Stand with anybody that stands RIGHT. Stand with him while he is right and PART with him when he goes wrong.
Speech at Peoria, Illinois (October 16, 1854)
Two decades before Hitler, Lenin created a totalitarian state devoted to mass murder. Too few people are aware of this.
Leninthink
On the pernicious legacy of Vladimir Lenin.
This was not an accident or an unintended consequence of laudable actions:
What is new, and uniquely horrible about the Soviets and their successors, is that they directed their fury at their own people. The Russian empire lost more people in World WarI than any other country, but still more died under Lenin. His war against the peasants, for instance, took more lives than combat between Reds and Whites.
By rights, the Hammer and Sickle should be as repugnant as the Swastika. Decent people should shun those who wear it or march under its banner.
Dmitri Volkogonov, the first biographer with access to the secret Lenin archives, concluded that for Lenin violence was a goal in itself. He quotes Lenin in 1908 recommending “real, nationwide terror, which invigorates the country and through which the Great French Revolution achieved glory.”
Lenin constantly recommended that people be shot “without pity” or “exterminated mercilessly” (Leszek Ko³akowski wondered wryly what it would mean to exterminate people mercifully). “Exterminate” is a term used for vermin, and, long before the Nazis described Jews as Ungeziefer(vermin), Lenin routinely called for “the cleansing of Russia’s soil of all harmful insects, of scoundrels, fleas, bedbugsthe rich, and so on.”
G. K. Chesterton advised that one should never let a quarrel interfere with a good argument. Lenin had no interest in good arguments, reasoned debate, or even a quarrel. His goals were best achieved through slander and vituperation.
In Lenin’s view, a true revolutionary did not establish the correctness of his beliefs by appealing to evidence or logic, as if there were some standards of truthfulness above social classes. Rather, one engaged in “blackening an opponent’s mug so well it takes him ages to get it clean again.”
This passage from Morson has resonance today:
Don't argue with them, Make them stink in the nose of the world. Make people curse and abominate them, Make them shudder with horror.
Vide:
Critics objected that Lenin argued by mere assertion. He disproved a position simply by showing it contradicted what he believed. In his attack on the epistemology of Ernst Mach and Richard Avenarius, for instance, every argument contrary to dialectical materialism is rejectedfor that reason alone. Valentinov, who saw Lenin frequently when he was crafting this treatise, reports that Lenin at most glanced through their works for a few hours. It was easy enough to attribute to them views they did not hold, associate them with disreputable people they had never heard of, or ascribe political purposes they had never imagined. These were Lenin’s usual techniques, and he made no bones about it.
Jordan Peterson
Joy Behar: "Useful Idiot" Tulsi Gabbard Hasn't Denied Being A Russian Asset
Tulsi Gabbard Conspiracy Theories Go Mainstream
Fox News
James Damore
Or take the tropes mocking “Whataboutism”. At their core these dismissive tweets are cheap Leninthink. Actions are not good or bad in and of themselves; they are to be assessed purely in terms of Who/Whom. It doesn’t matter if Trump is following a precedent set by Bush, Clinton, or Obama. Orange Man Bad. Impeach him.
Left-Wing Journalists Slam CNN For Asking For The Truth About Middle Class Taxes
Elizabeth Warren has 'woke journalist' allies who don't want you to ask questions
Don’t let your children go to J-school
We now see members of the Senate and Congress trying to carve out similar exceptions to the First Amendment. Journalists cheer them on. They see no contradiction between their pose as defenders of democracy and limiting the speech of American citizens.
I recall a Soviet citizen telling me that people in the USSR had absolute freedom of speech-- so long as they did not lie.
Lenin at least was conscious of his rejection of the norms of debate. Our self-nominated mandarins are too ignorant and insular to realize what they are destroying.Can anyone remember the last week during which none of America’s major newspapers ran a piece arguing for censorship? https://t.co/0Bxz87c6Gj— Charles C. W. Cooke (@charlescwcooke) October 29, 2019
On “mediated democracy”:
To be most effective, propaganda needs the help of censorship. Within a sealed information arena, it can mobilize all means of communication-- printed, spoken, artistic, and visual -- and press its claims to maximum advantage.
