January 29, 2017

Freedom is like love, unless you're giving it away, it's not real...

The hardest thing about freedom is giving it to someone else.

Mostly, the RWers of the past few decades have proposed a very jingoistic, authoritarian kind of freedom.

January 22, 2017

The ratings war....

Trump is laboring under a misconception. He still thinks he is in campaign mode, and that "his" media is still dominant. The problem is that his Twitter and Alt-Right support probably at most gets read by the same number of voters reflected in his poll numbers, about 35-40%. He's a salesman at heart (nice word for a con man, I know . But now that he's in the office, he's got nothing to sell beyond the captive audience of his Twitterbots.

Now that the M$M is reporting on him, even as soft as some of the coverage has been, now his likeness and antics are being sent out to millions more folks around the country. Given his constant attacks on the press, it is not surprising (well, it is a little) that the HQ (honesty quotient) has actually gone up, along with the Factuality of it all.

The "real" media might be obsolete, but not quite yet, I think. They definitely dropped the ball in the election cycle, but there have been promising signs that they are picking up the pace since November. Trump may get lots of likes on social media, but now, as the only one out there he is losing the battle with the press.

Now the real task at hand for us: Tying Trump's abysmal numbers to Congressional Repubs. Theirs is the agenda we need to fight.

January 5, 2017

Thanks for making my point...

The OP was wailing that it was somehow wrong to compare FDR fireside chats with Trump tweets. I didn't see the show he was referring to, so I can't comment on that.

But the truth is, as you say, the important thing right now is that Trump has used a new technology for distributing information to his advantage and we need to learn how to counter that if liberalism is to survive. We have the superior message, I'm sure we can agree with that. How do we make people listen? Obviously, flooding the old technology didn't work well enough.

Studying our opponents is basic Sun Tzu. We can't counter them if we don't understand or even admit that they found and used a tactical advantage. There are certainly several other areas where we got out-foxed that need work, too, but this is pretty big.

January 5, 2017

You are confusing content with tactics...

FDR and JFK were both attempting to sway public opinion, just like Trump is trying to do. Their job is harder, because it is easier to instill fear and hatred than to inspire people to do good things, in any medium. Trump is trying to morph his position as "King of Tweets" or King Twit into an authoritarian presidency. Our job is to stop him.

Much like any treatment for disease or addiction, moralizing usually doesn't help, it just confuses the issue. Instead of over emphasizing what he is saying, focus on how he is saying it and how we can work to counter it. Just counter-attacking is inadequate, because we are then fighting on his turf. We need to learn to fight back effectively.

Rants may lead to short term better feelings. They don't affect folks like Trump and his supporters, who take as a badge of pride that they don't care what we think about them.

December 4, 2016

I'm really starting to hate the term "populist"...

it seems to me that the term has no relation to what a majority of citizens in a country really want, but only seems to follow the opinions of the loudest and most unscrupulous minority of voters, usually led by some rich asshole who has no clue about what the "common citizen" really wants or needs. And not just no clue, but an active desire to self-aggrandize at the expense of the very folks who support the "populist" candidate.

Populism has become a route to fascism, if history is any judge. Mussolini was a populist, as was Hitler. So forgive me, my inclination is to fight "populism" as it has been manifest since the early- to mid-20th Century. Real democracy requires intelligent, well informed citizens, populism seems to need citizzens to be willfully ignorant to succeed.

Count me out.

October 21, 2016

Yeah, it makes sense...

after '12 they did their autopsy, and it had some things in it that are kind of scary to Dems. It recommended going after our voter base.

From a raw power stand point, the Repubs did the best thing for the Dem party when they took that autopsy and filed it away in some dusty cabinet somewhere, never to again see the light of day.

The current white supremesist takeover of the Repub Party is something that has been underway since the Southern Strategy was adopted by Nixon. Bush and McCain could see what was happening and perhaps worked to reverse it, although a case could be made they didn't work that hard to.

October 20, 2016

It's almost kind of strange, really...

At the debates, and I'll say all three of them really, Clinton displayed one feature that many people have criticized her for. She was prepared, calculating, and ruthless. She really toyed with Trump for the first two debates, and saved the "kill shot" for the final one. She acted cool and calm while she pared him like an overripe orange and squeezed the juice out of him.

And all of that demeanor that she has been criticized for is what will make her a great president when she is executing the office of POTUS.

Now, at various times, we've seen the human, connected side of Hillary during this campaign, and that's all lovely because we want a president with a compassionate side, much like Obama has been. But tonight she showed how she would perform when facing up to the Putins of the world. So did Trump for that matter. A little pressure and he folded up like a lawn chair. I'm with her.

October 12, 2016

Hallie Jackson just asked the ultimate question...

she asked a panelist (I didn't catch the woman's name, but she was a Repub for Trump, I believe) what was more important:

Now I would argue that loyalty to the country and constitution should out-weigh both of those, but...at the heart of authoritarian systems is the idea of individual loyalty to the leader and not to the country or to abstracts like "rule of law" or "constitutional law." It is no coincidence that Hitler (I know, Godwin's Law ) had all the officers and soldiers in the German armed forces swear an oath to him, personally. That kind of shit had more weight in Europe with it's history of feudalism, but the heart of that system was, of course, a complex system of individual fealty of lords and local barons to other royalty. In many ways, Fascism is a modernized, corporatised feudal system in which national interests are seconded to "individual" desires of the corporate class.

Remember, when Deep Throat (google Watergate) came out, the attacks from douche bags like Ollie North were about his being a "traitor" to Nixon and that cabal, with no considerations of national or constitutional loyalty.

August 18, 2016

He's using his pep rallies as "focus groups" for his talking points...

with predictable results.

I remember-sorry I don't have a video clip-how he introduced the whole "Obama/Clinton founded ISIS" line. It was at one of his recent rallies. He was trying to use a teleprompter IIRC, but then he goes off script. He starts his usual babbling and you can almost see his face light up in "I have a good idea" mode when he blurts out that "Obama founded ISIS."

Now the crowd didn't immediately react, perhaps in shock and disbelief, but there was a smattering of applause, and I can imagine Trump looking at all the faces in the crowd, wondering what they just heard, but then starting to beam with realization. So he says it again, louder this time, with more force to it. The crowd starts to cheer and applaud. Then he seems to realize that he's not really running against Obama, so he repeats it again, this time adding Clinton's name, saying "Yes Obama and Crooked Hillary Clinton founded ISIS."

This accomplishes two things, at least. One, it gets his fawning supporters off on another tangent, always eager and willing to believe something evil about the President and Hillary Clinton. To them it has become fact, incontrovertible, non-arguable fact. Secondly, it cements it in his mind. It's the simple old memory trick to repeat something three times (or more) to make the memory last. It becomes fact in his mind, too. And he's off for several days on his bogus bullshit, wondering why the press is hammering him about what in his mind is established fact. In the end, he'll drop it; not because he realizes it is bullshit lies, but because he starts to realize that it isn't working for him, even though he cannot grasp why.

He does this all the time. Of course, his rallies are totally non-scientific means to select focus groups. They are already supporters, there will be no critical look at his words. But in his version of the bubble, his rallies ARE "the American people," as he mistakes the ability to gather a few thousand supporters for the actual ability to garner support from the broader electoral base. He takes in the cheering and accolades and believes that's what everybody thinks of him. If the American people don't think that, in his mind it is only because of the media mis-representing him and his words/actions. His basic thought process never gets past "How can they NOT love me?"

Yeah, narcissism at it's ugly finest.

July 14, 2016

Well said...

As an older gent, I have come up many times against that old truism immortalized by the Rolling Stones in song so many years ago...."You Can't Always Get What You Want."

I get enough accusations of "ideologue" from righties on boards I hang on, I don't need that around here. I've always considered myself a center-left moderate. The Repubs have been careening so far to the right over the years, that their supporters look at me and scream leftie/commie/socialist...whatever leftie insult they care to toss out. I've learned to more or less ignore it.

As for Bernie, he did the Dem party, and the country a huuuugggeeee service by running, and by staying in so long. I've long felt that the country has needed a solid lurch to the left just to get back to the centrist country we mostly were up until the Reagan "Revolution" started with their identiy politics and theological movements. A pox on the Repub party.

I know we need a solid center-right party in this country for long term stability. We don't need any more drift to the right. It's past time for the pendulum to swing back. I do think that Bernie supporters that pull the stay home or go 3rd party cards disappointing, but it is their choice. I suspect most of them will pull the lever for Hillary come November, and hopefully for some Dem down ticket seats, too.