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Yes we can. Get, stay energized. Don’t Quit.
I think the GOP picks its topics of DEM derision solely to appeal to those within their sphere of influence: specifically, their prejudice(s) and fears.
So whether or not the GOP purveyors of vitriol believe in what they spew is anyone’s guess. I gleaned this from watching Bill Moyer’s Capital Crimes. (you can watch it here:
http://www.pbs.org/moyers/moyersonamerica/capitol/index.html
The shear self-servingness of those like Ralph Reed and Tom Delay was so obvious I became convinced that many in the GOP are just ACTORS. Reagan anyone?
They act out in whatever manner it takes to garner the support of the those within the sphere of their influence.
They conduct themselves with precise calculation, and rarely from truly heartfelt convictions, or so it seems by the silliness of their retorts.
They artfully craft Bumper Sticker Talking Points, probably written by the ad titans of Wall Street. They are damn good at it, btw.
They just want to win, be damned with anything else like truth or principles.
The spawns of Lee Atwater will do anything and say anything to get a vote.
They have derided Liberals so severely for decades, that they have successfully convinced the fearful and the haters, that they will both be the victims of Democrats in power. They have terrified their base with base lies.
So great has been their success in this regard, that we have allowed their coercive tactics to force us to retreat from calling ourselves Liberals anymore. We are now progressives. Would we have changed our name but for the GOP derision machines?
All that said, that President Barrack Obama is black and that he lived in a Muslim country in his youth, couldn’t be more perfect stage material for the GOP win-at-all-cost, vitriol is our tool, actors.
MoT from your fan here, speak to the hearts of the audience from your heart. Ponder the principles under attack by the GOP Actors. I think they use the racism in the hearts of their voters as a meme for their support. Sadly, it works. And, yes, there are some true racists in Congress. I am just not convinced that Obama’s race isn’t just another tool for the GOP. A hateful tool that appeals to the rascist hearts of their base. A tool in the hands of Actors who will always believe that "the end justifies the means" even if that means letting America burn, while they fiddle.
I think we need to fight back using their most effective tool:
Bumper Sticker Responses to their Bumper Sticker Slogans.
Short, simple, punchy, and always principle based.
A true principle can’t be argued because it is a true principle.
A silly example: An Air Born Ball Always Returns to Earth
How can anyone argue with this? It’s based on the principle of gravity. Arguing a principle makes the arguer denying it look stupid.
Here are some political examples off the top of my head:
Obama’s Death Panels – re-tort – Health Care Saves Lives
Government IS the Problem – retort with (examples)
Government Keeps Us Safe
Government Delivers Your Mail
Government Pays Your Troops
Government Puts Out Your Fires
Government Feeds the Elderly
So, as I haven’t so much done here, KISS, keep it simple. Speak in Bumper Sticker.
In defense of Liberals: Liberals Have Heart
This proud Liberal chose to be one because I believed that Liberal leaders shared a heartfelt desire to serve ALL the people. To give voice to the voiceless, hope to the hopeless, health care to everyone, a fiscal balance between the Military Industrial Complex and the Real Needs of America. In short, to provide all the services necessary for the creation of a healthy society: Education, Health, security on all levels, and fairness and a shared prosperity.
We had the above before Reagan. Heck, even Nixon placed controls on housing costs, much to the consternation of the neoconservatives. Nixon had more heart that today’s GOP!
This is what the GOP has done to my life and the lives of millions of Americans. The result of Republican domination for decades and the disgraceful dismantling of American security by NAFTA, bank deregulation, and continual war.
This is what I hope Obama Et Al will fix. It is why I worked countless hours to help elect him:
Too many don’t have any money left anymore after paying for life’s necessities.
We are no longer credited by our life-long work experience, and are forced into "entry level" positions with a low wages, if we are lucky enough to have a job.
We are paid NO interest on our savings.
We are captive victims by credit card bank policies allowed by Congress.
The costs for health care are ridiculous. Providers on all levels are free to gouge the system, while our government seems to think it’s ok for us to pay $14K, $19K, $22K, or $27K out-of-pocket annually, heaven forbid we have a health crisis and are poised to force us to do so. (See my DAILY DOSE series of analyses of the health care reform Bills.
Depending on which State we live in, social safety net systems vary greatly. Where are our champions on the Hill charged to serve all citizens? Charged to help the citizens of states who won’t provide proper education and/or social safety nets for their citizens?
And practically half of the US Budget is now spent on the increasingly privatized Military Industrial Complex. The growth in this market in the past 10 years defies comprehension. Our tax dollars are being spent to create tools that can be used to coral our very own freedoms. Crowd control technology has been perfected. I once read that War was the opportunity of weapons invention. The floodgates of the US Treasury are opened and our national wealth has become the wealth of the MIC CEOs. Are we NUTS!
We are becoming an impoverished citizenry, slaves working to just get by.
Race has nothing to do with our descent. Power and Greed, winning at all costs, the hell with the citizenry. This is where the country is after 30 years of near complete GOP control and some DEMS that failed to rally on our behalf when they had the chance.
Well they have the chance now. Will they rally?
Ask them that, Ministry of Truth.
Results, not Race, A Good Leader Make
The GOP Fear Obama’s Good Results
His Success, Will Be A GOP Insult
Obama’s Success Will Expose the GOP LIE
It’s Not a Sin to be A Liberal Guy!
Well, enough said.
Good Luck to you, Ministry of Truth. You will know the right things to say. You work hard studying. You know the issues. Have great faith in the power of your words. Don’t worry about sounding clever. Just be YOU. I have faith in YOU.
And, I don’t think you have to out yourselves.
Would Benjamin Franklin have been so successful if he had signed his Poor Richard’s Almanack with other than a pen name?
Wisdom in folk society meant the ability to provide an apt adage for any occasion, and Franklin’s readers became well prepared. He sold about ten thousand copies per year (a circulation equivalent to nearly three million today).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Franklin
Lastly, what time will you broadcast? And I can’t find out where to go to watch online. Can you give us a link to programming information? Went to Air America’s website and didn’t see a reference to Nicole’s show. Thanks.
ROCK ON MINISTRY OF TRUTH!
Here is MoT’s diary request for your input:
I’ll be on Air America radio tonight, wish me good luck and thank you to all
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2009/9/11/780266/-Ill-be-on-Air-America-radio-tonight,-wish-me-good-luck-and-thank-you-to-all
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Any Bumper Speak ideas? Share, ok?
Hate good government? You’ll love Somalia.
Ha! Good one, chuckling while writing, or maybe
Hate Big Government, You’ll love Somalia
What gave you the first clue, Sherlock?
Snarkiness aside (with apologies), if it ain’t a one-liner, it ain’t getting heard.
BTW, back in the ’60s, the left were the masters of the bumper sticker, e.g., “What if they gave a war and nobody came?”
My recent conclusion:
So many politicians and industry leaders seem to hail from Yale, Harvard Et al.
We know how much they all love to wager and win, right? Remember that Eddie Murphy/Dan Ackroyd Wall Street movie, right?
Hang in here with me. What if we are just pawns in a selfish game?
What if they have to draw straws to determine whether they become Dems or Reps? or liberal or conservative for the overseas leader types?
What if winning is just a freaking game for these folks and we are just pieces of the game?
You know that many of these graduates (the ones who want to pursue law/politics) get to be indoctrinated in schools like Rhodes etc?
Privatization of government made me start to think this way. I grew up in a very wealthy town. WASPS. The kids all slipped into family businesses when they graduated. Well, with increase in global competition, the kids were having a hard time finding a lucrative landing. So, voila, privatization of government services. All kids get their own corporation sucking from the government teet.
Is this too tin foil hatty? Should I have NOT thought out loud?
I think this is perhaps too far-fetched, but I also think there may be something to the Yale/Harvard/et al point at least among Democratic politicians. I think that folks who come out of these schools are taught an ideology that requires them to be non-ideological in the traditional sense of the term.
So, for example, if old-style liberal ideology suggests that Government-run health insurance is the way to solve our health insurance problem, then these folks learn that this is a partisan ideological position that has no validity and is also political unfeasible, and that to solve problems caused by our private health insurance system, they must therefore find a solution different from the straightforward one of a national health insurance system.
So, they look high and low for a solution and one among them, Jacob Hacker, comes up with this bright public option idea. Now this is the kind of idea that people in this crowd can really get behind. It’s not ideologically old-style liberal because it doesn’t drive the insurance companies out of the basic health care business. It’s not ideologically free market because it retains a Government-run component. It’s also friendly to free market principles because it purports only to create competition and a functioning market where one hasn’t existed before. Also, it’s politically clever, in that it’s hard for reasonable person to say that it’s socialized medicine or at least that’s what they thought before they were taught, once again, that Republicans are not reasonable people. They’ll call anything they want “socialism” whether that makes sense or not.
Moving to the area of economic stimulus, the Harvard/Yale et al types on’t subscribe to either free market economics which has just failed big time, or too Keynesian principles, since these are so passe. However, they can try to use their Harvard/Yale et. al. smarts to find a middle way between what these two sides recommend. Just because there’s no economic theory to support the half-baked stimulus package they passed, that doesn’t mean they have a problen. After all, they’re just so Smaaarrrt, why should they listen to any mere theoretician.
