existing system has a host of serious flaws. But they can never get excited about fixing them – only about making sure Democrats don’t get to.
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One of the keys to establishing collectivism is convincing people that they are powerless individually and can only be saved by big government or, alternatively, by an avant-garde of leftists who will establish collectivist government. This is working pretty well in San Francisco and here’s an example I walk past on my way to work:
Conveniently for the hopeless folks in the Western Addition, I’ve already got a logo for their little revolution. I hope they like it.
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I lost a bet this morning. Over breakfast my wife said “Obama won the Nobel Prize” and I said “No way in Hell.” It was too absurd to be true so I figured betting on it was a sure thing. The magic of Google over the iPhone soon disabused me of this notion. So now I need to get all worked up and attack Obama just relax.
Sometimes something upsets you and you have all this anger you don’t know what to do with, so you blow up on someone who hasn’t really done anything wrong. This is very human but it is also wrong and, if you do it in public and especially if you do it in front of people you want to respect you, it is just counter productive. So who’s fault is it that Obama got the Nobel Peace Prize?
Obama didn’t give the prize to himself and there’s no evidence that he or any cronies lobbied for it. The Nobel Prize committee is evidently a bunch of Mean-Green, left wing idiots, but we should have figured that out when they gave the prize to Al Gore so:
Lashing out at Obama over unjustified accolades is not a new problem for conservatives and it is not going away any time soon. The Main Stream Media (MSM) has has been fawning over Obama for a long time and they’ll still be idolizing him like teen age girls at a Jonas Brothers concert a year from now. This will piss off conservatives pretty much every day along the way but, just like the Nobel prize, it is not Obama’s fault.
Obama is the lightning rod standing out from large and often amorphous or anonymous groups of Mean-Green left wing idiots who do things like give him the Nobel Peace Prize but the lightning rod is not to blame for the lightning. Conservatives who respond to the Peace Prize announcement by criticizing Obama come off like a man who’s had a hard day at work coming home and kicking his dog.
I think a good response to the prize announcement for conservatives is “I don’t know what the Nobel Prize committee was thinking and frankly I don’t care what they are thinking anymore. Let’s talk about free market health care reforms.”
Update: Iowahawk is on the job, treating the Nobel Prize committee with all the respect they deserve in Membership Has Its Privileges.
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