Tag: messaging

here we find yet again exposed the central lie of American establishment journalism: that opinion-free “objectivity” is possible, required, and the governing rule. The exact opposite is true: very strong opinions are not only permitted but required. They just have to be the right opinions: the official, approved ones. Just look at the things that are allowed. The Washington Post lavished editorial praise on the brutal, right-wing tyrant Augusto Pinochet, and that caused no controversy. AP’s Washington Bureau Chief Ron Fournier got caught sending secret, supportive emails to Karl Rove, and nothing happened. Benjamin Netanyahu formally celebrates the Terrorist bombing of the King David Hotel that killed 91 civilians and nobody is stigmatized for supporting him. Erick Erickson sent around the most rancid and arguably racist tweets, only to thereafter be hired as a CNN contributor. […] Having someone who was part of the slaughter of 80 civilians in Lebanon on your Board is fine. [Having] a former AIPAC official with an obvious bias toward Israel […] is perfectly consistent with a news network’s “credibility.” But expressing sadness over the death of an Islamic cleric beloved by much of the Muslim world is not. Whatever is driving that, it has nothing to do with “objectivity.”

Glenn Greenwald, opining on the inexplicable firing of CNN’s Octavia Nasr. Read the whole thing. Your Liberal Media.

GOP Reaps No Outrage

jonathan-cunningham:

Let me see if I have this straight: in the last few days members of the GOP have savagely screwed the unemployed, protected the bankstas, trashed Thurgood Marshall, implied rape and incest is part of God’s plan, defended BP, threatened to either end social security or screw over 20 million plus people who have paid into the system for at least 20 years by making them wait until age 70 to see their benefits, and screwed homeless veterans with children. That about it, or is there more?

You can rest assured that there’s more, it’s just not what you may have been expecting. The real outrage? That The Democrat has made an issue of no part of any of this. Not even slightly. Instead, they’ve acceded to the demands of the minority. Over and over and on every issue listed there. And, in so doing, directly contribute to the seeds of their own electoral destruction.

Oh how we’ve all grown tired of hearing the same rhyming statements that defenestrate the GOP on any one of these issues every time a microphone has been switched on. Right? Oh how we’ve grown tired of the GOP repeatedly being forced to vote against jobs, or bank reform, or Wall Street reform, or BP reform, or the notion that rape isn’t part of God’s plans, or any of the rest of it. Right?

This is why we fail. Every time.

GOP Reaps No Outrage

Blather in the Wild

Bob Somerby notes it too:

Question: Have you seen any stories about the way the heat wave proves that global warming is happening? We ask because of the lunacy that occurred when it snowed in D.C. this year.

[…]

There has been no nonsense this week—and that, of course, is good. But in these well-twinned weather events, we can’t help seeing the shape of American politics over the past forty years. One tribe has broadcast well-known bits of nonsense: Socialized medicine has failed wherever it’s been tried! The Social Security trust fund has already been spent! If we lower tax rates, we get extra revenue! In the absence of active attempts at rebuttal, such nonsense has been quite effective. Claims of this type have driven American politics, as in the past year’s debate about the Obama health plan.

Many people believed what they heard about that unusual snow in D.C. This week, it’s been very hot in D.C. Thankfully, not a word has been said.

I tend to agree up to a point, in that it is intellectually comfortable to see a lack of foolishness in the discourse. But, by the same token, you cannot win a the larger game you refuse to play the smaller one. And, let’s face it, The Democrat categorically refuses to use a convenient heat wave (or, for that matter, any other politically useful event) to make the GOP an object of derision; the GOP and its media enablers have no such compunction about using a convenient snow storm, oil spill, natural disaster, and or terrorist attack. It’s all about messaging and inoculation. The first thing low information voters should think about when faced with some future snowstorm-related attacks on Democrats should be some Democrat pointing out the fact that it’s hot today in an amusing way that demeans and debases some particularly idiotic, utterly predictable GOP talking point.
Neither today’s heat or last winter’s freak snowstorms have much if anything to do with global warming per se; but you cannot simply grin and bear an attack, no matter how ridiculous, and hope that the truth will out because you have the facts on your side.

The facts do not matter.

I said: hot out there.

Average high for Boston today? 79°F.

Temperature right this very second? 88°F

The same can be said for most if not all of the eastern seaboard of Our Great Republic.

This must be extremely embarrassing for the global warming deniers. I’m already sick of the blanket coverage of this heat and how embarrassing it is for them. Such blather is sufficiently prevalent that probably one half of one degree of this heat is directly attributable to B-roll of eggs frying on pavement.

BP’s Oyster

According to the New York Times, the oldest oyster-shucking operation in the country shucked its last oyster on Thursday. Towards the end of the piece is this quote from the requisite owner/operator:

We were just hopeful they would have capped that thing by now [such that we wouldn’t be forced to shutter the business]

Uh, even if they had completely and forever capped it yesterday, your business model (harvesting food products from the gulf) is over. Probably for decades. Remains unclear to me why the media, so obsessed with idiotic minutiae, utterly fails to comprehend The Big Picture. All these gulf-based industries except oil are going away. And in terms of those living on the Earth today, they are likely going away forever. Oh, right, “obsessed with idiotic minutiae.”

MSM: If you want a guvmint-should-be-doing-more story, how’s about the guvmint should be actively retraining these folks, starting now for some sort of useful job that they’ll be doing for the rest of their lives, because shrimping, shucking oysters, and the various other food-related gulf industries are over. Forever. It’s just that the media, and by extension America, doesn’t seem to grasp this yet.

A little dab’ll do ya

OpenLeft notes just a short list of the things that Rand Paul (and his supporters) think it should be legal for the owner of a private company to fire you for:

  • Not being the same religion as the boss
  • Not having sex with the boss
  • Having children, or not having them
  • Not liking the same sports teams as the boss
  • Not voting for different political candidates than the boss
  • Not eating the same food than the boss
  • Not liking different colors than the boss.

Basically, any reason at all.

This is exactly right, and yet is sadly underappreciated by the general public, or at the very least in the MSM’s depiction of said public. Turns out dread Big Guvmint is responsible for some hugely popular things. Who knew?

And, in another edition of This is Why, it also goes a long way towards explaining The Democat’s current fecklessness. You see, it’s all about inoculation. We know right now that the glibertarians and their friends in the Tea Klan hold a set of wildly unpopular beliefs. Put simply, they think you should Go Die in the Streets. Are you a child whose parents have no money for food? Go die in the streets. Sick? Go die in the streets. And so forth. Turns out most Americans prefer not being relegated to death in the streets.

So you blow them the fuck up with it. Repeatedly. To the extent that Rand Paul and his ilk answer honestly (see: Brown vs. the Board of Education was wrongly decided), they will instantly and permanently alienate vast swathes of Americans, including many or even most “Conservatives.”
To the extent that Rand Paul and his ilk shuck and jive and dissemble about street death relegation, they will alienate that fraction of America that constitutes their primary support (pun definitely intended)…they come off as “just another meely mouthed politician” and/or end up with the most dreaded tag of all: RINO. Either way, it’s a strategy that puts more Democrats in office unless and until the GOP gets a clue. Which, let’s face it, is a long way off into Our Glorious Socialist Future.

Top 12

John Cole runs it down for us re: just what qualifications are required to be a serious person seeking a judicial appointment:

  1. Titillating David Brooks- no boring career oriented types need apply. Try to squeeze in some college era hijinks to liven up that vita- maybe a possession bust as an undergrad, some racy Facebook pictures, or a term paper supportive of Mao.

  2. Ed Whelan demands a valid driver’s license and there will be a proficiency test to demonstrate “mastery” of the subject.

  3. Paul Campos would like a dissertation on the history of curriculum theory (no slouching and skipping out on the role of hermeneutics and critical theory), a treatise on best pedagogical practices, a complete review of the collected works of John Dewey, and a positive evaluation from every lazy student you may have ever had.

