Publicity's the key

by Khalid Fri Mar 24, 2006 19:51

"In the US, a currently faddish idea among some center-left political thinkers is that the Right Wingers have developed a lead in rhetorical technique, that they are better than the left at “framing” issues, at implanting truisms in the public mind to which they can refer with advantage in policy debates."

I don't know which is worse - that the centre-left thinks that copying the rhetorical technique of the Right will get them more votes or that they apparently believe that ordinary Americans are stupid morons? Remember Lincoln: "You can fool...etc."

"The truth is much blunter and simpler: The Right has a lot more money, and almost all of the US media parrots their party line. Much of the public lacks the education and the free time to see through the lies they hear repeated in the news every day, and so is misled."

I thought the elitism of the Right was bad but this takes the biscuit - you appear to assume that ordinary Americans who vote for Right wing must be brainwashed by the media and uneducated because they voted Right wing? I think it is more likely the ordinary Americans vote Right wing because they are Right wing themselves. Its disgusting but its the only logical conclusion I can draw from almost 50% in 2000 in support of Bush and an overwhelming vote of Bush in 2004.

"If progressive viewpoints were presented in even 20% of the media instead of less than 5%, the the rich man's feeble lies would dissolve in the public mind like grease meeting soap. "

So Americans heads are full of grease? And all they need is the soap of a pro-Democrat media?
CNN, ABC, NBC, Letterman, Jay Leno, Michael Moore and all of Hollywood came out in support of Kerry. But the Right voted for Bush - they were bombarded with anti-Bush rhetoric but none of its stuck -they could not have help but to be educated about the issues, nobody but a caveman could not have known - but they voted for Bush - I don't million Americans were fools - I think they were Right wingers.

"That 60% in the US (70% of troops in the war zones) oppose the war under these conditions of heavy propaganda is a credit to the public. The reason that public demonstrations are often poorly attended in the US (we did have many tens of thousands on the streets nationally over the weekend) is surely due to the fact that the public is mostly uninformed about them. I suspect the same is true in Ireland."

Now that the war has turned sour the American public want out - even the Right - they are still Right wingers but the no longer believe Iraq is worth the price - as they see it they gave the Iraqis "freedom" by removing Saddam, gave them a constitution and democratic elections and still American GI's continue to die. The reason that public demonstrations are poorly attended in the US is because they are organised by the political movements that advocate the revolutionary overthrow of American democracy - the mainstream in America vote for the centre-left Democrats or the Right because they in fact are centre-left or Right wingers - the Americans would vote for the extreme-left if they shared their values. They obviously dont because as I said above despite being bombarded with anti-Bush media and presently being bombarded with bad news about Iraq, they haven't abandoned their political allegiances - the 2006 representative elections will result a Capitol Hill dominated by Dems and Republicans because that is how the Americans vote - Bush is unpopular so Republicans will look for leadership elsewhere.

"Remember also that the Right had to steal the last Presidential election; they'd have lost otherwise. Most of the US public, in other words, has opposed them for years, and merely waits advice in converting its opposition from passive to active."

If the US public merely awaits advice to convert its opposition from passive to active then why were they supposedly brainwashed into giving 50% to Bush in 2004?
I mean every four years it seem to you the frustration against Bush among the American people builds and builds and then suddenly they vote Bush back into power?
The Republicans didnt steal the election - they had money and were better at the rhetoric - but the fact of the matter - the sad fact of the matter - is that 50% of Americans given clear choice between a warmonger and a peacemaker chose a warmonger.
Indeed much of the dissatisfaction with Bush is not that he launched the Iraq War but that he made a mess of it - many Republicans unlike the Democrats do not think that war was unjustified - they just think it could have been fought better and is now being fought badly.

Know your enemy - it is not Bush but it is America itself - the American people support the War on Terror despite the mess in Iraq - the American people are the enemy of the rest of the world - they are a nation of terrorists.

by Ted Bagg Sun Mar 26, 2006 17:27 cryptodemocrat at yahoo dot com

You seem to misapprehend my metaphor: Grease is the right-wing lie, soap the progressive correction.

Regarding the 2004 Presidential Election, there is no doubt. Check these links:
http://216.250.183.124/politics/election-2004/The_2004_....html
http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2006/1832
Not just now, but in 2004, the US public chose against the Bush administration and its murderous program.

It's not true that the progressives “bombarded” the public with anti-Bush rhetoric, nor that CNN, NBC, ABC supported Kerry. Quite the contrary. The bias was clearly and overwhelmingly in the other direction. Except for the handful of formal debates and the Democratic Convention, there was very little coverage of Kerry's actual statements on prime time. Jay Leno's jokes against Kerry parroted the Bush campaign's baseless talking points. Almost the only support Kerry found on broadcast TV was in his political advertisements and in the ads run by MoveOn.org. CBS suppressed a report on the Bush administration's crucial and knowingly false claim to Congress and the public that Iraq had sought to buy Uranium ore from Niger, and then canned its top anchor when he reported, correctly, that Bush had failed to report for his cushy stateside Air National Guard duty during the Vietnam War. One item of evidence in support of the report turned out to be forged; but most of the evidence was irrefutable, and the report was true.

It's not true that the groups who organized the antiwar movement in the US advocate the overthrow of democracy. Even Workers World, the main group behind ANSWER (Act Now to Stop the War and End Racism) seeks not to end democracy, but rather to extend it to the workplace and to the many among us who are systematically disenfranchised. History will praise Workers World and condemn the Democratic Party leadership.

In every society, not just the US, the public depends on the media and on the educated minority for information. That's what people with academic degrees are for. Most people have to work for a living and lack the time to research policy questions; that doesn't make them morons in the US or elsewhere. In the US, the rich have a stranglehold on the mass media -- TV, radio and newspapers -- that marginalizes people who know what they're talking about and largely deprives the public of the ability to make informed judgements. Our relatively uninformed judgments are far better than one would expect from morons, but the stranglehold's a deadly threat to us all.