Citizen Zed - 6/26/12

Corollary: The more entities spend trying to buy elections, the dumber they think you are.

It’s doubtful Ms. Soltis means to complete the thought this way. She’s a “Republican pollster”. Rigorous thought and logical progression aren’t a part of her rationale for tweeting the proposition in the first place. One can, however, imagine the ostensible point. When we see these ubiquitous polsters and “analysts” as nothing but marketing professionals and Mad Men, all turns on soliciting feeling and outrage, on tweaking the immediacy of prejudice, impulse, and desire.

Politics, that most equivocal pastime, at once conjuring the most noble and the most base, is now mostly marketing. Universities still have philosophy and political science departments, but we know politics is now the province of a vocational school and the vulgar lens of a marketing apparatchik.

“Young voters who start voting today and have bad taste in their mouths about the GOP are likely to look at politics through that lens for years.”

Read on and we might as well be talking about toilet paper, toothpaste or vinyl siding. Appearances and perceptions unalloyed by critical faculties, the stuff of stupidity in other words, are the primary terrain. Mapping the “reptilian brain” is job one for navigating both analysis and action in a nation where citizen has condensed into mere consumer.

“Yes, those people who whine about money buying elections think you’re dumb,” the tweet reads in translation. But, of course, what shows itself here is that Ms. Soltis thinks you’re dumb.

She doesn’t think you’ll have the temerity or the cognitive fortitude to read it as an underpinning to ROI strategies for those who do the actual buying, that is, “in an age of austerity surreally contradicted by the hundreds of millions being poured into campaigns.” No, it’s the people who complain about this increasingly warped campaign fun-house - they think you’re dumb. They don’t simply claim you’re dumb, which would imply an argument is forthcoming, but rather ensconce the evaluation at the level of a premise.

Let’s assume we’re all dumb. Let’s buy the premise, touch that third rail en masse and agree we are, each and everyone of us, stupid. Ask yourself who’s tone betrays wanting you to remain that way. What tone and style is it which sinks itself into sentimentality and satisfaction, into affirming the greatness of America merely on account of what we’ve already achieved, and (since inquiry is unneeded) into unexamined feelings about freedom? What forces slap on the veneer of logic and argument for the sake of an apology for the status quo, and leave you exactly where you were before?

I’d hazard to guess that even in our stupidity, we’ll find an answer in those who are squeezing every ounce out of the Citizens United ruling. We may have forgotten what to call these people, but thanks to Ms. Soltis’ jingle.. tweet, we do know a premise they hold dear.

Grover Norquist: the tax lobbyist with an iron grip on the GOP

Grover Norquist took an interest in politics at an extremely young age. He says he worked as a volunteer on the 1968 Nixon campaign at the age of 12, and it was then that he had his big idea.

While his contemporaries were consumed by comics, movies and candy, it occured to Norquist, as he returned home from school in Massachusetts one day, that Republicans should pledge never to raise taxes. Four decades on, that particular brainwave is at the centre of the country’s biggest political story.

Now 55, Norquist holds no elected office but is one of the most powerful figures in Washington…  >continue<

Sunday’s 60 Minutes Appearance  |  A Child Shall Lead Them

randomactsofchaos:

Clay Bennett/Chattanooga Times Free Press (11/16/2011)

Newt Gingrich, Lost In Space

George Lakoff has devoted serious energy to unmasking this framing game. It’s a game Newt developed and pushed to new levels, surfacing more or less explicitly in the 90’s with the memo “Language: A Key Mechanism of Control”.

…we have heard a plaintive plea: “I wish I could speak like Newt.”

“The words”, we hear from Gingrich’s cover letter, “are tested language from a recent series of focus groups where we actually tested ideas and language.” With this political style directly imported from advertising, working below the radar of active reason, one can only wish for the kind of disclaimers that pop into fantastical car and truck ads: “Dramatization”, “Professional sophist on a closed course” or “Do not attempt in a real debate”.

…oddly enough, Newt’s fate may be all the worse insofar as Republicans take seriously his stature as an intellectual. When one can imagine Jerry Springer as the most apt moderator for a Republican debate, there are hazards to branding oneself in a way that leverages opportunity amidst a general intellectual  vacuum…. His audience is more likely to see him cast “appropriately” - alongside Will Robinson and the Robot, a Dr. Smith dramatically lost in space.  >read more<

motherjones:

The Newt Testament

Your guide to Gingrich’s greatest rhetorical hits over the last 33 years. Now with more Hitler/Munich analogies!

We have to add another to MoJo’s great collection.  It’s from back in 87 during the Iran Contra hearings - when Oliver North was on for hours. Now this is when Reagan funded terrorists in Central America with moneys derived from helping Iran during its war with Iraq (assisted much more explicitly).

In an amazing example of pernicious verve, we have sophistry essentially revealing itself as sophistry:

One Marine Lieutenant Colonel had more courage than every Chief Executive officer of the Fortune 500 combined.  People were tuning in for hours, more than they watched soaps, more than they watch situation comedies.  Increased total ratings for day-time television by 10% … because they were fascinated by the drama.

And I’ve suggested strongly to the White House - The country will believe the drama in which we point a finger and say “these people want to take us down the road of European socialism, these people are the intellectual parallel to the German socialist party…”

… see more Newt gems at Mother Jones