Norman Davies, Europe: A History
They still don't get it
We really are ruled by inept experts
RTWT.
Trump Is A Demon Of The Establishment’s Design
The circus that is the American election cycle has an added bit of flair this time. No, not the possibility of a female on the ticket. We had that buzz of excitement in 1984 and 2008. It is the spectacle of a self-promoting, billionaire blowhard taking the “Bulworth” approach towards a legitimate run for the presidency. Donald Trump has added spice to the 2016 presidential election cycle and in the slow, summer news season to excite cable news operatives. He has rocketed to the top of the polls, rustled Establishment jimmies, and caused conversations to take place that no one would expect.
As much as he is loathed by the Establishment, he is a demon of their design.
Previously:
Trump has years of active Twitter use to get inside the media’s OODA loop and change the framing of any report. The media’s biased use of Twitter, as if it is the pulse of “the people” despite Twitter’s proven liberal and black demographic skew, allows Trump to use what is the equivalent of an Internet CB Radio to increase visibility and shape media coverage. The system has allowed Twitter to have an effect because Twitter is a leftist tool to shape narratives in the left’s favor.
Why do journalists love twitter and hate blogging?
Blogging was a direct attack on MSM hegemony at both the micro (fisking) and macro levels (explanation space). I just don't see Twitter as the same threat. It is a flood of unmemorable chatter that is easy to ignore. Blogging had the potential to break the power of the MSM guild. Bloggers, at their best, presented arguments. Arguments can both change minds on the immediate subject and undermine the credibilty of those establishment pundits who present weak cases on a regular basis. (Yes, i'm looking at you Brooks and Frum).
At a minimum, blogging brought a lot of outsiders to the pundit/editor game. Twitter seems more useful as a way for insiders like Kurtz to extent their brand and magnify their voice.
Calling for impeachment is a great way to fire up parts of the base. As Dr. Sowell points out, it only helps the administration and their allies with the public at large.
LAWSUITS AND IMPEACHMENT
Whenever Democrats are in real trouble politically, the Republicans seem to come up with something new that distracts the public’s attention from the Democrats’ problems. Who says Republicans are not compassionate?
…
With public opinion polls showing President Obama’s sinking approval rate, in the wake of his administration’s multiple fiascoes and scandals the disgraceful treatment of veterans who need medical care, the Internal Revenue Service coverups, the tens of thousands of children flooding across our open border Republicans have created two new distractions that may yet draw attention away from the Democrats’ troubles.
From the Republican establishment, Speaker of the House John Boehner has announced plans to sue Barack Obama for exceeding his authority. And from the Tea Party wing of the Republicans, former Governor Sarah Palin has called for impeachment of the president.
Woodward understood that the majority of the public would tune out their reporting if they believed it was fueled by an anti-Nixon agenda.
As recounted in All the President’s Men, during this period Bob and I would often meet for coffee in a little vending machine room off the newsroom floor. These were our strategy sessions. Just the two of us, and really bad cups of coffee. We reviewed the status of where we were on each story, and discussed what kind of presentation we would make that day to our editors. Sometimes, we thought, they were awfully slow to recognize the value of a particular piece of our work. We had elaborate good-cop/bad-cop routines that we more or less rehearsed over the coffee. Usually I was the bad cop.
One of our conversations in the vending machine room was intentionally left out of All the President’s Men.
