Propaganda pays off

Talk about getting bang for your buck. Read down the comment threads on articles about the current government shutdown crisis-and you'll see that the massive, multimillion-dollar propaganda campaign carried on year after year at the behest of a few thousand billionaires and multimillionaires...has been amazingly successful.

We know a lot more about the human mind than we did even a few decades ago. And amoral people with a vast sense of entitlement have paid skilled operatives to use that knowledge to get many millions of Americans to believe a long list of "facts" that are not factually true.

However, those lies are woven into a pandering, emotionally self-satisfying narrative that makes more "sense" to the average Republican voter than ambiguous, messy reality does.

Reality doesn't stand a chance.

The result is people like the commentors here who absolutely believe that they know more about the Constitution than the Supreme Court and the constitutional lawyer who's our President, more about civics than civics teachers...these are people who believe the political things they believe with same fervor that the more fervent Fundamentalist Christians or Muslims or Jews or Hindus or Buddhist apply to their religious beliefs.

You will also see that this propaganda campaign has inoculated them against reality--given them bogus counter-arguments but even more important, gotten them to believe that Democrats are the enemies of America, and therefore they need not listen to a single word any Democrat says.
When you talk with them in person you can see their faces close up, at which point nothing you say will be processed in their cerebral cortex--it all gets shunted down to the emotional centers in the middle of the brain.

The irony being that their leaders are their actual enemies--enemies who've convinced their victims that they're their friends, in a massive Stockholm Syndrome.

Thus the .1% have become the most successful parasites in Nature--parasites whose victims eagerly present themselves to them to get sucked dry, and then turn angrily on those who are trying to save them.

Apart from the moral horror, it's quite impressive to watch.

Responding to the GOP's condemnation of Lberals/Democrats

I read this succinct diatribe in a major publication's comment thread recently:

 

The Liberal Democrats seek political power by the creation of strife.
_____
They attempt to turn black against white.
_____
They attempt to turn man against woman.
_____
They attempt to turn rich against poor.
_____
They attempt to turn labor against small business owners.
_____
They attempt to turn debtor against creditor.

Here's my response:

Yes, despotic movements always claim that all discontent is due to "outside agitators." Morsi in Egypt. The Mullahs in Iran, Southern whites back in the '60s, who were sure that "their" cullud folk were perfectly content until them Jewish college boys from the North came down to rile them up
.
Meanwhile the Republican Ministry of Propaganda seeks to distract us from:

1. Their war on blacks, spearheaded by their 22-state coordinated program to suppress the black vote, along with a 40 year campaign to "get tough on crime" that puts blacks in jail more often and for far longer than whites apprehended for comparable crimes, then disenfranchises all those black men for life

No wonder they've given up on the black vote.

2. Their war on women who are young &/or single &/or educated &/or not white Anglo &/or not fervent fundamentalist Protestant/Catholic &/or urban, via a national campaign to keep women ignorant about reproduction and fertility control options, keep them from getting HPV vaccinations in time for them to help, keep them from getting abortions even if they've been raped regardless of their age, keep them from getting birth control if they're underage.
No wonder a majority of women consider the GOP the party of old paternalistic white men--white men who adore "their" wimmen, just like they once adored "their" cullud folk.

3. The war on the poor and the middle class, seeing the former's real wages drop and the latter's stagnate for 30 years while the income of the .1% skyrockets in the same timeframe while corporate "welfare" also skyrockets while education and assistance for the neediest is continually cut back to the point where medical care for the poor approaches that of a third world country.

4. The war on small business by the GOP and it big business patrons. Walmart enters a town and dozens of small businesses die, with no net increase in employees there. Farm subsidies that favor a short list of huge agribusinesses hugely while doing nothing for other farmers. Helping big corporations outsource their pollution to all the small businesses and individuals around them. The special breaks and loopholes for big business written into so many bills in the dead of night. The GOP talks "small business" but it's smoke and mirrors.

5. The war on debtors. The GOP's machinations have turned the average college grad into a debtor who may not be able to repay his college loans until he’s middle aged, creating a generation of anxious, compliant workers–workers who can’t escape the burden even if they go bankrupt. Predatory home loan operations where buyers are lied to about the loans by the lenders, and then hundreds of thousands are foreclosed on illegally–going on to this day–while the loans are sold to pension funds and other investors as safe according to bought-and-paid-for ratings agencies, combining to implode the American economy in 2008–and not reformed to this day due to GOP rules manipulation in the Senate.

But Goebbel’s Rules of Propaganda state that you should always accuse the opposition of doing what you yourself are doing so they’ll be distracted into defending themselves instead of going after you. As the entry I'm replying to demonstrates.

The Democrats are no angels, as consulting FactCheck.org and PolitiFact.com will tell you. But those same sources will show that they’re pikers next to the GOP.

Fact checkers do--or don't--tend to their knitting?

The Republican war on fact checkers was predictable, because given what the fact checkers have been saying after the Republican convention, either Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan and their cronies are lying--and lying large--or the fact checkers are lying.

That's the choice.

The least interesting part of the Republican attack is their attempt at cult programming: saying that all the mainstream media is left wing and in the tank for Obama, and then weaving conspiracy theorizing about various associations they say the fact-checking institutions have.

Next comes their habit of simply ignoring fact-checkers' challenges. Romney's been doing this for over a year.

But the most interesting is the Republican Ministry of Propaganda trying to define the fact-checkers' job as only legitimate it they confine themselves to quantifiable assertions and open statements.

For example, last year Romney ran an ad stating that President Obama had said in 2008 that "If we keep talking about the economy, we’re going to lose.”

The ad neglects to mention that Obama was quoting someone in Senator John McCain's campaign. 

But by the GOP's Goodspeak Rules, Romney's ad wasn't lying because Obama did say those words. It's just "interpretation" that journalists have no business doing to call Romney a liar because the words were a quote. 

Thus Lyin' Ryan's lie about the GM plant's closing in his hometown meaning Obama had broken a promise to keep it open was defended as true because even though the plant closed during the Bush administration, laying off its 1200 employees, a few dozen stayed on until April 2009 to finish an order for vehicles being produced on contract for a Japanese carmaker. So it wasn't formally padlocked until Obama was President. But this is lawyers' parsing, like Clinton's notorious "What is the meaning of 'is'?" malarkey. The plant was effectively closed during Bush's reign. And Obama hadn't promised to keep it open--he was making a more general statement, and made good on that general statement when he engineering the GM bailout which did keep many plants open.

If you read what Ryan said carefully, you can see how he was able to get 90% of listeners to believe he said the equivalent of "Obama lied, workers cried," while leaving himself room for his numberless paid defenders to attack the fact-checkers by saying Ryan didn't say precisely what he got his listeners to hear.

So now if you mention Lyin' Ryan to Republicans they can dismiss that sobriquet as fact-checkers' not only being Liberals but also going beyond their mandate.

Ironic how Republicans derided Clinton for such parsing when he was talking about the Lewinsky affair, yet happily do exactly the same thing now. 

Propaganda is often very subtle in its methods. That's how it can communicate racist sentiments to racists that pass right over the heads of nonracist Republicans. Welfare-gangs--street crime memes all signify "Negroes" to racists, while Republican spinmeisters hotly defend harping on such themes as being only what they say they're about. 

