Reagan: The Other Third Rail

Thanks to my Tabloid Friend on Facebook, I know that Ron Paul was foolish enough to criticize Ronald Reagan some years ago. First below is the 1987 quotation from Paul, then Politico writer Ginger Gibson's commentary.

“I think we can further thank Ronald Reagan for doing a good job [on furthering the Libertarian Party]. He certainly did a good job in 1980 pointing out the fallacies of the Democratic liberal agenda and he certainly did a good job on following up to show the disaster of the conservative agenda as well.”

The first rule in modern GOP politics is that you do not diss Ronald Reagan. The Reagan embrace may not be as tight as it was, say, a decade ago, but he is still a revered figure in the party. Thus, the above line from Paul’s nomination speech at the 1987 Libertarian Party convention in Seattle may not go over well with GOP regulars.

Fortunately, some American presidential candidates are cannier and more cautious than Ron Paul where Reagan is concerned. Here's how you do it, Ron:

“I think Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not. He put us on a fundamentally different path, because the country was ready for it. I think they felt like with all the excesses of the 1960s and 1970s and government had grown and grown, but there wasn’t much sense of accountability in terms of how it was operating. I think people—he just tapped into what people were already feeling, which was we want clarity, we want optimism, we want a return to that sense of dynamism and entrepreneurship that had been missing."

Yep, that was Barack Obama (via), during his campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination. Or was he aiming for the Republicans?

Reagan: The Other Third Rail

Thanks to my Tabloid Friend on Facebook, I know that Ron Paul was foolish enough to criticize Ronald Reagan some years ago. First below is the 1987 quotation from Paul, then Politico writer Ginger Gibson's commentary.

“I think we can further thank Ronald Reagan for doing a good job [on furthering the Libertarian Party]. He certainly did a good job in 1980 pointing out the fallacies of the Democratic liberal agenda and he certainly did a good job on following up to show the disaster of the conservative agenda as well.”

The first rule in modern GOP politics is that you do not diss Ronald Reagan. The Reagan embrace may not be as tight as it was, say, a decade ago, but he is still a revered figure in the party. Thus, the above line from Paul’s nomination speech at the 1987 Libertarian Party convention in Seattle may not go over well with GOP regulars.

Fortunately, some American presidential candidates are cannier and more cautious than Ron Paul where Reagan is concerned. Here's how you do it, Ron:

“I think Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not. He put us on a fundamentally different path, because the country was ready for it. I think they felt like with all the excesses of the 1960s and 1970s and government had grown and grown, but there wasn’t much sense of accountability in terms of how it was operating. I think people—he just tapped into what people were already feeling, which was we want clarity, we want optimism, we want a return to that sense of dynamism and entrepreneurship that had been missing."

Yep, that was Barack Obama (via), during his campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination. Or was he aiming for the Republicans?

There Are People Who Do Not Love Their Fellow Man

I don't know much about Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar. I probably wouldn't even if I watched TV, since reality programs about religious nuts are not my cup of tea. What little I do know comes primarily from voyeuristic liberals who throw tantrums about them but at the same time can't or won't avert their eyes.

This sort of thing always reminds me of something that happened in the 1960s, when I was in my late teens. My brothers and I were riding with my mother to go shopping in town, and we passed a couple of long-haired, possibly bearded young men hitchhiking. My mother's head spun around as she gawked at them; it's a miracle we didn't go off the road. This was rural northern Indiana, and the hippie look wouldn't be taken over by country music fans for another decade or more, so actual hippies were in short supply. "I thought you said those people were just doing it to get attention," I remarked with typical teenage acidity. "Well," my mother replied with a high-pitched giggle I hadn't heard from her before, "I'm giving it to them!" Her prescription for us, of course, when dealing with those who are just doing things to get attention, was to withhold it. But quod licet Mommy non licet loinfruit.

I think it was my Facebook Tabloid Friend who first linked to a story about the Duggars, when they announced her latest pregnancy. I believe he linked to this story, a bit of concern trolling about the health risks of too many pregnancies. Tabloid Friend has thousands of friends on Facebook, most of whom appear to be Obama loyalists and nominal liberals like himself, people who scorn religious fundamentalists who forget that Jesus taught Love, you bigoted assholes! LOVE!!! So, of course, being true followers of the gentle Nazarene, they reacted to the Duggars with disgust. Loving disgust, of course, in the true spirit of Christ. Like my RWA1 on Facebook, TF saves me a lot of time in finding this kind of material.

Then after Michelle had a miscarriage, Tabloid Friend let us know that the Duggars had taken a picture of the little mite and distributed it publicly! to the whole freakin' world! ... Well, actually, they distributed it at the memorial service they held for her. According to Mary Elizabeth Williams's post on the story at Salon, one of the Duggars' young cousins tweeted the picture, and it eventually went up on the Duggars' website. Now, we all know I'm weird, but I don't see this as a big deal. The picture wasn't a gory, pro-lifer dead fetus; it was a cleaned-up tiny hand resting on (I presume) Michelle's finger. Not nearly as morbid as a Victorian dead-baby picture. Not as morbid as Eric Clapton's memorial song for his four-year-old son. But goodness, the fury this inspired! Christlike love-like fury of course. (I'm not being entirely sarcastic there: judging from the gospels, Jesus was given to exactly such outbursts himself.)

After the first flush of vitriol subsided -- Williams writes that "Commenters right here on Salon called them 'an obscenity' who are “unfairly crowding the planet with [their] disgusting obsession' and 'selfish, polluting choices,' who were, in essence, 'asking for it'" -- the main accusation was that the Duggars were making a spectacle of themselves with that picture. They were so worked up that they ignored matters that Williams had covered in her post, like who took the picture, and that it was spread first by a young cousin on Twitter. (We all know how aware teenagers are of privacy issues in social media.) They claimed that the Duggars were making a spectacle of themselves, exploiting their children just to make a buck for their reality TV show. Which has some justice, since the Duggars are indeed the subject of a reality TV show, but that means everything they do is connected to it. If the fetus had survived to term, the show would have exploited her baby cuteness. So anyone who wants to level this accusation has to ask whether a given act is good or bad in itself, and as I said, I don't see anything wrong with taking and distributing this picture.

I suspect a couple of other factors. The (slightly) less sinister one is just good old-fashioned squeamishness about the human body-- except that we right-thinking liberals are supposed to be healthy, life-affirming, pro-sex and pro-pleasure; hostility to the flesh is supposed to be the domain of Them, the Bible-thumpers. It's not that simple, though. One of the first things I noticed about Tabloid Liberal and his Obama-loving community of commenters was time and energy they spent rubbernecking and clucking over sex scandals, like Anthony Weiner's photos. Again, the party line is that only Republican Bible-thumpers care about what a politician does on his own time, but in reality it appears that liberals are at least as hysterical about it: at least as much as the Republicans who went after Bill Clinton in the Nineties, they demand that (especially male) politicians be monogamous and preferably married, a role model for our youth. (I remember that during Monicagate some Republicans wailed about how difficult it was to explain these horrible things to children, who would be traumatized for life because Our President had a dick; I think it was Katha Pollitt who pointed out that children were much more traumatized by the wars Clinton was waging, especially the terror bombing of Iraq, and by the alarmism over bad Muslims who were going to attack America if we didn't kill them first.) And good old Christopher Hitchens, who has just become late; I'll always remember his panicky revulsion over Clinton's "horrid leavings" on Lewinsky's blue dress. (And then there was his dismissal of the Dixie Chicks as "sluts" and "fucking fat slags" for mildly disrespecting George Bush.)

Another factor is squeamishness about death. Despite American secularists' self-righteousness about their rationality, their openness, their liberality, they exhibit very little of any of these. Death is scary, and I'm not putting people down for being upset by it. But "disgusting pictures of their dead baby"? The picture can be seen on Williams's post; I don't think it's disgusting -- if anything, a better criticism would be that it's too sanitized.