During the fall of 1972 we had established that there was a secret cash slush fund maintained by the Nixon re-election committee CREEP. It had financed the Watergate break-in operation and other campaign espionage and sabotage. The key to discovering the possible involvement by higher-ups was this fund. The CREEP treasurer, Hugh Sloan, and the bookkeeper, Judy Hoback, had after several days of teeth-pulling interview sessions told us that John Mitchell was one of the five who controlled the fund. Deep Throat had confirmed this. Mitchell, Nixon’s former law partner, former campaign manager and former attorney general of the United States, was the ultimate higher-up. The man. And we were about to write a story saying that the man was a criminal.
As we reviewing the story and its implications, I put a coin into the coffee machine and experienced a literal chill going down my neck--a sensation sufficiently vivid, unanticipated and unprecedented that I recall it even now with almost a shudder.
“Oh my God,” I said to Bob. My back was to him. I turned. “The president is going to be impeached.”
Bob sat motionless. He looked at me for a second or two in the strangest way. But it was not a look of skepticism or any sense of dismissing what I had saidnot the look he delivered many times on my occasional flights of fancy.
“Jesus I think you’re right,” said the staid man from the Midwest.
It had not occurred to me that such a thought had crossed his mind too. Even the most partisan Nixon-haters to our knowledge had not suggested such a possibility. It was only three months after the break-in at the Watergate. It would be another twelve months before Congress took up impeachment, and 22 months before Nixon resigned. “We can never us that word in this newsroom,” Bob said.
I saw the point. Our editors might think that we had an agenda or that our reporting was overreaching or even that we had gone around the bend. Any suggestion about the future of the Nixon Presidency could undermine our work and the Post’s efforts to be fair.
We did not tell this story in All the President’s Men because the book was published in April 1974 in the midst of the House Judiciary Committee’s impeachment investigation of President Nixon. To recount it then might have given might have given the impression that impeachment had been our goal all along.
Republicans, with a few notable exceptions, have shown themselves to be something less than “formidable investigators” or persuasive advocates.
The Ervin and Cox operations shared information extensively and together constituted the most formidable group of investigators that had ever looked into the dark recesses of any administration. Cox gathering evidence for the quiet legal processes of the courtroom, Ervin and his colleagues accumulating information and arguments for the political processes upon which Nixon's ultimate fate depended.
Ace:
The simplest way to explain the behavior of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies.
So, This isn't Even a Joke Anymore, People Are Seriously Agitating for Mitt 2016
Reminder:
Prediction: Romney 2016.
GOP future: It’s not the “messaging”
Previously:
Bush vets back in action
Bush veterans are striking back.
Senior officials from former President George W. Bush's administration are wading into the fight over the Republican Party's direction and future.
In conversations with The Hill, many White House alumni said they're increasingly alarmed by the party's libertarian drift on foreign policy and frustrated by the collapse of immigration reform legislation. In 2014, they're worried the party might continue to nominate flawed candidates, and many aren't staying quiet any longer.
Conservative Messaging I
The 2012 campaign was not just Obama vs. catoon-Romney. It was also Obama vs. the ghost of George Bush.
Leaving ideology aside (as swing and low-information voters do), the Bush legacy is an anchor around the neck of the right.
Conservative Messaging II
The issue that fired up the conservative base was Obamacare. Here again, Romney could not take full advantage of this issue because he had signed Romneycare as governor of Massachusetts.
Despite these two enormous weaknesses, the "professionals" kept telling us that Romney was the most electable candidate in the primaries. This does not reflect well on the "professionals" professional competence.
What ails the GOP
Karl Rove is part of the problem, not the solution.
This is what Cromwell said to the Long Parliament when he thought it was no longer fit to conduct the affairs of the nation: "You have sat too long here for any good you have been doing. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go"
One last consequence is often forgotten. The liberal landslide completely gutted the power of the power of the old barons in the House. Committee chairmen were no longer chosen solely by seniority; their power was no longer absolute.
Democrats continued to win majorities in every election. They ignored Republicans, routinely used the rules to prevent direct votes on issues on which their stands were unpopular, maintained caucus solidarity and, under the leadership of Tony Coelho in the 1980s, bludgeoned business PACs into contributing to marginal Democrats and not contributing to Republican challengers.
Maybe we should not be surprised by the slow walk investigations to get to the heart of the IRS scandal.
1. The big GOP donors.
2. Mitt Romney in the 2012 primary.
3. The existing House leadership.
How Reagan became Reagan: The Texas Earthquake of 1976
This is a a big legacy for a man who lost most of his big elections:
Dave Treen, Political Builder
David Connor Treen was a one-term governor (and four-term congressman) of a troubled southern state. He lost or withdrew from far more elections than he won. His nomination for a federal appeals court judgeship fell apart. And he was the butt of two of the most famous put-downs in American political history. Yet, although almost no history books will say so, he was one of the more consequential figures in late 20th century politics, not just in Louisiana, but nationally.
The losing was inseparable from the big accomplishments. Every big movement starts out with defeats. The movements that grow and make history have many characteristics, but one thing they share is a surplus of principled men who are not afraid to lose as they work to advance their cause in inhospitable environments.
Treen played a huge role in breaking the Democratic Party's monopoly on the South. He played an important role in organizing U.S. House Republicans toward a conservative, reformist model in the late 1970s to help lay the groundwork for the Reagan presidency. He planted the seeds of reform in Louisiana government.
Hayek wrote that “without a theory, the facts are silent.” The same is true with intelligence. Adopt a wrong theory and the best intelligence in the world won’t warn you of disaster.
Maj. Gen. Kenneth Strong, bore a substantial share of responsibility for failing to recognize the signifcance of the German buildup in the Ardennes, which had been flagged by Ultra. Strong told the supreme commander that German formations identified in the area were merely resting and refitting. The fundamental failure, in which many senior American and British officers were complicit, was that they were convinced of their own mastery of the campaign and thus, discounted the possibility of a major German thrust.
Rove wanted to be his generation’s Mark Hanna—a political operative who forged a new, dominant majority coalition.
But if you allow carpers to shoo you away from every generalization before you have time to explore it, you have no hope of coming to grips with basic questions of modern America.
The administration he helped elect demoralized the conservative base.
Conservative anger and the Reagan legacy
… and left the conservatives and Republicans with a terrible burden in future election.
Why are conservatives mad at the GOP?
Five quick points about the conservative tantrum
GOP future: It’s not the “messaging”
Conservatives and messaging
Yet so strong is the Republican death wish that the RNC’s blueprint for the future is more of the same.
Gabriel Schoenfeld: A Bad Day on the Romney Campaign
In my e-book, A Bad Day on the Romney Campaign, I try to account for a long chain of mistakes that led the campaign to misfire in the middle of the national-security crisis that erupted in Cairo and Benghazi on September 11, 2012. As I attempt to show, the errors made in that episode did not happen in a vacuum. Rather, they were one of the consequences of a vision of American politics embraced by Romney and his top strategists. The problem before them in the quest for the presidency was, at its core, conceived of as an advertising and marketing challenge.
That vision of politics failed and the consultants Romney hiredif not political consultants as a classare now fighting for their livelihoods, if not their lives. “Should We Shoot All the Consultants Now?” was the title of a panel discussion held at a recent conservative conclave. As that blunt question makes plain, at least some Republicans comprehend that turning politics into nothing more than a subsidiary of the advertising and marketing business, as the Romney campaign attempted to do, is the path to repeated failure.
Yes, indeed. Let’s have more of the stuff that did not work last time.
But the trouble is that the consultants are deeply entrenched in the Republican Party. And they are using their entrenched position to fight to retain their grip on resources and power. Evidence of their struggle can be found in the Republican National Committee’s Growth & Opportunity Project, the official Republican autopsy on the Romney campaign.
