Letters to the Editor
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Why Dems chose to play this losing game is beyond me. Their skins are too thin, they take it too seriously and they worry too much about being liked. It's only noise if you pay attention to it.
Said President John Kerry.
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so what do you suggest? .. should we get in the gutter and start making comments about McCain's kids(like he did about Chelsea)?
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The Republican Party is the home of hateful misfits.
The problem is that the Republican Party serves only one purpose: to advance the interests of the wealthy and powerful, or more specifically, the amoral wealthy and powerful who do not care who or what they harm, so long as they stay on top.
Those people constitute a tiny minority of individuals, so they stoop to the lowest of methods to convince others to join their cause. They, like Adolph Hitler, use hate and fear and ignorance to rally people to their side. Hence, the elevation of truly horrible people like Ann Coulter and Pat Robertson and Rush Limbaugh -- the cheerleaders of hate. They are the tools which the elite use to win over the masses, and unfortunately -- again, as Hitler proved -- their methods work.
The fascists own the media, they own industry, they own politicians. This is why we hear endless loops of the Reverend Wright, followed by endless denunciations by media gasbags, but the crown prince of hate, Rush Limbaugh, is invited to Republican affairs as an honored guest.
The bright spot in this is that not all Americans are ignorant and hateful yahoos.
We have the power to, if not defeat the plutocrats, at least take back the best weapon against them: our government.
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Another Tactic
Another tactic of the machine is to mask the most vile, hate-filled screeds as reasoned debate. See this
http://buchanan.org/blog/?p=969
How can any reasonable or edifying can any national debate be when the right wing noise is accepted as mainstream and the positions held by the majority of Americans (re-Iraq occupation, for example) is portrayed as fringe?
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What is hateful?
I read the editorial by Paul Campos that was linked and, in the comments section, there were accusations that DailyKos and Huffington Post are hate-filled websites, and that liberals are the problem because all they have to do is call someone a racist or a Nazi, which stifles all discussion.
Needless to say, my perception is completely at odds with those assessments, but, apparently, the people who hold those views are 100% convinced of their validity.
So, where does that leave us?
I really do believe that the amount and degree of hatefulness on the right eclipses many times over that which can be attribtuted to the left. And I believe that you are doing a good job of pointing that out, Glenn. I have no problem seeing it. But, how do you force someone else to see it?
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Long URLs
Triple-click almost always works in my experience, even if the text is hidden under a sidebar.
That being said, I'm a fan of TinyURL, though I absolutely agree that any link (even inline, should the Gods of Salon see fit to bestow that boon upon us) should be given an adequate introduction. But asking someone to copy/paste seems to me, in this second decade of the Web, to be somewhat onerous.
Dropping links into the sig field is often worth it - especially since I seldom put my blog address in there. It strikes me as unseemly.... a form of blogwhoring, dèclassè.
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America-hating Tories aka Bush league "Republicans"
They use all the same propaganda techniques used by Hitler, Stalin, Pravda - only subtler and more effective. Does this mean Americans are dumber than Russians? No - only naive in their belief that we have a "free press" and a "free country".
I listen to Rush Limbaugh every morning. IMHO, he is a very smart and talented prostitute. And the morons hang on his every racist, lying, smearing, ad hominem word. Not bad for a man who failed at everything he did until he discovered the viagra of shout radio, oxycontin, and the viagra of viagra.
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Not to divert the thread into a meta discussion of the definition of fascism
But some readers may want to know that Dave Neiwert has documented this as well, and in great detail, specifically in - The RW Transmission Belt, part VII of his series:
Rush, Newspeak and Fascism
Friday, August 15, 2003
[Parts I, II, III, IV, V and VI. See my explanatory note.]
VII: The Transmission Belt
"Hitler was more moral than Clinton," intoned the nice-looking, dark-haired man in the three-piece suit. "He had fewer girlfriends."
The audience laughed and applauded, loudly.
A remark like that might hardly have raised an eyebrow in post-Monica America, particularly in the meeting-halls of mainstream conservatism, where it often seemed, by the end of Bill Clinton's tenure in the White House, that no hyperbole is too overblown in the campaign to depose him -- mostly, it seems, by convincing the rest of us that he was too grossly immoral to continue to hold the presidency...
http://dneiwert.blogspot.com/2003_08_10_dneiwert_archive.html#106100591663369732
That is a long series Neiwert did 5 years ago: Rush, Newspeak and Fascism.
A full HTML version is here:
http://www.cursor.org/stories/fascismintroduction.php
The right has been doing this since before WWII on the radio. They are quite good at it, and now they have the internets.
First part on his blog, for those interested, is here:
http://dneiwert.blogspot.com/2003/08/rush-newspeak-and-fascism_08.html
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@ WT
I know what you mean about tinyurl.
GG might've warned us that THIS
"absurd and obvious straw man"
was really THIS
http://instapundit.com/archives2/016893.php
Blech... 8')
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@maniondl - Guess what?
Thank you, Aycharaych. I'm a blog posting newb.
You are just the folks we want to reach.
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you can not take it -
seriously or you are dead - state the times of irony.
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No Kerry didn't ignore the noise
He tried to 'elevate himself above it' by obliquely noting that it was irrelevant. That's a different thing. Look Dems can take one of two paths. Either they can get in an alley fight with the GOP and literally take them down. By that I mean a scorched earth policy of actual personal destruction. Or they can get off their high horses of identity politics they're mired in and speak to the actual failures of the current admin that McCain seems intent on continuing and what, specifically what, chapter and verse they plan to do about it. If McCain is running as Bush III then the Dems should be tearing down Bush like he's the antichrist. And stop all this gibbering nonsense about who's black enough or liberal enough or who ran around the airport in Bosnia. That, is a loser strategy.