  4. Andrew Sullivan would like proof one way or another of your sexual orientation. I suppose pictures will do, but the apparent gold standards are the assurances of Jeffrey Toobin and Eliot Spitzer.

  5. Somewhat related to #4, K-LO [Kathryn Jean Lopez] has decided that four out of over one hundred justices have been women, and this poses a grave threat to the white male, so no more va-jay-jays- women need not apply.

  6. David Bernstein is tired of Ivy Leaguers, so come on down, Heritage Law students!

  7. Republicans are requiring a history of judicial experience, which could be daunting, considering they will most likely block your appointment to the bench.

  8. Ed Whelan is also requiring that future justices not be residents (current or former) of New York City.

  9. Michael Steele is demanding that you not question the Constitutional Right to practice of slavery.

  10. Lynn Sweet would like a decent batting stance. And no, I’m not kidding. According to recent debates, proof of a good baseball stance could also serve as verification of your sexual status, as required by Sullivan in point number four.

  11. [Andrew] Sullivan is now demanding a record of taking risks and failing to prove a record of life experience.

  12. And Howard Kurtz requires a spouse and children

Center-right radical socialism

“ My fellow Americans, in the past weeks we have witnessed a string of avoidable tragedies caused by the excesses of corporations and their executives. Millions of innocent people have suffered economic losses and dozens have lost their lives. The heedless rapacity of BP will cause suffering to the fishing industry, damage to the Gulf’s fragile ecology and new economic losses to a region that is only beginning to recover from Hurricane Katrina.

“The mining disaster is another reason why we cannot rely on corporations to act in the public interest. Unless government vigorously policies mine safety, more miners will lose their lives, more wives will lose husbands and more children will lose fathers. But better enforcement of oil and coal safety will never solve the entire problem. We as a nation must do what BP cynically professed it was doing. We must move beyond petroleum and beyond carbon.

"And the mother of all economic catastrophes, the financial collapse, is further proof that markets must not be left to their own devices. We need the toughest possible regulation of Wall Street so that the rest of the economy can recover.

—Robert Kuttner, saying what Obama won’t.
Kuttner goes on:

Gentle reader, presidents on occasion have actually made speeches like this. Roosevelt did. Lyndon Johnson did during the civil rights era. You could look it up. They used events to move public opinion. They built popular support for progressive interventions.

To which I add: yep.

Four Things

The way I see it, this graph boils down to four things:

  1. Perceived level of understanding is a dangerous thing. But then, we knew this.
  2. Self-identifying independents of 1993 were largely moderates. Today, they are (apparently) the far right that finds the GOP not-quite-lunatic-enough and (probably) some fraction of former GOPers who are horrified by that party today. A “voted-X in last election” cross-tab would’ve helped here. A lot.
  3. The epistemic loop seems entirely responsible for the shift in initial wrong-ness, and misperception among Democrats that also has to be corrected through painstakingly slow re-education and gradual convincing. Lots of Democrats were buying into the Death Panels horse-shit too, after all, they heard it on the news, so the news-givers must be making at least a casual effort at factual correctness instead of merely reporting what various “sides” said. Right? Right? It is a mortal lock that these Democrats are older, and came of age with Walter Cronkite. They implicitly trust what they hear on TV, even if it’s on FOXnews. You can (eventually) convince them otherwise, but only with a lot of work; and research shows they still marginally believe the wrong fact if it comes first, even when said people realize the initial fact is misinformation. This is why primacy in the race to inoculation in the messaging war matters so goddamned much, and yet the Democrat categorically refuses to use it.
    Nearly 80% of Republicans self-identifying as “not knowing much” about healthcare reform knew that there were going to be Death Panels. More than 80% who “knew a lot” thought that as well. This is FOXnews, Rush, Beck, and Drudge (aka the MSM’s assignment editor). No other explanation for it.
  4. The Facts Do Not Matter

Full report (PDF link) here.