Reply #65: Thanks! I sees what I sees

[RedLetterRev]

and have too often been accused of saying out loud when the emperor is nekkid. Can't help it. I'm a hillbilly :)

For those who don't want to put up with Salon's day-pass, I'll go ahead a put out the salient paragraphs, right from the horse's (ass's) mouth:

But they sure did know how to play the game.

Consider one memo highlighted in a Capitol Hill hearing Wednesday that Scanlon, a former aide to Rep. Tom DeLay, R-Texas, sent the Coushatta Tribe of Louisiana to describe his strategy for protecting the tribe's gambling business. In plain terms, Scanlon confessed the source code of recent Republican electoral victories: target religious conservatives, distract everyone else, and then railroad through complex initiatives.

"The wackos get their information through the Christian right, Christian radio, mail, the internet and telephone trees," Scanlon wrote in the memo, which was read into the public record at a hearing of the Senate Indian Affairs Committee. "Simply put, we want to bring out the wackos to vote against something and make sure the rest of the public lets the whole thing slip past them." The brilliance of this strategy was twofold: Not only would most voters not know about an initiative to protect Coushatta gambling revenues, but religious "wackos" could be tricked into supporting gambling at the Coushatta casino even as they thought they were opposing it.

Emphasis mine.

The point is, they do it to us all the time, have been doing it for years. We're catching on slowly -- slowly. It's frustrating, especially when it's your (or in this case, my and folks like me) turn to be the boogeyman.

And whilst I'm ranting, I'd love to put one RW term to bed and never use it again: "values voter". They are nothing of the sort. They are wedge-issue voters. It is neither a sense of duty, nor patriotism, nor civic pride that stirs them off their dead arses to vote. Only the sheer, demonic glee of taking something they don't appreciate away from someone they don't know bestirs them. Those are people who will trespass into your back yard to steal the sheets of your line and the wood off the side of your shed to burn a cross in the yard of someone they don't know and beat them with a Bible they don't read.

That's not "values". That's just evil.

:rant: