* drifty:
The honest answer to the question raised by Frank Luntz – “Why do Republicans keep winning if their candidates are so shitty?” – is that the GOP base is morally subhuman at a deep and probably incurable level.
That selling fascism to brownshirts and racism to intractable bigots is like any other kind of narcotics trafficking. Like selling hillbilly heroin to Limbaugh. Users are not necessarily going to score out loud and in public, but they don't exactly need a whole lotta persuasion to get them to buy and mainline the lethal shit the Right is slinging.
Luntz’s “solution” is the most recent GOP Talking Point being handed around the Conservative Pundit glory holes as eagerly as Hillary snuff porn anime: That Liberals need to stop being so “angry”.
When your party is led by outright lunatics and liars, traitors and thieves…
When after thirty years your base can only take nourishment suckling on the poison that oozes from Cheney’s bile sacs, Coulter’s fangs, Hannity’s tongue, O’Reilly’s wheezing pores, Falwell’s ingrown soul…
When your official cult house organs have been spewing raw hatred it the noosphere for thiry years…
...and your advice is that the other side who have finally had it with playing nice with these moral locusts are” too angry”?
It boggles the mind."
* drifty:
"While the lies and half-truths provide some kind of parasitic sustenance for the half-wits that prop up this President, his War and his Party, this firehose of unabashed McCarthyesque propaganda has also flattened most of “legitimate journalism”
No wonder they have always been so baffling, smugly at ease supporting a President who lied the nation into war and disaster: This is a Party that always, always, always fixes the facts around its bigotries.
Because no one with a Big Voice will challenge them. No one with Big Ink will push back on them even slightly.
These droolers are allowed to decide deep in the reptilian pylons of its Unitary brain who it will hate, who it will fear, who it will scapegoat and to which Dear Leader it will swear its eternal fucktard fealty unchallanged by the press. And then cherry-pick history, philosophy and the Bible for snips and sentence fragments that support its deranged ideology. Romp across the headlines for seven years, screeching for Bill Clinton’s blood like macaques going through heroin withdrawal, because no one in the MSM will make it their business to report on this as a story.
This Party of God who fall alternately and obediently into cheering ranks and leaden, smirking silence as their Dear Leader runs through everything of value in this nation like a junkie going through a fistful of stolen credit cards, and not a single soul in all of Punditville has balls hairy enough to stand up and say: “These people are what is wrong with America”."
2 comments:
This came up,
"The honest answer to the question raised by Frank Luntz – “Why do Republicans keep winning if their candidates are so shitty?” – is that the GOP base is morally subhuman at a deep and probably incurable level."
There's a whole lot to be said about a line like this.
Suppose we wanted to change the politics of the country for the better. Would we be able to do that by pissing off the arguable majority of the population, a group that has been able to elect the President and until recently most of the Congress? I don't think so. Don't you think calling them "morally subhuman" would stop cold any dialogue between them and anyone who made such a claim? Yep...
Beyond how badly this would be for dialogue, does it really explain anything? Do we really think that even the neo-cons or the fascists have nothing to say for themselves? I'm thinking there must be something to their position that explains why people refuse to agree with liberals and leftists.
Maybe this Frank guy didn't mean his audience should believe that Republican candidates were really so bad. They just take positions that their liberal/democratic/other opponents don't appreciate for some reason. By going right to belittling Republicans as morally subhuman, we fail to understand their positions.
I'm saying, if we really wanted to change the world for the better, we'd have to understand why people seem to be opposed to our way of thinking of things. The "moral subhuman" language gets in the way of our doing that.
hmm - good issues, as always.
one extra piece of info that you might be missing is the Frank Luntz is actually THE message guru for the repugs. At various times, I've suggested that he is more evil/important than Karl Rove.
The broader point that Drifty was making (and i may not have included it in my excerpts) is, largely, valid if a little OTT. That is, the media, with the help of Frank, has failed for a longest time to tell us what a disaster the bush presidency is, AND they were used (often willingly) to appeal to the Lizard Brain - which is, arguably, "morally subhuman."
Imagine, for example, instead of "War is Good," the media had called out the 'morally subhuman' claims and said "Racism, war, homophobia is Bad" - we'd be in a different place now. A better place.
One thing we can say, in retrospect, is that the media enabled this administration from start to finish - and a) without the media, Bush would have hit 28% a long time ago - and b) we were right all along - it wasn't even a matter of ideology, it was never about 'left/liberal' - it was about calling the egadministration on its radical, dangerous, lying and incompetent nature.
It may not be the most effective move to call 28% of the population morally subhuman, but a responsible media would have marginalized (via reality) those 28% who think that Iraqis deserve to be killed 'because of 911'
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