Rogues of "K" Street, Confessions of a Tea Party Consultant.

[Cleita]

If you missed Randi Rhodes today it was one of her better shows where she read on the air this article by a proclaimed "K" street consultant to the Tea Party movement.

There is so much good stuff in this and it's a long read but very worthwhile in helping us understand just how these tea baggers are being manipulated by the right wing political think tanks behind them. The writer details how these same consultants brought down ACORN and the the woman who played the hooker is one of them. Since I can only put four paragraphs up, I chose the following ones.

http://www.playboy.com/articles/rogues-of-k-street/index.html?page=1

<snip>

Tea Party members are into less sexy things than a missing birth certificate, such as the national debt and privacy. They watch Fox News and read blogs. They’re conservatives, but don’t call them Republicans. They are intense followers of bloggers such as Jim Hoft (Gateway Pundit), Andrew Marcus (Founding Bloggers), Glenn Reynolds (Instapundit) and Mike Flynn (Big Government.com). BigGovernment.com was created last fall as part of Andrew Breitbart’s growing media empire.



The exciting news for me is that the organization still needs someone who can deliver a message to the masses using traditional means. Even the most forward-looking political professionals know blogging and text messaging will get you only so far. That’s where I come in. I’m part of the team prepping to deliver the Tea Party message via traditional means.



A good piece of mail gets its message across in 10 seconds. Television gives you 30 seconds, maybe. We’re playing to the reptilian brain rather than the logic centers, so we look for key words and images to leverage the intense rage and anxiety of white working-class conservatives. In other words, I talk to the same part of your brain that causes road rage. Ross Perot’s big mistake was his failure to connect his pie charts with the primordial brain. Two years after Perot’s first White House run the GOP figured this out, and thus was born the "angry white man" and with him a 54-seat swing in the House of Representatives.


The mail you’ll see from me this fall won’t have much to say about gays or the unborn. We have new foils, such as the Troubled Asset Relief Program and the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. Leveraging rage about a bailout for mega-millionaires and an $800 billion "stimulus" that has barely moved unemployment below double figures is a cinch compared with explaining why Bobby and Joey’s marriage is bad for America.Designing a thank-you note from an imaginary Wall Street executive to working-class taxpayers is so much more rewarding than most other messaging campaigns. With new variable-print technology, the postcard can be personalized and won’t look as though it was printed overnight at Kinko’s.

<snip>

Do read the whole article. It's a real eye opener. It's in Playboy, but you do have to read the articles every now and then. :-)

[Hello_Kitty]

1. Why would someone write such a drawn out confession, even voluntarily?

There's something fishy about this. The rhetoric hews to every stereotype about liberals and conservatives.

[Cleita]

2. Guilty conscience?

It won't be the first time someone who acted criminally, even if legally, confessed because they knew what they were doing was wrong.

:shrug:

[Canuckistanian]

3. It wouldn't be the first time

Andrew Sullivan, Ariana Huffington and David Brock (founder of Media Matters) all started out as rabid anti-Clinton conservatives.

It's what happens when otherwise intelligent people on the conservative side suddenly realize what assholes their compadres are.

[Warpy]

6. Are you crazy? This guy is proud of himself

He oozes self satisfaction with every single word. He knows the rules are for other people, not himself, and that's how he runs his whole life. He's in the catbird seat, he's two steps ahead of everybody he knows to be more intelligent than he is because he knows not to play by the rules.

[Cleita]

7. Why would he let us in on the secret though?

The thought did cross my mind he could be bragging. But what he is doing is putting his somewhat covert industry out in the open. I mean that dark bar where they do business drinking Tanquereys has suddenly moved out onto a sidewalk outside of Starbucks.

[Warpy]

8. He lives in the shadows, working out of a hotel bar

and wants us all to know just how powerful and smart he really is and to quake with fear that he's so effective at his job.

The whole thing was sickening. Sociopaths usually are.

[SpiralHawk]

4. "playing to the reptilian brain." - How perfectly Republicon

[Cleita]

5. My thought is that they would know how to do it because they

are one of them.

[wiggs]

9. Why isn't this quote from Bush era played every week and every time something

like this comes out? What's so hard about showing that the GOP are all about message and fear and not about issues??? Creating realities is all about framing, false issues, message, media control, etc.. From Suskinds book:

The aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." ... "That's not the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."