The RNC postmortem does not beat around the bush. Politics, in its vision, is the art of best matching a candidate’s positions to the preferences of voters as those preferences are revealed in polls and focus groups. To this end, great weight is placed in the report on the urgency of gathering ever more information about the electorate. In particular, explains the report, “we need to know what language is most likely to motivate a donor or a voter and convert them into a vote for Republican candidates.” To discover exactly the right collection of wordsthe magical incantation for getting votes, the “use of data and measurement is critical.”
The RNC’s “vision’ is not just bad, unprincipled politics; it is also short-sighted, ignorant marketing.
To implement this technocratic vision, the RNC recommends that the Republican Party become a “data-driven” party. To accomplish this, a high priority must be that “voter and volunteer data, fundraising and donor data, digital data, consumer data, and media habits” all be integrated, analyzed, and made accessible to candidates by means of “application programming interfaces (APIs).” These APIs in turn can be used to “facilitate more user interfaces (UIs) to address all manner of campaign function and level of sophistication including file selections, modeling and analysis, and the feedback of touch-point and response to marketing initiatives.”
Such technobabble continues for pages of the report.
Advertising great Bill Bernbach would agree whole-heartedly:
Our country’s greatest presidents, from George Washington to Abraham Lincoln to Franklin Delano Roosevelt to Ronald Reagan, did not need to bend to the whims of the electorate. By dint of their principled statesmanship, they bent the electorate to their will. They educated it. They persuaded it. They brought it along. They certainly did not need application programming interfaces to get elected and to accomplish what they accomplished. Nor did Abraham Lincoln need to hire a “messaging professional” to write the Gettysburg Address.
If we are going to talk about politics and marketing, Bernbach has couple of lessons the GOP might want to ponder.
We are so busy measuring public opinion that we forget we can mold it. We are so busy listening to statistics we forget we can create them.
Mary Wells Lawrence, another legend of advertising and marketing agrees:
I think the most important element in success in ad writing is the product itself. And I can’t say that often enough. Or emphasize it enough. Because I think a great ad campaign will make a bad product fail faster. It will get more people to know it’s bad.
Advertising doesn't create a product advantage. It can only convey it.
It is no surprise that the RNC and its consultants want to ignore these fundamental insights. They cast a bad light on the GOP consultant-pundit class and the campaign they ran in 2012.
Great advertising, the kind that works, almost always comes out of the product you are going to advertise
The issue that fired up the conservative base was Obamacare. Here again, Romney could not take full advantage of this issue because he had signed Romneycare as governor of Massachusetts.
Numbers that should scare Mitt Romney and the tools at Fox News
These numbers also suggest that Romney could be terribly vulnerable to Obama in the general election. Big donors might like his resume, but voters might find it repellent. His personal connections to outsourcing, Wall Street, and management snake oil could prove fatal.
I think we might have seen a a preview of the problem here in Pennsylvania in 2010. At the end of the campaign, the Sestak campaign hit Pat Toomey hard on the "jobs to China" issue. It seemed to get traction. Toomey ran 3.5 percentage points behind Corbett (the Republican candidate for governor). He squeaked out a win (51%-49%) against an underfunded candidate in a profoundly Republican year.
So that makes it look like Pennsylvania is out of reach for Romney.
Even more scary for the GOP is the way that Toomey under-performed across the board. He trailed Corbett in blue-collar Democratic counties like Allegheny and Beaver. He also saw a similar drop-off in hard-core conservative areas like Adams and Armstrong counties.
That suggests to me that Romney might have a problem recapturing all the Bush states that flipped in 2008 (like Ohio).
Related:
The Unmitigated Disaster Known As Project ORCA
Orca aground: Romney’s high-tech ‘Get Out the Vote’ failure
Conservatives and messaging
Conquest's Law
Conservatives need to create powerful, “sticky” messages that lead the electorate to a tipping point
If President Obama won any mandate at all, it was a negative mandate: the voters rejected the Romney caricature that the Obama campaign created.
What Obama did do successfully was vilify his opponent (“not one of us“) and make narrow, often fear-based appeals to particular interest groups. His campaign also demonstrated a mastery of technology for identifying voters and coaxing them to the polls….