These are also shaped charges. Romney gives his acceptance speech without using the word "Welfare" once, yet his advertising in Southern-flavored battleground states depends on the Big Lie that Obama decided to remove work requirements from welfare. He never says "Vote for Romney to stop the Negro illegitimately in the White House from taking white people's money and sending it to Negroes." But that's exactly what his supporters who are racist hear when his ads harp on this theme. Meanwhile his supporters who aren't racist nod their heads approvingly, and those who are in between are delighted because it gives them plausible deniability for their real reason for hating Obama so much. 

And they don't want fact-checkers to check on propaganda.

I wouldn't want them to either if I were them.

The GOP convention's first night theme was "We built it (on a lie)"

There it was, in big letters on the wall of the auditorium. In case you didn't get the message, one speaker after another harped on the theme of entrepreneurial Small Business Job Creators vs. President Obama, who recently told them "You didn't build it." Meaning, they hammered home again and again, that Big Government built it. You were just along for the ride. You owe everything to European Style Socialist Big Government.

So the first evening's theme was a refutation...of something President Obama never said. I mentioned this to a Republican friend of mine, who responded that he heard the clip of Obama saying exactly that himself. I said it was taken out of context. My friend say where did you hear that? I said MSNBC. My friend said "I wouldn't believe anything MSNBC said." I said they played the clip too--only with the words before and after that showed what President Obama meant. My friend said enough talk about politics.

It was exactly as if I said "I support the death penalty as long as it's for murder, as long as there isn't the slightest doubt as to the murderer's guilt (and eyewitness testimony has been proven to be unreliable), and as long as the prosecutor hasn't railroaded the defendant, withholding exculpatory evidence from the defense." And you quote me as saying "I support the death penalty." Did I say that? Yes. Does it say what I meant by itself?

The President said "You didn't build it" in the context of talking about how every successful entrepreneur depends on America's government for the roads his goods travel on, the safety of his warehouse not being plundered by thieves, the communications possible via the Internet (started 100% as a government project), the education he and his employees received--most likely in public schools, the electricity he gets, the plumbing he uses.

That's what the President said. He in no way discounted what successful entrepreneurs bring to the party. He just pointed out that saying "My achievements are 100% attributable to me and no one else" is a slap in the face to our society, and borders on the narcissism of a vain, boastful little boy who can't admit to having ever gotten any help.

The irony piled on irony is that Mitt Romney's signature achievement--rescuing the Salt Lake City Winter Olympics (I mean, other than RomneyCare)--mostly came from getting a $1.5 billion in taxpayer dollars from the Federal government to bankroll it (with a lot of that going to pork for local cronies). You can read the gory details here.

Not to mention the fact that most of the self-made men and women cited in the GOP's "We built it" campaign have turned out to be similarly ungrateful about getting substantial largesse from the government they hate so much. The poster child lady first featured in their campaign turned out to have gotten a huge SBA loan a year before--and was featured in SBA marketing for their program.

Here again, the GOP could make an argument for fiscal conservatism. But they're addicted to the mind-altering drug of the Big Lie, which plays with resentful, fearful, angry, uneducated white men far better than the facts. Plus it doesn't force them to reveal the fact that they aren't fiscal conservatives--their proposals for tax cutting without specified expenditure cutting means they're fake deficit hawks.

But they're real government haters, because their hyper-rich patrons are government haters, because they might make a few less billions that is currently being siphoned out of middle class pockets and into theirs.

Robert Reich says the two fears motivating middle class Americans are "the rot at the top and the mob at the gates."

The GOP's propaganda campaign gives them the best of both worlds by misdirecting the "rot at the top" part towards educated people in general and the federal government in particular, and the "mob at the gates" part toward all blacks and Latinos, using code words and phrases (like "welfare queens") to get the word out without having to admit what they're doing.

PS: Mrs. Romney talked about how she and her husband faced the same problems you faced raising your family and dealing with illnesses. She's just like you.

Except for the fact that her "family" includes dozens of maids and whatnot to cushion the burdens of parenthood, and her illnesses didn't result in her health insurance company cancelling her health insurance as soon as she got really sick, forcing the Romneys into medical bankruptcy. Funny how she didn't mention those things.

So apart from those tiny details, yeah...she's just like you & me.

What makes the Tea Party tick?

CSPAN's Book TV --which you probably watch if you're over 60--had a pair of sociologists on last weekend who had done a study and a book about local Tea Party activists. You can read about it on Amazon here.

The researchers struck me as being objective and thorough. And they added that they liked the people they met personally. So their conclusions didn't reflect any personal animus.

Here's what they found:

1. Tea Partiers are all anti-Federal government, anti-federal deficit, anti-taxes.

2. They mostly run small businesses themselves, and they like businessmen--very much including wealthy corporate businessmen, who they think of as small businessmen like themselves, only who made it big. 

2. Around 2/3 are Evangelical Protestant Christians; the rest are non-fervent. This is an internal schism, with the fervent Christians considering the somewhat more secular ones (who are also more urban & more educated) as being practically RINOs.

3. They're nearly all middle-aged and older whites.

4. Groups they dislike openly:
    a. Young people in general, who they consider lazy ingrates, entitled, disrespectful of traditional American culture and values, and disrespectful of their elders.
        So they greet all the talk about cutting student loan rates with hostility.
    b. Muslims. Not just Salafist and Wahhabist fundamentalist extremists, but all Muslims.
    c. College Professors, who they consider out of touch, infecting their children with loony pie in the sky social ideas--and also teaching their children disrespect for traditional American culture and values. This has a whiff of Town  & Gown antipathies from back in the day.
    d. Illegal immigrants--particularly from Mexico and parts south
    e. Legal immigrants--particularly ones from non-Anglo countries like Mexico and parts south
        --In general they have the same view of immigration that Mexican law does: that it should be prohibited where the numbers and cultural makeup of the immigrants would change the character of society.
    f. Homosexuals.
    g. Atheists.
    h. Democrats, who they see as the party of young people, Muslims, college professors, illegal immigrants, and legal immigrants--in short, anyone except for middle aged and older Anglo whites.
    i. ObamaCare--although they like its provisions when asked about them individually and when they aren't identified as part of ObamaCare, and although many Tea Party types are on MediCare and are collecting Social Security, and know these are government programs. But they believe they paid for them, while the groups listed above are freeloaders who are just mooching off them.
    j. Anyone who supports abortion rights. They don't see it as a women's rights issue, because they see fertilized eggs as little men and women whose rights completely override those of the hominid baby bags they're inside of.
    k. Liberals.
     l. Environmentalists.
    m. Overpopulation Jeremiadists like me.

5. Groups they dislike implicitly:
     a. Blacks. Even in meetings where they don't think outsiders are present, nearly all Tea Party types won't talk about this openly, and Tea Party leaders--both grassroots and self-appointed ones working for the Angry Billionaires' Club and GOP operatives--hotly deny that there's the slightest whiff of racial animus in the Tea Party.
        Their feelings are rather nuanced. If a black were the Republican presidential candidate and a white were the Democratic one, they'd vote for the black, and mostly without hesitation. In the pre-1970 Old South, they'd talk about "our Colored folk" affectionately if paternalistically, contrasting them with the "uppity Negroes" who'd been "influenced by outsiders." But if someone espouses values the Tea Party types don't like, and that someone is black, like Obama (actually half black, but even the President doesn't call himself mulatto or mixed race), they'll get an extra dose of opprobrium, all of it attributed to policy stuff though.
    b. Members of religions that are not evangelical Christian, to the degree that the religion differs from evangelical Protestantism. Though they seem inclined to give Catholics who are Anglos a pass due to the abortion issue. Many of them do not consider the Mormon religion to be a Christian religion.