In the area of reconstruction of the financial system, real market conservatives are telling them no bailouts. Progressive economists are telling them to take the failed banks into receivership, reorganize them, get rid of their toxic assets, and then spin them loff again to investors. They, however, know more than anyone else, and so take a middle way implementing huge bail-outs without any significant regulation and without taking the institutions receiving the support into receivership and without making any serious efforts to regulate executicve compensation for those on the public dole.
Finally, in the area of politics itself, they’ve concluded that old theories of effective politics which prescribe partisan conflict in the service of passing legislation in a Democracy are wrong, and that they must have a bipartisan process if any legislation is to get done and if the country is to solve its problems. Never mind that bipartisan processes always seem to come up with Rube Goldberg solutions that are quite ad hoc and never meet problems directly. The excellence of these solutions is apparent because their success is not evaluated in terms of their likely or observed effectiveness, but rather in terms of whether they are bipartisan or not.
In sum, there is such a thing as being too arrogant and too clever by half in the solutions one arrives at, and the Harvard/Yale et. al. do have that problem, I think. Their number one requirement is that a solution must be counter-intuitive and original to be useful, and it must be one that is likely to minimize partisan conflict in congress. Any solutions that have been offered in the past are ip so facto disqualified from serious consideration because implementing them may require partisan conflict which is to be avoided at all costs, and which is always avoidable, if only we are clever enough in designing new solutions.
Excellent!
Hey, you wrote a great diary, if you choose to post your comment as a diary.
Concise, logical, and completely correct, in my opinion.
In the process, the needs of the majority of people can’t be met, can they?
Compromise, in the theater of Congress today, has unraveled the fabric of society leaving the masses to deal the massive financial insecurity. Somehow, if this isn’t repaired I don’t think things are going to go well.
Words cannot describe the sadness I feel for American families today. If you haven’t already, I highly suggest watching Elizabeth Warren here. She explains how and why the Middle Class is dissolving. And, yes, the culprit is greed by those who benefit from unbridled profit.
And, while you listen, she also explains the unravelling of the American Family because MOMs had to join the workforce in order for the family to remain in the Middle Class.
She begins at about 6:23 minutes in:
The Coming Collapse of the Middle Class
Those people grew old(er) and became Republicans. I think of the number of people, many of whom were quite involved in the 60s anti-war movement, who are now staunchly Rightwing. Perhaps it was merely a practical matter of not wishing to go to Vietnam-it seems to be a recurrent theme among the leadership of the right, as it is apparent they have no strong reservations against war-unless they are among the participants.
Exactly.
And they couldn’t help themselves, even if they wanted to. It is a CEO’s fiduciary responsibility to maximize short-term profits. If he/she demonstrably works in pursuit of a contrary goal, he/she can be sued and will surely be replaced.
It is a game, and they are chained to it and dead if they don’t play well. But they aren’t the enemy; the game is. Somehow we need to change the game.
National Health Care: It’s not just about me.
Greed won’t feed the hungry
A closed mind never grows
National Health Care: What Jesus WOULD Do.
I would really like a BIG Confederate flag with Calvin pissing on it, but I think, living in Florida, that I would probably be shot…
Sighs
Sarcasm works in one liners:
Get Government out of the Fire Department!
No Damned government between me and my Burning House!
etc.
The Coming Collapse of the Middle Class
Ok, can’t post the you tube video. Here’s the link. This is about 45 minutes BUT a must see in order to understand how we got to where we are today.
And, btw, it only took ONE generation to unravel The American Dream.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=akVL7QY0S8A
Government IS the Problem - If you’re really fucking rich.
Government Pays Your Troops – *AND* Some Horribly Immoral Motherfuckers.
Government Feeds the Elderly – Please Help Us Find a Cure For becoming Elderly. It’s Your Fucking Money, You Know.
Government Keeps Us Safe – From being Viewed as Benevolent.
Government Puts Out Your Fires – Domestically. Abroad – We Start ‘Em!
Politics by our two party system plays us all for the suckers we are. They keep telling us how great a Country we are, making us overlook the truth. The Congress has caused every problem this country has, including the Housing and Banking crisises. They say they must fix Social Security, but won’t quit robbing the fund. They haven’t fixed one problem, yet create more everyday. Our military has never protected this Country, and failed at Pearl Harbor and 911. Our sixteen intelligence agencies also failed us, both times. Our Military has flubbed the two wars in 3rd world countries. Hitler almost took the world in three years. Eight years and were defending poppies and rocks, hoping to win something.