The other factor expresses itself in rhetoric reminiscent of the eugenics movement: the Duggars are breeding like rabbits, "pumping out so many babies on an already crowded planet", "the batshit Duggar woman, who spits out babies like a dog whelps pups - all for the greater glory of whatever sky fairy she and her semen-donor worship", "if everyone had the Duggar's thoughtless self-entitled attitude towards breeding the world would be a desolate, Mad Max style wasteland", "7 billion people on this earth and this lady thinks its cool to pop out 20. effing ridiculous", "This lady is a kid collector , she pops em out like rabbits", "This women is like a self fufilling prophecy pregnancy puppy mill." And there's a lot more like those out there. This is lynch-mob language, the sort of swill you hear from Israelis about the Arabs, that you used to hear about Jews from the Nazis, and from eugenicists about just about everybody.

Sure, you can argue against having such a large family, but that's just the point: these people aren't interested in arguments, they're just venting rage against people who haven't, as far as I can tell, actually harmed them in any way. They refuse to avert their gaze from this sight that inflames them so much. They're rubberneckers, ghouls, like people who gather around a fight or a traffic accident, hoping to see gore. If anyone's mental health is suspect in this little circus, it's not the Duggars'.

Two criticisms about the Duggars do seem possibly relevant to me. I've seen a couple of claims that the Duggars rely on public assistance, but evidence is slim so far. The best support I've seen is one commenter on this post, who answered another commenter's claim that taxpayers aren't contributing to the Duggars' income: "I admit that I do not watch this on a regular basis; however, when I did, the family (all of them) went grocery shopping and the mother used food stamps, a program that is tax-payer funded." (No permalinks to the individual comments, which are nested under this one.) This is only of real interest because the Duggars are apparently right-wing Christians who would be happy to get rid of public assistance for other less worthy people; if so, they're hypocrites and do have too many children: more than they can support despite being debt-free and employed.

The other important negative is that the Duggars belong to the Quiverfull Christian movement, which explicitly and overtly encourages the production of children, with women subordinated to men. (Interestingly, the movement also rejects medical treatment for infertility on the grounds that they are "a usurpation of God's providence".) Typically, Quiverfull focuses on a couple of "Old Testament" verses as the core of their doctrine, while apparently ignoring the New Testament's exaltation of celibacy and sexual abstinence. In this light, the Duggars' reality show can be seen as an attempt to make their cult look "normal" (to reverse right-wing attacks on gay-friendly television programming) by presenting a relatively attractive family as its emblem.

You could compare the Duggars, by the way, to the secular scientists Frank and Lillian Gilbreth, who had a dozen children in the early twentieth century in a somewhat more egalitarian marriage, immortalized in the book and movie Cheaper by the Dozen. Which reminds me of a reason, suggested by one online writer, why someone might enjoy watching the Duggars' show: it's interesting to see how people manage the logistics of a difficult task and bring it off successfully -- and raising a large family is a difficult task.

But there, you see? This fuss has tricked me into spending much more time than I intended online looking for information about the Duggars, who don't seem to me worth that much attention. In the case of Tabloid Friend and his community of commenters, the Duggars are much more interesting than, say, Obama's last-minute decision not to veto the indefinite-detention bill -- a matter on which, so far TF has had nothing to say. (You shall not put the Lord your God to the test, I guess.) But that's normal, isn't it? Scandalous sexual material is always handy for diverting the ignorant masses from issues that might actually affect their well-being. TF isn't that different from a Republican comparing homosexuality to bestiality -- he's just doing it from the other direction.

There Are People Who Do Not Love Their Fellow Man

I don't know much about Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar. I probably wouldn't even if I watched TV, since reality programs about religious nuts are not my cup of tea. What little I do know comes primarily from voyeuristic liberals who throw tantrums about them but at the same time can't or won't avert their eyes.

This sort of thing always reminds me of something that happened in the 1960s, when I was in my late teens. My brothers and I were riding with my mother to go shopping in town, and we passed a couple of long-haired, possibly bearded young men hitchhiking. My mother's head spun around as she gawked at them; it's a miracle we didn't go off the road. This was rural northern Indiana, and the hippie look wouldn't be taken over by country music fans for another decade or more, so actual hippies were in short supply. "I thought you said those people were just doing it to get attention," I remarked with typical teenage acidity. "Well," my mother replied with a high-pitched giggle I hadn't heard from her before, "I'm giving it to them!" Her prescription for us, of course, when dealing with those who are just doing things to get attention, was to withhold it. But quod licet Mommy non licet loinfruit.