[and]
The cultural bias the Democrats have created against conservativism reached its tipping point in November 2012 when a president with a disastrous economic record rather handily got reelected. Relying on decades of indoctrination and sophisticated modern social networking, Democrats spread a message that stuck: Republicans are evil. Everything else, whether from the Left or the Right, was just chatter that people ignored.
One of the big problems with conservative talking heads is that they make their money playing to the base. That is a great strategy for radio or cable news, but it does not do much to win over the low-information, swing voters. A few years ago I noted:
The Law of the Few says that studies show that there are specific people in society who are information, idea, and style vectors. Whether they have a vast network of contacts, a reputation for sharing useful wisdom, or the innate gift of salesmanship, these few people exercise a disproportionate effect when it comes to dispersing ideas. When they talk, other people lots of other people listen.
Do we have anybody like that articulating conservative ideas? I’m not so sure. Gladwell’s point is that these people spread their ideas because of their ability to connect directly with other people. All of our conservative talking heads are just that talking heads on TV or the radio. Conservatives, perhaps true to their commitment to individualism, do not have networks of people on the ground (i) who are themselves networkers, (ii) who are viewed as reliable information sources, or (iii) who can sell anything to anybody.
Still another good point:
There is no doubt that a sizable minority of the population is opposed to bigger government. This minority is large enough to boost the ratings of talk radio. It drives readership for rightwing blogs and raises money for some candidates. But is it it enough to win election?
40% is an enormous share in radio ratings. It is also the bad end of a landslide election.
By definition, low-information voters aren’t reading Ace of Spades or Powerline. We can’t engage them if we don’t know them.
In a way, the internet has made things even worse for conservatives. While it’s increased information dissemination, it’s also increased information ghettoization. We don’t talk to our neighbors about politics anymore. Instead, we go to a like-minded blog and enjoy the feeling that we’re not alone. But by doing so, we delude ourselves into believing that there are more like-minded people out there than a walk in the community and a talk in the park would reveal.
Now to my dissent.
The man who lives in a small community lives in a much larger world. He knows much more of the fierce varieties and uncompromising divergences of men. The reason is obvious. In a large community we can choose our companions. In a small community our companions are chosen for us. Thus in all extensive and highly civilized societies groups come into existence founded upon what is called sympathy, and shut out the real world more sharply than the gates of a monastery. There is nothing really narrow about the clan; the thing that is really narrow is the clique....The men of the clique live together because they have the same kind of soul, and their narrowness is a narrowness of spiritual coherence and contentment like that which exists in hell. [Heretics]
Let’s not forget the biggest, stickiest Republican/conservative message of all:
Key fact number one. As Obama moves toward "socialism", he does so at the behest of the "capitalists". It is not as if he is sending paramilitary gangs to take over successful, profitable businesses. Obama, like Bush before him, is compelled to act because the capitalists screwed the pooch, crapped the bed, and then muttered "maybe my bad" when their recklessness sent the financial system off a cliff.
The broad public knows this, and that makes it hard to win them over with cheap slogans about socialist bogeymen.
The 2012 campaign was not just Obama vs. catoon-Romney. It was also Obama vs. the ghost of George Bush.
We {heart} W.
Is that fair? Not entirely, but it is accurate.
Tanked the economy (worse than LBJ)
Started two wars he could not win (worse than Carter)
Or as Lee Atwater might say “if you can’t spin it, change the subject.”
If you’re explaining, you’re losing.
So I wonder if there's a bit of buyer's remorse here, magnifying the GOP's failings on other issues due to a possibly-unconscious need to lash out at Bush for the continuing chaos and violence in Iraq.I would add that i think that the Right is lashing out because they invested so much hope in Bush as a conservative, as a political leader, as a war leader. Rather than admit that GWB was not what we wanted him to be, we look for scapegoats. Today, the chosen object of hate is the House GOP.
