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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?


To: LindyBill who wrote (321724)8/29/2009 2:49:46 PM
From: Brumar893 Recommendations  Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 793958
 
The problem with the left, he seems to think, is that they are responding from a center, sending talking points out to a periphery, whereas the right has discovered how to attack swiftly, from a plethora of directions and in depth. The right is inside their OODA loop and Haque realizes that if this goes on long enough, the left will lose.
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He correctly understands that the attacks are coming from everywhere in the conservative political spectrum, that its sheer leaderlessness is actually a source of strength because it means that like al-Qaeda, every group of conservative protesters can initiate and plan its own actions within the context of a shared narrative.
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Haque advises the left to forget about the facts; to focus on the frame. He tells them to destroy their opposition with the wow of authority.


Come on, the left's "facts" aren't facts anyway.

Haque’s advice will ultimately fail because it fails to recognize the fundamental difference between ‘fake’ 5th generation warfare and the real thing. The real thing is bottom up; the fake thing is astroturfed. The genuine article aggregates the wisdom of crowds; the counterfeit hires crowds.
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To think that the current unrest is the creation of Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck would be to make a fundamental mistake. Those figures are simply its beneficiaries ..


Why they're not getting anywhere by thinking its Palin or Rush or Beck thats the problem so let's destroy them to win.

3. Consider it possible that all men, including small businessmen, plumbers, rubes from Alaska, cleaning women who say their prayers at mealtimes — are in some fundamental way the equal of graduates of Harvard Law School and know as much about life and death as Dr. Zeke Emmanuel.

Amen.

There's a lot of good stuff in the comments at the Belmontclub:

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In here there is nothing about Leftists soberly undertaking some self-examination or soul searching. Constant through out is reliance on the fallacy of “appeal to authority”, in this case the authority of the leftist institutions ...
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Our current elites and their institutions are mostly delusional parasites, they live in a world dependent on an exterior world which operates by wholly different rules.
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Aug 27, 2009 - 4:42 am 7. Marsh Arab:
The right is fighting as a distributed insurgency. This has been clear for some time. It is equally clear that the left has not a clue as to how to respond to this phenomenon.
The left’s methods, tried and true, rely on controlling the dialogue with the MSM and decapitation strikes on the right’s leadership. With the advent of the ‘new media’, the MSM has been suffering with an inability to control the dialogue and with a loss of credibility. The decapitation strike (think of what was done to Gingrich, Delay, Bush, Cheney, Rove…Palin) has continued to work fairly well – especially since Republicans do not protect their own as well as the Democrats. The recent change, however, is that the right has begun to act without a leader which completely takes the decapitation strike off the table. In the healthcare debate, the left has no opposition leader to demonize. They’ve tried to make the ‘townhallers’ into insurance industry drones or crazy whacked out “birthers”. But the once powerful MSM was unable to pull it off. So, instead, they just attack the citizen opposition themselves, i.e., brownshirts, nazis, and unamerican.
What the left really wants in the right is a leader, a figurehead, someone to attack and demonize.
Someone to investigate. Perhaps it is best if we don’t give them one.
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To: LindyBill who wrote (321724)8/29/2009 4:10:57 PM
From: KLP1 Recommendation  Respond to of 793958
 
For Advise and Consent fans: Con Lit, cont. [John J. Miller]
Allen Drury belongs on any list of conservative fiction writers.


In today's WSJ, he's on a list of the best five novels about political conspiracy:

4. Advise and Consent
By Allen Drury
Doubleday, 1959

A generation of political junkies got hooked on the ways of Washington because of this book, published 50 years ago. The winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, "Advise and Consent" revealed the ¬inner ¬workings of the Senate—and ¬offered compelling drama along the way. An ailing, manipulative, FDR-like president nominates as secretary of state an ¬arrogant liberal intellectual and would-be Soviet appeaser, meant to evoke Alger Hiss.

In the midst of his vicious confirmation battle, evidence emerges that he was once a member of a secret Communist cell.

Allen Drury, who was a reporter in the New York Times's Washington bureau, is not exactly subtle about his politics:

All of his bad guys are soft on ¬Communism. The capital he depicts is a period piece: Senators all orate like William Jennings Bryan; socialite ¬hostesses have boozy salons where senators get sloppy; a hint in a ¬newspaper column can destroy a ¬politician's career. But it's addictive reading and arguably still the best novel about Washington politics.

For more on Drury, see this essay by Roger Kaplan.
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