I think it was my Facebook Tabloid Friend who first linked to a story about the Duggars, when they announced her latest pregnancy. I believe he linked to this story, a bit of concern trolling about the health risks of too many pregnancies. Tabloid Friend has thousands of friends on Facebook, most of whom appear to be Obama loyalists and nominal liberals like himself, people who scorn religious fundamentalists who forget that Jesus taught Love, you bigoted assholes! LOVE!!! So, of course, being true followers of the gentle Nazarene, they reacted to the Duggars with disgust. Loving disgust, of course, in the true spirit of Christ. Like my RWA1 on Facebook, TF saves me a lot of time in finding this kind of material.

Then after Michelle had a miscarriage, Tabloid Friend let us know that the Duggars had taken a picture of the little mite and distributed it publicly! to the whole freakin' world! ... Well, actually, they distributed it at the memorial service they held for her. According to Mary Elizabeth Williams's post on the story at Salon, one of the Duggars' young cousins tweeted the picture, and it eventually went up on the Duggars' website. Now, we all know I'm weird, but I don't see this as a big deal. The picture wasn't a gory, pro-lifer dead fetus; it was a cleaned-up tiny hand resting on (I presume) Michelle's finger. Not nearly as morbid as a Victorian dead-baby picture. Not as morbid as Eric Clapton's memorial song for his four-year-old son. But goodness, the fury this inspired! Christlike love-like fury of course. (I'm not being entirely sarcastic there: judging from the gospels, Jesus was given to exactly such outbursts himself.)

After the first flush of vitriol subsided -- Williams writes that "Commenters right here on Salon called them 'an obscenity' who are “unfairly crowding the planet with [their] disgusting obsession' and 'selfish, polluting choices,' who were, in essence, 'asking for it'" -- the main accusation was that the Duggars were making a spectacle of themselves with that picture. They were so worked up that they ignored matters that Williams had covered in her post, like who took the picture, and that it was spread first by a young cousin on Twitter. (We all know how aware teenagers are of privacy issues in social media.) They claimed that the Duggars were making a spectacle of themselves, exploiting their children just to make a buck for their reality TV show. Which has some justice, since the Duggars are indeed the subject of a reality TV show, but that means everything they do is connected to it. If the fetus had survived to term, the show would have exploited her baby cuteness. So anyone who wants to level this accusation has to ask whether a given act is good or bad in itself, and as I said, I don't see anything wrong with taking and distributing this picture.

I suspect a couple of other factors. The (slightly) less sinister one is just good old-fashioned squeamishness about the human body-- except that we right-thinking liberals are supposed to be healthy, life-affirming, pro-sex and pro-pleasure; hostility to the flesh is supposed to be the domain of Them, the Bible-thumpers. It's not that simple, though. One of the first things I noticed about Tabloid Liberal and his Obama-loving community of commenters was time and energy they spent rubbernecking and clucking over sex scandals, like Anthony Weiner's photos. Again, the party line is that only Republican Bible-thumpers care about what a politician does on his own time, but in reality it appears that liberals are at least as hysterical about it: at least as much as the Republicans who went after Bill Clinton in the Nineties, they demand that (especially male) politicians be monogamous and preferably married, a role model for our youth. (I remember that during Monicagate some Republicans wailed about how difficult it was to explain these horrible things to children, who would be traumatized for life because Our President had a dick; I think it was Katha Pollitt who pointed out that children were much more traumatized by the wars Clinton was waging, especially the terror bombing of Iraq, and by the alarmism over bad Muslims who were going to attack America if we didn't kill them first.) And good old Christopher Hitchens, who has just become late; I'll always remember his panicky revulsion over Clinton's "horrid leavings" on Lewinsky's blue dress. (And then there was his dismissal of the Dixie Chicks as "sluts" and "fucking fat slags" for mildly disrespecting George Bush.)

Another factor is squeamishness about death. Despite American secularists' self-righteousness about their rationality, their openness, their liberality, they exhibit very little of any of these. Death is scary, and I'm not putting people down for being upset by it. But "disgusting pictures of their dead baby"? The picture can be seen on Williams's post; I don't think it's disgusting -- if anything, a better criticism would be that it's too sanitized.

