What Dean flap can teach us about DSM and other issues

[yurbud]

We have to agree that the one things republicans do extremely well is communication and shaping issues.

Democrats fail at this not just because they don't know how boil things down to digestible talking points (like Kerry's egregious performance on why he changed his vote on Iraq funding) or framing the issues morally, but because they don't tell a discernible story.

Conservatives have done this with their war on terror. the West vs. Islam, while not openly stated, is a story that has legs over 1,000 years old and resonates.

They have done something similar by connecting "liberal" with communist. We fought communist for decades, so we must fight liberals to finish off the communist threat.

The Democrats refuse to tell a story, even the simplest one about how life improved with FDR's New Deal, the GI Bill, and Great Society, that kept us a middle class society.

The story they don't tell is the one that Rush Limbaugh constantly accuses them of telling because it is the one the right fears most--class warfare.

That was the nerve Howard Dean touched when he mentioned people who never worked an honest day in their lives. Most of us knew he wasn't talking about the Evangelical janitor who has become the GOP foot soldier, but rather the people the policies are designed to benefit, the investor class, trust fund babies, and scammers like Ken Lay.

This story not only explains our tax and social policy, but it explains what we are doing in Iraq. We are killing people and allowing our soldiers to be killed to benefit a very, very few who are already extremely wealthy, those who own oil companies, defense contractors, and construction companies that get rebuilding contracts and pocket most of the money. The hundreds of billions of dollars in contracts and potential trillion in oil is reason enough to lie and kill.


In exchange for us doing this for them, they give us nothing. They never have. When the United States was the top oil producer in the world, oil taken from our public lands, we had the Great Depression, and that shared wealthy of our nation didn't seem to make it into our collective pocket.



This story is as old as humanity itself. The few want to get rich at the expense of the many, and the way to hold on to that wealth is to keep everyone else as hungry and powerless as possible. They have no allegiance to the country where they live and will move their investments and jobs elsewhere to make more money. They will even sell weapons to our enemies or both sides in a conflict to make a buck, like they did in the Iran-Iraq war. even though they live here, they do everything they can to avoid the less than onerous taxes we ask of them

Why aren't Democrats telling this story? Because they are the plain girl waiting for the football captain to ask them to the prom. She spurns perfectly decent guys(those of us who aren't wealthy) waiting for him to ask. But the captain, corporate America, isn't going to go out with a mousy girl who may decide she wants to be a virgin until she gets married when he can have a cheerleader (the GOP) he KNOWS will put out because she has for all his buddies.

That high school analogy works in other ways too. Right now, we are living in a high school like those ones in the South, where everything is about football. The whole town worships the players, they don't have to do their homework or even go to class if they feel like it, and the principal looks the other way if they decide to beat up some pencil neck geek for fun.

Do the other students want the school to do away with football? No. They like watching and many wish they could play. They simply want the same rules to apply to football players that apply to the rest of us. If they don't do their homework, they fail the class. If they beat someone up, they get detention.

That's the view most of us have of corporations. They get to make up their own rules, and it is so rare that they are seriously punished that a prosecutor like Eliot Spitzer is considered wildly successful when he gets back HALF of what corporate scammers steal.

I know there's a problem with my football analogy. The football player would have no doubt about whether Joe Lieberman will put out.




Hillbilly Hitler art:



Blog:

[ixion]

1. I will not concede that repugs are good at communicating and shaping

anything.

The only thing that has allowed their blatant, obvious untruths to persist is the enabler -- the Mainstream Media -- has acted as an amplifier, conscience and collective short (very short) term memory.

As Jon Stewart said, there is no 'real' debate. Only rehashed talking points within 'acceptable' parameters. As long as this is the environment, the truth will never be known, and there will never, EVER, be real debate about issues, only bogus, prefabricated arguments that frame things in such a way as to make taking opposition despicable.

[yurbud]

2. I agree about debate, but you have to acknowledge the truth

You can hate Hitler, but you have to admit he was a snappy dresser.

Same thing with these guys. You can hate or disagree with what they say, but you aren't likely to forget it.



Hillbilly Hitler art:



Blog:

[Carolab]

3. They deliberately practice RIDICULE. It's a stated policy.

Why can't we ridicule them back? Didn't you ever confront a bully? If not, try it sometime. They back off like the scared little babies they are.

{snip}

The Democrats irrationally repudiate the highly successful Republican approach of playing hardball. Early in 2004, the GOP brazenly announced that its game plan consisted of ridicule. Not respectful disagreement. Not a competition of ideas. Ridicule. Conservatives ridiculed Kerry’s appearance, his manner of speech, his ethnic background, his principles, his wife and his supporters. They even ridiculed his Purple Hearts. Karl Rove’s plan was to win the election the way elections in elementary school are won, including having his candidate’s buddies count the votes. Meanwhile, Kerry demanded that his staff remain respectful of Bush, who just might be the most inviting target for ridicule that God in Her infinite wisdom has ever created. The result? You know the result."

{snip}

The following might seem like a trivial point, but it speaks volumes. Republicans disdainfully mispronounce the name of the Democratic Party as the “Democrat” Party. The Democrats react by pleading for bipartisanship. They don’t object because that would be inconsistent with cultivating comity. They don’t reciprocate because that would be immature and lower the level of public discourse. They don’t even acknowledge the slight. They just endure it, passively and willingly, as they endure stolen elections and illegal wars. These are the compulsively victimized people who spent their high school years saluting their underwear as bullies ran it up the flagpole. They are now my representatives, as they are yours


http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=132&topic_id=1850262&mesg_id=1850262&page=

[yurbud]

4. democrats are the wife of a wifebeater

"I must have done something to make him mad..."