They'll still vote for Romney, in part because they believe President Obama is not a Christian, due to Reverend Wright's infamous condemnation of America from the pulpit, which they in turn condemn without regard to the life experiences Reverend Wright had had that led him to that oratorical moment. The fact of Romney's LDS faith had dampened their enthusiasm for him. It won't keep them from voting for him but it might keep some from campaigning for hims as enthusiastically as they would have for, say, Wealthy Lobbyist Sentorum.

In short, Tea Party types are Anglo-American tribalists, who feel embattled at every turn, who focus on economic issues in public by and large because that's the only way they can have unity within their ranks, but a majority of them expect politicians they help elect to pass and enforce socially conservative laws--against abortion and homosexuals for example. In practice this is what has happened--often ahead of taking action on economic issues. So to a degree the third of Tea Party types who aren't ardent social conservatives are being duped.

So are independents who vote for Tea Party-affiliated candidates in hopes of getting elected politicians who will  "mind the store" and focus on economic issues. Instead they've gotten anti-abortion jihadis.

Liberals, by the way, have the same problem when they elect candidates who then focus on causes they can't do anything about--like my local and very liberal city council spending hours on a resolution to urge the President of the United States to add a Department of Peace to his cabinet instead of acting on local issues--issue they could actually do something about.

And just as Tea Partiers have zero empathy for the Occupy movement and Democrats / Liberals in general, in my experience the reverse holds true as well, with many, many liberals not giving Tea Partiers any credit, not acknowledging that they could be responding to real problems, even if they disagree with the Tea Partiers' solutions.

The Tea Party movement is both an authentic grassroots movement and an example of AstroTurf pseudo-populism. that is, corporate special interests have been quick to adopt/co-opt the Tea Party movement and Fox News has worked tireless to organize Tea Partiers and give them a platform--as long as and to the degree that it will help elect Republicans who will vote the way Grover Norquist and his paymasters want them to vote. This doesn't mean the Tea Partiers were just sitting in their homes watching reruns of Lawrence Welk before this. And it doesn't mean they've all been co-opted successfully. It does mean that the effort is being made by well-paid operatives, and that it has had a degree of success.

And at the same time Liberal politicians have helped by campaigning on the behalf of citizens of other countries who are here illegally, on the behalf of granting special favors to every ethnic /racial group in this country except for Anglos, and on the behalf of public employees, even the ones who are compensated far better than their private sector counterparts.

Because of that, efforts Democratic politicians made to appeal to Anglo blue-collar populism are wasted effort mostly, because those pols aren't willing to change their stances on those issues, which are key ones for Tea Partiers.

And it leaves Democratic-leaning independents like me frustrated. We understand where the Tea partiers are coming from. They have an authentic Anglo-American culture, and it is being changed substantially by immigration from Mexico in particular, due to the huge numbers and the peasant demographics of those immigrants. Many public employees have been getting too much for their work. And it's long past ime for special legislative favors for anyone who isn't an Anglo to end.

At the same time the Tea Partiers hostility to the environment, to science, to highly educated people, to other ethnic groups, and above all to their eager embrace of precisely the people who have created their economic problems, all turn off independents like me. Their lack of skepticism towards their ostensible friends in high places, coupled with their rigid opposition towards anyone and anything they think is outside their tribe, make them perfect tools in the hands of the corporatists.

Just one more example of how tribalism is really the worst political problem of our era--and the most intractable.






  

   

Today I've been watching the Republican Ministry of Propaganda doing their best to Swift Boat the President. This is the permanent Republican campaign strategy for races at all levels: identify the Democratic opponent's strongest virtues and try to negate them with a well-funded blitzkrieg campaign. They always do this, so it's no surprise that they're doing it now--especially since the Democrats had the effrontery to point out that Candidate Romney had stated that he wouldn't go after Bin Ladin.

No one forced Romney to say that. Now he's trying to pretend he didn't. Or at the least that President Obama has no right to bring it up.

This from the party that diverted an aircraft carrier from its homecoming--and the reuniting of its 5,000+ crewmen with their loved ones--in order to provide--at taxpayer expense--a campaign visit to the carrier with President Bush II tricked out in naval aviation gear and landing on the carrier (as a passenger), then making a speech exulting in our victory in Iraq, backed by a giant Mission Accomplished banner hung on the carrier's superstructure, lest any dolts watching might miss the point.

Of course the real issue is that the pollsters tell us a solid majority of Americans trust President Obama to manage our foreign policy far more than they do Governor Romney.

And the Democrats' ad coupled Romney's preference to abandon the hunt for Bin Ladin with his willingness for Detroit to go bankrupt.

Now Romney did mean "managed bankruptcy" when he said "let Detroit go bankrupt" but Romney's solution would still have resulted in General Motors and Chrysler being liquidated, because no one but the U.S. government was willing to pony up the cash needed to keep them alive, and Romney was against the government bailing them out.

The fact that President Obama's solution did the union workers a favor at the expense of bondholders--contrary to bankruptcy law--is something conservatives can argue, but it's beside the key point: Romney would have left America with one major auto company; Obama left us with three.

There's a link between Romney's disinterest in finding Bin Ladin and in rescuing Detroit: in both cases he takes a business investor's pure spreadsheet-based viewpoint. He didn't see the ROI in either case (Return on Investment).

I get the impression that larger issues are kind of invisible to Romney. He's never shown an interest in foreign affairs or in the world of ideas. He is indeed a businessman. And there's nothing wrong with that. But he doesn't seem to be anything else.

If that's so, then his presidency will be a Republican dream come true: a fiscal conservative who's more than happy to let Grover Norquist's Congress pass him bills to rubber stamp, regardless of content. I predict that if he gains the White House and the Republicans retain control over the House and their veto over the Senate doing anything, Romney will never veto a bill sent to him by the GOP--he won't even threaten to veto one.  He is nothing if not eager to please Republicans. And, like Bush II, completely indifferent to the approximately 50% of the country that won't be voting for him.

Public opinion polls tell you what the public thinks? Yes but...

I just saw a comment on a previous post from someone who pointed out that "the People have the power to do whatever they want...the People have the power to enact any legislation, or turn out any politician they...please, any time they please, independent of any political party or who is in the majority in Washington. Those who are the loudest, and have the most to say... should say that, or shut up."

The people who live in the most naive fantasy universe are, paradoxically, drawn from the population of people who consider themselves the most realistic.

The fantasy is that public opinion is formed in freedom, and that, armed with this public opinion, a majority has the power to get the legislators--and, hence, the legislation that the majority wants.

This has not been true from the moment the United States was organized to this moment, now.

One example: Al Gore received the majority of the popular vote in 2000. Last time I checked, he didn't become President. Nor have fifteen other candidates through our history who like Al Gore won the popular vote but lost the election.

But that's just the tip of the iceberg. Pervasive gerrymandering--in both Republican and Democratic-dominated states--has led to incumbent politicians being able to pick their voters, instead of vice versa.

The electoral college system--unique among nations--means that one Wyoming voter has over three times the "voting power" of one California or Texas voter.

A nationwide vote suppression campaign by the Republican Party (under the transparent lie of "voter fraud") means that in many areas Democratic voters will find it harder if not impossible to vote--particularly if they're black or college students or old and/or rural, or have jobs they can't afford to take time off from to vote. And many Republican-dominated states now disenfranchise people convicted of a felony for life, on the assumption that all felonies merit a lifetime of not being a full citizen any more. By pure coincidence most of such people are black, courtesy of a system that penalizes blacks more for comparable crimes than whites, among other things.

And even if the voting franchise dice weren't loaded, the free will of American voters is hugely compromised by the vast and largely unaccountable sums of money being poured into a no holds barred, broad-spectrum propaganda campaign aimed at Democrats and particularly at a Democratic president.

I'm continually flabbergasted at how this pervasive campaign goes unnoticed by the media--mainstream and otherwise--in accounting for public opinion.

I remember a news story years about about how the villagers in a central American country got together and murdered an American aid worker because some local demagogue had spread the rumor that she was buying children to be trafficked to America.

And in Africa polio was about to wiped out when some Nigerian Muslim leaders spread the rumor that the vaccine was actually a White Western plot to sterilize African women. No one knows whether it will be possible to kill off polio in Africa now.

This isn't some "foreign problem." Here in America an amazing number of people--many with educations--believe, counter to all medical fact--that vaccinating their children endangers them, and that not vaccinating them is good for them.

People everywhere and everywhen are amazingly gullible when it comes to rumomongering when it panders to fears and antipathies they already have.

Thus in the coming election, it is not true that Americans--2/3 of whom have already made up their minds BTW--are basing their voting choices on diligent personal research focused on relatively unbiased information sources such as Factcheck.org and Politifact.com. Their ideas in a majority of cases reflect potent emotional narratives that were fed to them in many times a day doses.

And that, my friends, is how you can get people to vote against their own financial and other best interests.

Most other democracies recognize this and have worked mightily to keep money--whatever the source--out of electoral campaigns. People are highly susceptible to propaganda. I know this from my training in sociology in college, and I can feel its pull on me every day, and only my training in recognizing and dealing with propaganda protects me from being herded by it.

Lastly, one irony of this whole thing is that part of the propaganda missile aimed especially at less-educated white men is the term "sheeple" that they're invited to apply to Lib-er-uls. Well, Lib-er-uls can be herded, to be honest, but the very people who bandy this term of contempt around the most are the biggest "sheeple" of all.

How cults work

I once had a friend who joined a cult. That's when I discovered how cults work on people, up close & personal. I mention it now because the Republican Party--and, to a lesser extent, the Democratic Party--has gained some of the features of a cult:

1. Create an alternate reality--a set of plausible, emotionally persuasive, internally consistent (at some level) narratives. Make it simplistic. All your problems and all your society's problems are due to X (something which isn't your fault). The solution is simple: Y (something which will require no sacrifice from you--or which you can be led to believe requires no sacrifice from you--even if the cult orders you to assign all your worldly possessions to the cult, you'll enjoy shared prosperity of some kind which will amply repay that investment).

2. Isolate cult members from anything and everything that might point out that the emperor has no clothes.
    a. Do so by offering alternate information sources that all agree with the cult's alternate reality.
    b. Get cult members to reject all information from any other source.
    c. If possible, get cult member to only socialize with fellow cult members.
    d. If the cult has taken the name of some heterogeneous organization, convince cult members that only the cult's members actually represent that larger organization, and that anyone else is trespassing--and your enemy.
    e. Get cult members to believe that the slightest compromise represents total failure--represents letting the camel's nose in the tent--that anyone who urges compromise is an enemy, even if they say they're fellow cult members.

3. Continuously get cult members to believe they're in danger from the cult's enemies---that is, keep them on  a permanent war footing. Do this even when real danger looms--either discount that real danger or ascribe it to a plot by the cult's enemies.


Who does this? In the Muslim world, the Salafists do this, to the extent of believing anyone who speaks against their Prophet should be killed on the spot--and "speaking against" means "not totally supporting the Salafists' interpretation of Islam.

And as I said, here in the America the Republicans--and the immensely wealthy handful of individuals who fund them--have managed to create something like a cult.

Consider:

1. The President of the United States, Grover Norquist, elected in 2010 in a landslide (from a GOP perspective), and holding written oaths of fealty from a majority of Congressional Republicans, preaches that all of America's problems comprise The Government, which steals our money via taxes and spends it on People-Who-Aren't-Us (Mexicans, Kneegrows, Welfare Queens (mostly Kneegrows and Mexicans), Liberal Slackers, Foreigners (both here and abroad via foreign aid).

2. Fox News Channel provides a 24x7 propaganda outlet for the explanations of everything authorized by President Norquist and the Republican Party's paymasters, along with the vast majority of radio talk shows. Fox provides a wide spectrum of Right wing viewpoints, including Libertarian (John Strossel), Religious Right (Mike Huckabee), Tea Party (Hannity), faux Independent Doctrinaire Catholic (O'Reilly), Senate Republican (Van Sustern), Corporatist (Neil Cavuto), etc., but the best indicator is the putatively mainstream news programs put on Fox News every weekday morning, plus the Shepherd and Baier programs. Those are where the far right tilt can be seen without the distractions of hosts' charismatic personalities and particular concerns.

All of these programs regularly seek to delegitimize all other sources of news that don't hew to the far right line. They speak of "Mainstream News" with contempt, consistently, with particular emphasis on CNN being --according to them--a left wing operation. They also dump on self-declared nonpartisan factchecking organizations (especially factcheck.org and politifact.com), as well as polling organizations other than the reliably right wing one, Rasmussen.

The result is that is you seek to bolster a criticism of any right wing assertion by alluding to any putatively nonpartisan source, the average rank and file Republican will tell you that such sources are highly suspect and require you to "prove" your point otherwise. Or they'll just say "I don't believe you."

Also along these lines, they'll frequently refer to "the American People" and "The Constitution" when they actually mean only American citizens who vote Republican (i.e. including the millions of self-declared Independents who just happen to always vote Republican), and only the parts of the Constitution that they like, and as interpreted by far right wingers (who claim of course that they aren't interpreting it at all)--hence the call for a balanced budget amendment. Calling for an amendment means you don't think the Founding Fathers had all the answers; that the Constitution they wrote wasn't the be-all and the end-all, and may even be wrong in places. So much for revering it as a perfect, sacred document.

"Compromise" means "surrender" in Republispeak. When referring to Republicans it means "shameful, totally unacceptable, abject surrender to the Enemy." Hence statements rejecting any and all compromise. Meanwhile, when Republicans claim the Democrats won't compromise, they mean "the Democrats refuse to surrender to us 100% and want 10% of what they'd asked for." So again "compromise" means "abject surrender" here as well, only in the other direction."

Several other factors contribute to Republican success, down on the process level.

One is the fact that Americans are sorting themselves out, moving to communities of like-minded people more and more, making Red and Blue regions Redder and Bluer.

Another is our winner-take all voting system, in which slight majorities confer total victory, making it unnecessary to build heterogeneous coalitions.

And another is our 24 hour news cycle combined with modern imaging technology, enabling newscasts to instill terror in viewers vastly out of proportion to the actual dangers involved, simultaneously blinding them to worse dangers that can't be imaged as successfully.

Thus you can use ultrasounds to make embryos seem sentient, while overpopulation statistics are dry piles of numbers. Every gory crime from anywhere in the nation can get wall to wall coverage for days, terrorizing people, while the rapid depletion of the porous aquifer is invisible and unnoticed (until it's too late).

The result of all this is that it's becoming harder and harder to have a constructive dialog with a Republican.
Often your only hope is to try to get under their umbrella of paranoia--possibly by arguing within the Republiverse to show how their position on something actually runs contrary to their own principles or is too extreme--by their lights--an extension of those principles.

Good luck with that. Trouble, the Republican Ministry of Propaganda is so well-financed voices of reason get drowned out by their giant bullhorn, which makes you look like an oddball outlier compared to what they believe is not just true but axiomatic, and thus not to be questioned.

Are some people commenting in forums for $$$?

Besides the blogosphere there's the--what, threadisphere? All those comments on articles in newspapers and media websites. 


Turns out a fair number of those comments are being made either by people who are doing it for money, or who were directed there by people doing the directing for money by setting up Astroturf propaganda websites.


On Amazon.com's Science forum someone has been starting human-affected climate change denialist threads for over a year--one after another after another. I don't know if he's doing it for pay but something's seriously off here (he's also flagrantly violating Amazon.com standards, which forbid incessant posting of the same topic repeatedly).


I wrote an entry on the Amazon.com Science forum about special interest money invading supposedly "free forums,": citing investigative research by The Guardian and Greenpeace (one a leftist newspaper, the other a leftist advocacy group, to be sure).


A guy on an Amazon.com forum contested my entry, saying the accusation of doing entries for money was intrinsically illegitimate--something that just resulted in tit for tat accusations.

The short answer:

The money trails do matter because this isn't a formal debating society-it's a forum of intellectual exploration, and it does influence what we should do if it appears that certain posters are here to push propaganda for pay, or as pawns of those who direct them here.

Moreover, this is a widespread problem across all public forums that deal with science and technology-not just Amazon.com. Too widespread, and too much by people who obviously are not natural members of the forums.

I strongly suspect that this is one of those conspiracies that do exist (among the countless fake ones)-and you should care whether someone's trying to play you like a flute. (see Hamlet if you don't recall the scene where he asks Rosencranz and Gildenstern to play a flute, and when they say they can't, asks they why they're trying to play him.)

The long answer:

It is true that in the logic of formal debate, my character/motives are only relevant if I'm asking you to trust me as part of my argument..

So if an axe murderer says 2+2+4, I don't need to trust him--I can use my knowledge of arithmetic to verify it. But if he says "my former cellmate told me he killed Johnny Pell" that's more problematic, and I won't believe him without independent confirmation. And if Mrs. Jones sues her father for molesting her as a child--after he disinherited her for being a drug addict--I'm going to need a lot of independent validation before I believe her claim.

However, what I see being done by far right wing billionaires and their minions is the attempt to convince the public that many more people agree with their propaganda than actually do. This is an implicit "fact" that's very important. As are attempts to mold public opinion through propaganda amplified by vast funds used to pay "serviceable villains" who promote their patron's viewpoint for money.

After all, legislators are generally more impressed by perceived numbers of voters on one side of an issue, rather than by sweet reason alone. So this isn't a minor issue. And, humans being the social creatures they are, if you think many, many people hold a particular view, you'll be more daunted than if you think it's just a handful of loons.

Social experiments done over the past 70 years have revealed how susceptible most people are to what they perceive as public opinion.

Every single day the major broadcast news media--all of them--constantly refer to "public opinion" yet almost never talk about whether or how that "public opinion" was carefully guided by slick, well-financed psy ops. Vast applications of money to American political debate has greatly shaped it.

And Goebbels, an expert propagandist, accurately observed that if someone hears a lie repeated often enough he'll come to perceive it as truth, often as not. Even the way we think about issues. From "death taxes" to "death panels" to "tax relief" we're given a conclusion at the start of our thinking about something. See George Lakoff for information about this from a cognitive psychologist's viewpoint.

Moreover, in these forums, we're accustomed to believing that people come here with questions and issues they want to explore/debate. However, what if the person you're debating with is being payed to advance his position? Wouldn't that change your willingness to debate with him--realizing that nothing you say will change his mind, because he's not here for the same reasons as you are?

He might be here as a missionary, or perhaps as a "threadstitute" (I just made that up). But either way you're wasting your time arguing with him.

So it's the implicit propositions that "this is a widely held belief" which can be validated/invalidated by seeing whether there's a money trail.

And surely you realize that "everybody does it" is the standard fallback position of a propagandist who's been uncovered.

So of course if you turn over the rock and discover Koch and Exxon minions scuttling around under it, they're going to start chanting "Soros, Soros, Soros." Especially since they regard him (and Buffet, and perhaps Gates) as a "class traitor."

However, the Koch brothers have a financial motive: they're major polluters, major beneficiaries of corporate welfare, major promoters of government taking other people's property and handing it over to them.

Soros is a money guy who doesn't gain personally from his financial contributions. So his motive is philosophical, not pecuniary. That's a big difference. Doesn't mean he's right and the Kochs are wrong on the face of it, but it is relevant to my evaluation of their activities.

Moreover, the Kochs are deceptive/underhanded, while Soros is pretty straightforward. Soros donates money to campaigns and politicians he approves of. The Kochs are major creators of astroturf operations that try to create the impression of being grassroots affairs.

Case in point: Right wing psy ops operatives trained Tea Party volunteers to sit spaced apart at public healthcare forums, then to interrupt pro-reform speakers by shouting verbal assaults thinly disguised as questions, then shut up immediately so as to avoid being thrown out, while another trained "volunteer" sitting somewhere else would immediately shout out another phony "question." And another, and another. By not massing, by not just standing up and shouting until they were removed, by asking pseudoquestions that maintained a tiny fig leaf of respectability, they could not only destroy pro-healthcare reform people from presenting their pitch--they could also make it seem as though the whole audience was against healthcare reform.

And here you have one person--"mug wump" posting the same thread topic with minor wording variations time after time after time for over a year.

I think it's relevant to speculate on how such a major imposition on Amazon.com's Science forum came to be. This forum isn't just formal debate--a field I'm intimately familiar with--it's also psy ops--another field I've been forced to educated myself about, due to stuff like this.

Of course "mug wump" [the guy doing the serial denialist postings]  might just be a pawn--but if he 'fessed up and told us where he's getting his info from, I bet the trail of breadcrumbs would lead back to Koch Industries or one of its subsidiaries.

And that's my last point. This isn't just going on at Amazon.com. I've seen the same thing happening all over the place--Scientific American, NYTimes, Washington Post, you name it.

And in particular I'm seeing major invasions of online forums by people who don't belong there--whose illogic and poor grammar/spelling reveal that they aren't actual members of that community. The New York Times by people who clearly aren't New York Times readers; Scientific American's forums likewise, and so forth.

So how did they get there? These people aren't, for the most part, geniuses at ferreting out stuff. I'm betting they're being directed to go hither and thither by paid operatives running Astroturf websites.

So yes, the money does matter, and while adherents of both parties try to market their ideas to the public, one side has vastly more to spend on it than the other, because one side represents billionaires while the other represents wage slaves.

It's not an equal fight. We're being bullied, and having been a bright kid who went to blue-collar public schools, I became way too familiar with both bullying and with anti-intellectualism-which pervades the propaganda of the far right. Look at all the posts by the pawns and the threadstitutes-they're chock full of scorn and contempt for smart people-all them scientist types. Doesn't that get your back up?

The billionaires' bully boys storm in here and tell us how they spit on us and how they expect us to knuckle under to them-that they are the Real Americans and we're some kinda unAmericans.

And they violate Amazon.com's forum guidelines routinely. They don't play the game by the rules you and I observe, and I'm trying to get the decent people on these forums to fight back and not keep playing their game by their self-serving rules.

They can set up their own forum and run it any way they please, but here they should observe Amazon's guidelines, along with the rest of us.

They have no honor.

How to foster democratic revolutions in Iran and elsewhere

Our government should make a high quality movie about the American Revolution--only make it in several versions, using for the actors ethnic Arabs for one version, Persians for another, Pakistanis for another, and Afghans for another (yes, I know Afghans speak several languages), speaking in their own languages.

The screenplay should subtly emphasize the aspects that are most relevant to current conditions, including the British contempt for the colonists and efforts to muzzle the press and enforce its ideas through military force.

Distribute the film on DVDs but also excerpt it, in short chapters, on YouTube and other social media.

It would absolutely have to sound natural and appropriately colloquial to each target audience. 

Wouldn't that be an interesting propaganda project?

We really need to let peoples suffering under tyrants know that we've been there, done that. And overthrew ours. Yet by making it strictly historical and talking about events of over 200 years ago we can avoid being accused of trying to pull something over on people over there. We can say we're just trying to share our history with people of other countries.

Principles aren't always principled

A Brazilian friend sent me this quote from Goebbels on the Laws of Propaganda:

* A media system wants ostensible diversity that conceals an actual uniformity.

* We strive not for truth, but effect.

* The worst enemy of any propaganda is intellectualism.

* For the lie to be believable, it should be terrifying.

* A lie repeated thousands of times becomes a truth.

I thought about this as I read a comment on a New York Times op-ed piece about how the ongoing Republican campaign to deligitimize President Obama's election isn't based on policy issues or disagreement about governing philosophy--it's based on a thick stack o' lies, shaped and executed in strict accordance with Goebbels' Laws of Propaganda.

Here's the comment:

...As a history professor at a community college [in Oklahoma], I face this everyday. Students barely tune into the news but they believe these gems you have attacked. Trying to get them to understand that there is no basis in fact for these fallacies doesn't sway them a bit. They just know it's true.

And note Goebbels point about intellectualism being the worst enemy of a propaganda campaign. That's why the Republican Propaganda Machine devotes so much effort on encouraging anti-intellectualism, as epitomized by the Quitter From Alaska.

Tea Parties

Most Tea Party types will tell you that the ideas they express are their own, derived from getting the news, thinking about it, and by the sheerest coincidence arriving at the exact set of conclusions that the Republican Party leadership and its patrons want them to adopt.

This isn't necessarily stupidity. For example, I have one Republican friend with a very high IQ who believes most GOP talking points and tells me I've been brainwashed by the "MSM" (a Republican curse word meaning any news outlet to the left of Fox TV).

No, it's tribalism plus the peculiar human trait of believing that we aren't influenced by marketing, while anyone who doesn't think the same as us is the other side's sock puppet.

The stupid think this, and are easily led, of course, but intelligent people like my friend can be led as well, given sufficiently adroit propaganda, soaring eternally on the wings of vast wealth.

Also, women are generally more conservative than men (I don't mean they're Conservatives--just that they're more cautious; remember, if the tribe loses one fertile woman there will be fewer children next year, while the tribe could lose most of its men and still have as many babies next year). So when fear is instilled in them, their first impulse is to cling to the status quo and resist anything they perceive as changes.

Meanwhile, men are generally more aggressive than women, so when you scare them their first impulse is to attack what they think is their enemy, rather than engage in self-examination, or in considering and weighing alternatives. They're most likely to attack when they feel emasculated. Many men have died for their countries--but even more have died for their, um, male organs, once you strip away the layers of rhetoric and rationalization.

Put both atavistic responses together and you get the average Tea Party get-together, egged on by demagogues like Congressman Michelle Bachman, who called the Obama administration "gangsters."

And as I said in a previous post, we Democrats have pushed them into the Republican leadership's eager arms.

To boil down that post:

Tea Party person: We white working-class people have been shafted, and we're angry.

Democrat response: You're racists.
Republican response: You're right, and it's the Democrats who've shafted you. They've taken what's yours and redistributed it to foreigners and bums and blacks and Mexican illegal immigrants--everyone but you.

Tea Party person: Great. Now I know who the enemy is.

Democrat: But the enemy is the Republicans and their big business patrons--and you racist Tea Party types.
Republican: See, the Democrats hate you, so they're lying. And they're in cahoots with big business. [followed by factual warpage, such as the fact that Wall Street donates to Democrats whenever they think Democrats might win an election--and to Republicans as well, in hopes that they'll win, so that whoever wins they'll have their hooks into them; but the Republicans don't mention all that stuff of course].

Tea Party person: Right. Down with the Democrats and their bailouts of big business (and all those unwhite unAmericans)!

I'm not certain whether democracy itself can survive the use of state of the art psychology and sociology in the service of the richest--and most amoral--of the rich.

Frankly, they honestly mean the opposite

How about a new word, "hypedar," to describe being able to tell when someone's trying to pull a fast one on you, using propaganda, demagoguery...you know the drill.

For example, take "honestly" and "frankly." In normal conversation these words mean you're going to follow them by saying something that differs from or even contradicts your position on something--politics, your dignity...some sort of reversal.

But when politicians say "honestly" or "frankly," 99% of the time they follow up with a statement that's anything but honest or frank. It's almost always a direct attack on the other side.

They're entitled to attack the other side, of course. But in putting these words in front of an attack--it's bogus. They're pretending to hand you a personal--perhaps embarrassing--revelation. Not an embarrasing revelation about the other side.

Republicans and Democrats both do this, and they do it all the time.

And the next time you hear these words, see if I'm not right about what always follows.

And then you can show off your hypedar to your friends.

I only have one request: Don't spare your side. We want honest political debate, not tribal warfare.

Don't we?

---------------------------

Hypedar lesson #2:

"In fact," "in reality," "the truth is."

These aren't the sure signs of hype that "honestly" and "frankly" are. Sometimes a politician will follow up with an actual fact. But it's equally likely that they'll then make an assertion that they don't substantiate. This means what they've actually done is ask you to trust them, without saying so. When you say "in fact," state a supposed fact, and don't back it up--the only reason you have to believe them is their word, which they're implying is worth something.

Now I'm sure there are honest politicians out there. I've even seen a few that I thought were pretty honest--on both sides, too. That's why I'm saying that these catchprases aren't always hype.

Just most of the time.

Note that providing substantiation isn't good enough--the substantiation has to be an impartial authority.

Bogus authorities include, for the left, advocacy groups like the Southern Poverty Law Center and La Raza. For the right, it's supposed think tanks that are actually advocacy groups, and polling organizations that are actually owned by someone with an axe to grind.