The other factor expresses itself in rhetoric reminiscent of the eugenics movement: the Duggars are breeding like rabbits, "pumping out so many babies on an already crowded planet", "the batshit Duggar woman, who spits out babies like a dog whelps pups - all for the greater glory of whatever sky fairy she and her semen-donor worship", "if everyone had the Duggar's thoughtless self-entitled attitude towards breeding the world would be a desolate, Mad Max style wasteland", "7 billion people on this earth and this lady thinks its cool to pop out 20. effing ridiculous", "This lady is a kid collector , she pops em out like rabbits", "This women is like a self fufilling prophecy pregnancy puppy mill." And there's a lot more like those out there. This is lynch-mob language, the sort of swill you hear from Israelis about the Arabs, that you used to hear about Jews from the Nazis, and from eugenicists about just about everybody.

Sure, you can argue against having such a large family, but that's just the point: these people aren't interested in arguments, they're just venting rage against people who haven't, as far as I can tell, actually harmed them in any way. They refuse to avert their gaze from this sight that inflames them so much. They're rubberneckers, ghouls, like people who gather around a fight or a traffic accident, hoping to see gore. If anyone's mental health is suspect in this little circus, it's not the Duggars'.

Two criticisms about the Duggars do seem possibly relevant to me. I've seen a couple of claims that the Duggars rely on public assistance, but evidence is slim so far. The best support I've seen is one commenter on this post, who answered another commenter's claim that taxpayers aren't contributing to the Duggars' income: "I admit that I do not watch this on a regular basis; however, when I did, the family (all of them) went grocery shopping and the mother used food stamps, a program that is tax-payer funded." (No permalinks to the individual comments, which are nested under this one.) This is only of real interest because the Duggars are apparently right-wing Christians who would be happy to get rid of public assistance for other less worthy people; if so, they're hypocrites and do have too many children: more than they can support despite being debt-free and employed.

The other important negative is that the Duggars belong to the Quiverfull Christian movement, which explicitly and overtly encourages the production of children, with women subordinated to men. (Interestingly, the movement also rejects medical treatment for infertility on the grounds that they are "a usurpation of God's providence".) Typically, Quiverfull focuses on a couple of "Old Testament" verses as the core of their doctrine, while apparently ignoring the New Testament's exaltation of celibacy and sexual abstinence. In this light, the Duggars' reality show can be seen as an attempt to make their cult look "normal" (to reverse right-wing attacks on gay-friendly television programming) by presenting a relatively attractive family as its emblem.

You could compare the Duggars, by the way, to the secular scientists Frank and Lillian Gilbreth, who had a dozen children in the early twentieth century in a somewhat more egalitarian marriage, immortalized in the book and movie Cheaper by the Dozen. Which reminds me of a reason, suggested by one online writer, why someone might enjoy watching the Duggars' show: it's interesting to see how people manage the logistics of a difficult task and bring it off successfully -- and raising a large family is a difficult task.

But there, you see? This fuss has tricked me into spending much more time than I intended online looking for information about the Duggars, who don't seem to me worth that much attention. In the case of Tabloid Friend and his community of commenters, the Duggars are much more interesting than, say, Obama's last-minute decision not to veto the indefinite-detention bill -- a matter on which, so far TF has had nothing to say. (You shall not put the Lord your God to the test, I guess.) But that's normal, isn't it? Scandalous sexual material is always handy for diverting the ignorant masses from issues that might actually affect their well-being. TF isn't that different from a Republican comparing homosexuality to bestiality -- he's just doing it from the other direction.

The Pot Calling the Kettle FOX

My Tabloid Facebook Friend posted a link to an article called "Fourteen Propaganda Techniques Fox 'News' Uses to Brainwash Americans," which put me in mind of the Rules of Communist Revolution that used to circulate in mimeograph back in the good old days before the Internet, when you could believe everything you read. The Communists had only ten rules, Fox has fourteen! That shows the advantages of the Free Market!

