{"id":3961,"date":"2010-03-24T00:57:14","date_gmt":"2010-03-24T04:57:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/?p=3961"},"modified":"2010-03-24T01:04:10","modified_gmt":"2010-03-24T05:04:10","slug":"against-their-own-better-interests","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/2010\/03\/24\/against-their-own-better-interests\/","title":{"rendered":"against their own better interests&#8230;"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p align=\"justify\">I&#8217;m really tired of listening to Republicans talk. It&#8217;s boring and monotonous. I think they were more creative in former times, though I&#8217;m having trouble remembering. What I recall is so vague that I can&#8217;t count on the memories because I didn&#8217;t keep up so well in the past, but what I recall is that the <em>ad hominem<\/em> attacks came from riff-raff, not the mainstream. So Klansmen and White Supremists called people &quot;cummunists,&quot; but Senators and Congressmen didn&#8217;t. I grew up in a place where billboards said &quot;Impeach Earl Warren,&quot; but they didn&#8217;t call him names like that in Washington. I think there was some shared understanding that <strong><em><a target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/www.nizkor.org\/features\/fallacies\/ad-hominem.html\">ad hominem<\/a><\/em><\/strong> arguments represented a logical fallacy.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<div align=\"justify\">An  Ad Hominem is a general category of fallacies in which a claim or  argument is rejected on the basis of some irrelevant fact about the  author of or the person presenting the claim or argument. Typically,  this fallacy involves two steps. First, an attack against the character  of person making the claim, her circumstances, or her actions is made  [or the character, circumstances, or actions of the person reporting the  claim].  Second, this attack is taken to be evidence against the claim  or argument the person in question is making [or presenting].<\/div>\n<\/ul>\n<div align=\"justify\">But nowadays it has become the everyday standard Republican reaction to everything. It only really works if there&#8217;s a category of people that are uniformly reviled. In that situation, <em>ad hominem<\/em> attacks only have to establish or imply membership to do their damage. They remain logical fallacies, but it doesn&#8217;t matter.. McCarthy perfected the method with his &quot;red baiting&quot; in the 1950&#8217;s. In the South in my youth, associating someone with Civil Rights was enough to discredit them globally. The current Republican strategy is to make being a Democrat enough to discredit a person. In this scenario, these words are synonyms [different words meaning the same thing]:<\/div>\n<ul>\n<div align=\"justify\">democrat, liberal, progressive, socialist, communist, far left, fascist, spender, taxer, abortionist, environmentalist, atheist, evolutionist, climate change believer<\/div>\n<\/ul>\n<div align=\"justify\">If they can establish that you are <u>any one<\/u> of these things, you are <u>all<\/u> of these things, and you are the enemy. It requires constant reinforcement &#8211; provided by Talk Radio, Fox News, the Wall Street Journal, the Weekly Standard, the Right Wing blogs, and Republican politicians commentary. Another requirement to keep it going is that <u>everything<\/u> that the people in these categories do or say has to be wrong &#8211; <u>everything<\/u>. So, <u>all<\/u> Republicans must vote against <u>everything<\/u>. And the Media and politicos must attack <u>everything<\/u>.<\/div>\n<p align=\"justify\">But some enemies are special. This is a segment of today&#8217;s RNC&#8217;s email forwarded to me by a friend. It&#8217;s so easy to get into retorting these things &#8211; special targets like <strong>Nancy Pelosi<\/strong> [woman], <strong>Barack Obama<\/strong> [black]. I post this to point out only one thing. <strong><font color=\"#200020\">It doesn&#8217;t say anything about the content of the healthcare bill itself<\/font><\/strong>. It&#8217;s just about firing [burning up] Nancy Pelosi. She&#8217;s shown with fists clenched. She&#8217;s a &quot;Madam&quot; [runs brothels]. She&#8217;s depicted in a flaming inferno [Hell, Satan?]. It has these words about her: rammed, takeover, the Pelosi Health Care Takeover, iron-fisted.      <\/p>\n<table width=\"90%\" cellspacing=\"0\" cellpadding=\"5\" border=\"0\" align=\"center\">\n<tr>\n<td>\n<div align=\"justify\">The outpouring of support from Republican grassroots leaders like you has been extraordinary. In a little over 36 hours after Nancy Pelosi and Congressional Democrats rammed their government takeover of health care down the American people&#8217;s throats, the Republican National Committee has almost tripled our original goal of raising $402,010 to Fire Nancy Pelosi.   <\/p>\n<div>\n<p align=\"center\"><img decoding=\"async\" border=\"1\" src=\"http:\/\/www.gop.com\/images\/email\/032310_firepelosi.jpg\" \/><\/p>\n<div>I&#8217;m grateful for your help, but we&#8217;re not done yet. At 11:15 this morning, President Obama signed into law the Pelosi Health Care Takeover. This abomination means low-quality health care, higher taxes, and a declining standard of living for all Americans. In response to President Obama signing this monstrous bill, the RNC is extending the Fire Pelosi Money Bomb for an extra 24 hours &#8212; that&#8217;s 24 more hours to ensure our Party has the resources needed to defeat 40 Democrat Representatives and bring Nancy Pelosi&#8217;s iron-fisted reign to an end.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n<p align=\"justify\">And the attack on the healthcare bill is also <em>ad hominem<\/em>, even though the bill isn&#8217;t a person. It is an evil thing &#8211; an abomination, low-quality health care, higher taxes, declining standard  of living, monstrous. Everything about the email is <em>incendiary<\/em>. It&#8217;s like the Republican Congressmen who were joining the Teabaggers outside, inciting them to riot, yelling things like &quot;baby killer&quot; to match&nbsp; the epithets of hatred.<\/p>\n<p align=\"justify\">Decrying these tactics, retorting these accusations, trying to establish a dialog &#8211; none of these things have had any effect. In truth, our side really has no power to do anything about any of this. They&#8217;ve chosen a path, one that has worked for them for a while. There are people out there who want to jump on board. There&#8217;s an almost infinite source of money to fuel them, because it&#8217;s big money that feels threatened.<\/p>\n<div align=\"justify\">Most of the Democrats seem to be getting their rhythm about responding. They mostly don&#8217;t [respond]. These tactics destroyed John Kerry. Obama miraculously overcame them&nbsp; [though his opponents helped]. I don&#8217;t have any notion about how the 2010 Congressional Candidates will manage the local versions. But I was thinking today that the places where this kind of <em>ad hominem<\/em>, incendiary politicking has done the most damage are where the candidates engage it and then go a bit crazy. Donald Segretti took out Ed Muskie in one night. Michael Dukakis was taken down in a heartbeat by Lee Atwater. Karl Rove deep sixed John McCain in South Carolina, and was a force in untold races before he finished off John Kerry. The Academics who address such things [Drew Westin, <u>The Political Brain<\/u>, George Lakoff, <u>Thinking Points<\/u>] offer sound advice &#8211; control your own narrative, talk about your values, etc. If I were going to advise the Congressional Candidates for 2010, I&#8217;d suggest just a few things. Know the Republican Talking Points and name them as such when they come up. If you must talk about them, talk only about what they are designed to do, don&#8217;t engage them as real questions. Watch every tape you can find of Barack Obama, and do whatever he does. He&#8217;s the gold standard. One of his best lines was when he met with the Republican Caucus. He responded to an inflammatory Talking Point, &quot;<strong>That&#8217;s not true, and you know that it&#8217;s not true.<\/strong>&quot; Tell the truth in a George Washington sort of way [and maybe read my <a target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/2010\/03\/23\/aha-3\/\"><strong>aha<\/strong><\/a> post below]. In the end, it&#8217;s up to the people to get over this kind of bullshit by realizing that they are being manipulated to work against their own better interests&#8230;<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m really tired of listening to Republicans talk. It&#8217;s boring and monotonous. I think they were more creative in former times, though I&#8217;m having trouble remembering. What I recall is so vague that I can&#8217;t count on the memories because I didn&#8217;t keep up so well in the past, but what I recall is that [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_bbp_topic_count":0,"_bbp_reply_count":0,"_bbp_total_topic_count":0,"_bbp_total_reply_count":0,"_bbp_voice_count":0,"_bbp_anonymous_reply_count":0,"_bbp_forum_subforum_count":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3961","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3961","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3961"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3961\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3961"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3961"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3961"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}