----------------------

Hypedar lesson #3

"media bias" --Yes, there is media bias. However, far too often "media bias" means "someone who disagrees with me." The far right think the mainstream media is in the tank for the Democratic Party, and take as proof the fact that most reporters vote Democrat.

Amusingly enough, the far left think the mainstream media faithfully serves the interests of the multinational corporations who own the mainstream media.

Both sides are often totally unaware of what the other thinks about the mainstream media, because they never read or listen to or watch any source of information that differs from their own ideology.

And both sides generally lack the intellectual tools required to objectively assess the objectivity of a news source.

---------------------------------------

Hypedar lesson #4:

"The American people" --actually, this almost always means "whatever % of Americans agree with me; anyone who doesn't isn't really American, so they don't count." This is a version of flagwaving--trying to associate your side with America in the most tribal way possible. Because if they can make your allegiance tribal, you'll forgive all the nasty stuff they do to you, because otherwise you'd be supporting the other tribe.

Suffering under Britain's socialized healthcare

In citing reasons for sagging public support for healthcare reform, not one right wing shill has noted one itsy bitsy fact: the $1.4M/DAY the healthcare denial industry is spending to defeat any kind of healthcare reform whatsoever.

At the same time the healthcare denial industry's shills and spokespeople pretend to support various denatured versions of reform.

At the same time its black ops specialists spread one vicious lie after another (according to nonpartisan sites www.politifact.com and wwww.factcheck.org), using anonymous chain emails and whisper campaigns, followed up by right wing radio and TV propagandists.

The other thing the shills fail to note is our nationwide parochialism. Most of us, left and right, seem to have almost no idea that other industrial democracies exist, all with universal healthcare, all spending less than us, all with greater life expectancy.

Sure, the right wing propagandists bring forth individuals from Canada and Britain who say what you might expect.

But those countries are all democracies. And in none of them will you find the money and power vested in the status quo as America has. So if their systems (highly varied, some socialistic, some regulated capitalistic, most a mix) all suck so badly--why aren't their voters clamoring for America's fabulous system?

They must just be anti-American...

Well, I have a friend in Scotland--a high tech businessman who has traveled here fairly often. I asked him if the Brits longed for our system. Here's what he said:

"That's easy - the NHS isn't perfect but it is very, very good. The Palin stories are about as accurate as you'd expect from someone who thinks the earth is 5000 years old. I would resist in the strongest possible terms any attempt to dismantle the public health system.

I can tell you first hand that the elderly - vis my parents - get astounding treatment without the slightest hesitation. My father collapsed at our Christmas lunch - we had a paramedic on site in under five minutes from calling 999, our emergency number. An ambulance was at our door in 10 minutes and he was in a high-dependency unit within 20. He was recovering rapidly, but they kept him in over night after moving him to a lower care level ward. No forms, no charge, just fantastic service.

This concept of them choosing not to treat people on age is simply invented by the nutjob right wingers.

At the end of the scale, one of our staff has been diagnosed with bowel cancer - she was operated on within 5 days and was retained in hospital for a full 2 weeks for recover with excellent care and access to all the latest medication etc etc.

BTW you can ask my American friends living here for their views - it's identical to mine!

And I think the vast majority of the rest of the country would agree - I think you'd get at least 95% if not 98% support. As someone said 'everyone knows someone whose life was saved by the NHS.'"

Political Propaganda 101

A friend of mine got sucked in by the "Obama's not an American citizen" scam. I showed him how it couldn't be true. Then he asked me why so much smoke if there's no fire. I tried to give him a brief answer but it evolved into the following piece:

The underlying goal of a political party is to defeat the other side and either get back in power, or to stay in power.

Power enables a party to reward its patrons. The goal of the patrons is those rewards. The goal of the party is power and its cut of the take, distributed in various ways, from lunches and travel to unbelieveably lucrative jobs—usually for lobbying—on behalf of the patrons’ businesses, acquired after a politician retires from Congress or the Executive Branch.

Many of these reward paths aren’t spelled out in a memo (which could be leaked, after all). They’re just understood.

Often you have to betray your voters in order to reward your patrons. This is best accomplished by making your side so tribal—and so antagonistic to the other side—and so fearful of what will happen if the other side wins—that your side votes your way, betraying themselves and their loved ones, because you’ve convinced them that it’s that or the deep blue sea.

And people tend to be swayed by appearances. As long as your side looks and speaks like the epitome of your-side-ness, many won’t believe that you’re robbing them blind. Likewise, you need to make the other side look and speak unlike your base.

That was why, for example, the Republicans repeatedly ran ads showing John Kerry windsurfing, showing clips from when he was a young longhaired war protestor, showing him speaking in the Senate in long, convoluted senatorial sentences, showing his African wife acting all foreign. Bush, on the other hand, concealed his Harvard MBA by talking like bubba down the block—as if he’d grown up as a cowhand on a ranch (he bought his ranch after winning the presidency), instead of being the scion of an immensely wealthy, well-connected family..

Gaining or retaining power is best achieved by a multipronged, multilayered approach: tactically, you fire up your base, persuade the middle to lean your way, and make the other side depressed and confused, depressing their vote and their advocacy for their side. Strategically, you define every potential presidential candidate as untrustworthy and belonging to the Other Tribe—the one with bad morals, disrespect for everything good and pure, and on the take from Special Interests (well, neither side has to make that one up). Layered under that, on the Republican side, is a campaign that has been going on since FDR was president to make Americans distrust and dislike government; then this is tapped whenever the Democrats have a chance of reregulating any business the Republicans’ patrons own. Conversely, the Democrats have been trying to paint the Republicans as the Party of the Rich for the same length of time—defining G.O.P. as meaning Greed Over Principles.

Come time for the actual campaign—once each party is close to having a candidate---the following steps are applied:

First you have to fire up your base. Those are the people who will win primaries for you. Psychologically these people see the world in sharp divisions and bright colors. White hats, black hats.

Each side has a core constituency that will vote your way—if they vote. You don’t need to convince this group to vote your way. You just need to get them to the polls. They’ll go if they’re mad and/or scared. So you need to enrage/terrify them.

Outside that core constituency is a group that’s inclined to vote your way but who aren’t as tribal as the hardcore constituency. They will treat what you say more critically, and if you go too far with what’s used on the core group, you run the risk of turning them off or even driving them to the other side. So to fire up the core group with the real red-meat stuff that won’t hold up to close scrutiny, you make sure the wild stuff comes from “friends,” not your party, not officially.

This is the “clean hands” approach.

In America today, it’s a snap to set up superficially independent advocacy groups, directed and financed by the same special interests that contribute lavishly to the party. Then for the less-committed, the party fronts its own peeps, speaking more reasonably—or at least sounding more reasonable in terms of tone of voice and general deportment. Then they do the denial-affirmation dance. That is, they disavow any connection to the crazies saying the crazy thing (whatever it is). But then they go on to say that, however, maybe there’s fire where there’s smoke. Maybe responsible people should look into these claims. Maybe there’s some substance to them, somehow. Not really, of course. But…

So in this way the Party keeps its hands clean while continuing to stir the pot, while not alienating its own zealots, while at the same time sowing distrust and confusion about the other part to the less-passionate-middle and those in the other party who are susceptible to these sorts of manuverings.

Remember, in the world of politics, the parties are the outward manifestation of power, but the real power is often in the shadows, because its goals are so antithetical to yours that exposure does it no good. For the Left, it’s trade unions, organizations representing hyphenated groups (Latin-Americans, African-Americans, Catholic-Americans as far as illegal immigration is concerned, etc. For the Right it's the inversion of Socialism--those who believe business should control government--mainly the bulk of the wealthiest 1/2 of 1% of the country.

But what falsehoods should you peddle?

Answer: those that give concrete expression to your base’s deepest fears and anxieties—while at the same time giving the base plausible deniability that any of these concrete expressions are related to anything that’s indefensible in polite society.

Thus you can’t oppose a candidate because he’s a she, or not white, or too smart, or not a Christian (or perhaps a Jew). But that’s no problem. If he’s a she you accuse her of being tough/combative—implicitly a ball-buster. If he isn’t white you accuse him of being foreign—of only pretending to have American values/heritage. If he’s smart you accuse him of having foreign ideas, of looking down on ordinary people (this can work even if the person comes from low-to-middle class circumstances and the opponent is filthy rich, as long as you manipulate appearances appropriately). If he’s a Christian you can accuse him of being a bad Christian, liking a controversial Christian pastor, or being Christian in a way that’s different from familiar white Christianity.

In each case you must be very, very careful to never say what you want them to think. You just link what the opponent actually is to something that sounds plausible that gets them to think what you want them to think.

For example, a majority of Republicans came to believe Saddam Hussein pretty much planned 9/11 and provided logistical support for it. Bush never said this. But every time he mentioned 9/11 or Bin Ladin he then mentioned Saddam Hussein. It was artful. Then when he was accused of claiming Saddam did 9/11, he could honestly say “I never said so.” Which is true. But he knew that what he did say would make his followers think that. So he wasn’t a liar. He was a deceiver. That’s better, right?

Of course there are a multitude of tricks I haven’t mentioned here, but which both sides use to make you think Good Things about what they want you to agree with and Bad Things about what they want you to oppose.

For example, during his election campaign Obama said we have to grant illegal immigrants some sort of amnesty because it would be logistically impossible—and unkind—to round up and deport so many millions of people. This is what’s known as a False Choice Fallacy. He never mentioned the simple fact that if we change the way we do things so they can’t make a living here, they’ll go home the same way they came—on their own hook. Whether you advocate for or against illegal immigration, you should recognize that this was a patently false and misleading argument.

There’s also sarcasm, which both sides use constantly. For example, Sean Hannity, part of the right wing noise machine, commonly refers to Obama as The Anointed One. The propagandists who give Hannity his talking points use this to make Obama’s popularity seem like a bad thing, and his supporters like dazzled dopes.

And of course the campaign goes on after the election, because there’s always the next election, and even if the president isn’t up for reelection, a good chunk of Congress is.

So even though Obama’s citizenship will never be challenged successfully in court, the birther campaign serves to delegitimize him and allows those who don’t like his race, his foreign father, or that father’s religion, to attack Obama’s race, foreignness and not-religion without having to do any of those things explicitly. Again, plausible deniability. So the Republican Noise Machine will flog this issue on the down low as long as they can, using the AIDS virus model that worked so with with the Swift Boat Campaign.

The great thing about being on the Republican side of this is that there’s always money to finance the innumerable right wing radio stations and the TV network and the push polling (fake polling designed to plant rumors) and the whisper campaigns and the astroturf organizing. Sometimes the Democrats have to scramble for funds. And though most journalists are registered Democrats, their livelihood depends on chasing scandal, so they’ll gallop off after anything that promises juicy headlines. Clinton’s peccadilloes got spread all over the mainstream media, leading to his very testy relationship with the press that was supposedly in the tank for him. Most reporters like Obama but that didn’t stop them from running after everything the Republican Noise Machine put out there.

There’s also the art of omission. You ignore something you'd said previously was crucial. Thus when it was Clinton vs. Bush I, character was why you should vote for a president, because Clinton was a womanizer and Bush I was a loyal family man. Obama is a loyal family man, while McCain cheated on his first wife flagrantly, then dumped her after she was crippled in a car accident. Plus, Obama's and his wife and children are America’s darlings. They did take a whack at Michelle, calling her an Angry Black Woman, but she blew that one into bits on the campaign trail. So in that campaign, character--at least of the family variety--no longer mattered a bit. The issue just vanished.

Normally you attack the other guy’s strengths as well as his weaknesses, if you can find a cleavage line to drive a wedge into. Thus Kerry’s war record, which was vulnerable because Kerry is such a stiff, and because so many old veterans loathed him because of his vocal opposition to the Vietnam War, which they’ve revised in their memories so they can think we were winning but were forced to lose by the Democrats. Kerry played into that unintentionally. With Clinton his home life was vulnerable mostly because of his womanizing, but also because Hillary is smart—which lots of men find threatening—and his daughter was homely (ironic, since she’s gorgeous now). So they attacked his whole family, though only the most hardcore took the bait about his daughter’s ugliness (Rush Limbaugh being the best example).

But another feature of propaganda campaigns is that you try lots of stuff and see what sticks. As long as the attempts don’t come from party officials you can always dislaim them if they don’t work.

I hope all this answers your question as to why the birther business has been pursued to diligently.

Loaded language and the unspoken opposite

Every political label delivers its opposite silently.

If I'm pro-choice, you're anti-choice. If I'm pro-life, you're pro-death. If I'm a "person of color" you're either a colorless person or, if "colored," a traitor to your, um, color. If I'm pro-immigrant, you're anti-immigrant, even if you're only anti-illegal immigrant, even if you're really only against the ultrarich who benefit from illegal alien labor.

I don't have to say it in so many words. It's a stealth attack on the other side's honor and integrity--and it also preloads the argument in favor of your side's loaded questions and proposals.

These labels extend to dressing up bills and initiatives with similarly loaded terms. If my bill is called "No child left behind" then you want to leave children behind.

The only honest response is to not allow your opponent to use these terms that stack the deck, even if those terms are now in common parlance. "Master race" was in common parlance in Germany in the 1930s. That didn't make it right. Moreover, you have to give up whatever advantage you may get from using your own side's loaded words. If you do feel you must use some of these loaded terms, tack "so-called" in front of them like Malcolm X did.

This use of loaded terms is so common, so pervasive, that it's tempting--really, really, tempting--to just give in. All I can say to that is it's actually fun to challenge them all the time--as long as you show your willingness to give up your side's loaded terms as well.

One caveat: not all political terms are loaded, but most are. You could argue that "pro-choice" and it's unspoken antonym "anti-choice" are accurate and thus defensible. But an anti-abortion activist would argue that you're against the "unborn child" having a choice. But then you can challenge "unborn child" which is an oxymoron actually, since if a fetus gets "born" too soon you just get a dead fetus, not a born child. That's what a "miscarriage" is. Which is another loaded term, by the way, because there's nothing "mis-" about it. It's usually a woman spontaneously aborting a nonviable fetus. Period.

I would defend "illegal alien." It's the legal term, for one thing. And its antonym is "legal alien," the correct term for someone who's in this country legally. And that isn't pejorative. So this one doesn't fit the model of a term that carries a stealth load of propaganda against the other side.