The author of the article, Dr. Cynthia Boaz, is "assistant professor of political science at Sonoma State University, where her areas of expertise include quality of democracy, nonviolent struggle, civil resistance and political communication and media", so you know she understands media and politics very well. Let's go through her list of the techniques used by "Fox News and other propagandists disguised as media" to deceive We the People. To see her full commentary on them, just click the link. I'll add some more examples to show how uniquely evil Fox "News" is.

1. Panic Mongering. Oh, my, how awful! Other media, to say nothing of Democratic politicians and operatives would never try to scare us into supporting them by ginning up fake threats -- creating terrorist plots, for example, or pretending that another country poses a danger to us.

2. Character Assassination/Ad Hominem. “I hear these people saying [President Obama is] like George Bush. Those people ought to be drug tested,” [then-Press Secretary Robert] Gibbs said. “I mean, it’s crazy.” Or:

Democrats, just congenitally, tend to get -- to see the glass as half empty. (Laughter.) If we get an historic health care bill passed -- oh, well, the public option wasn't there. If you get the financial reform bill passed -- then, well, I don't know about this particular derivatives rule, I'm not sure that I'm satisfied with that. And gosh, we haven't yet brought about world peace and -- (laughter.) I thought that was going to happen quicker. (Laughter.) You know who you are. (Laughter.)

Or you can just focus on personalities instead of issues.

3. Projection/Flipping. "It involves taking whatever underhanded tactic you're using and then accusing your opponent of doing it to you first." I can't think of specific liberal/centrist examples of this offhand, though they're lurking in the back of my mind. Any suggestions? I'll add examples later as I think of them.

4. Rewriting History. Taking credit for withdrawing American troops for example, under an agreement that your predecessor negotiated. Never happen! And if it did, the liberal/left news media would catch you at it!Or

Obama, today: “We did exactly what we said we were going to do in Libya.”

"Something about a short-term no-fly zone, right?" Whatever It Is I'm Against It prompted helpfully.

5. Scapegoating/Othering. "The simple idea is that if you can find a group to blame for social or economic problems, you can then go on to a) justify violence/dehumanization of them, and b) subvert responsibility for any harm that may befall them as a result," says Dr. Against the crazies at Westboro Baptist Church, say. Or against anybody who engages in "hate speech."

6. Conflating Violence With Power and Opposition to Violence With Weakness."We came, we saw, he died."

7. Bullying. It's not exactly a new problem, nor is it limited to Fox.

8. Confusion. "The idea is to deliberately confuse the argument, but insist that the logic is airtight and imply that anyone who disagrees is either too dumb or too fanatical to follow along", says Doc. Erm, isn't that exactly exactly the liberal attitude to the "Reichtards" and Bible-thumpers?

9. Populism. "This," Dr. says, "is especially popular in election years." Indeed it is, indeed it is.

10. Invoking the Christian God. "My religious beliefs say that marriage is something sanctified between a man and a woman." Oh, and Rick Warren; remember him?

11. Saturation. "There are three components to effective saturation: being repetitive, being ubiquitous and being consistent," Dr. says. The message must be repeated cover and over, it must be everywhere and it must be shared across commentators: e.g. 'Saddam has WMD.' Veracity and hard data have no relationship to the efficacy of saturation." Or, as already noted, "Iranian nuclear weapons pose a direct threat to the U.S."

12. Disparaging Education. Again, this predates Fox News; it's part of the mainstream media. In The Bush Dyslexicon Mark Crispin Miller describes at length how, after the third debate between Al Gore and George W. Bush in October 2000,

the "analysts" at CNN said not one word about the substance of the candidates' exchange but just kept harping on the general "statements" were putatively "trying" to make about themselves through their tone and body language.

Although a waste of time, the postdebate bull session was at least not strongly biased, nor was its anti-intellectualism too pronounced. On ABC there was a far more noxious session on the subject of the third debate.

This session, featuring Sam Donaldson, George Stephanopoulos, Cokie Roberts, and George Will, "captures perfectly the the barbarous synergy between the right and TV news, each feigning populism for its own elitist purposes." Roberts complained that the issue debated by the candidates wasn't "the important point there. ... Because that's not what comes across when you're watching the debate. What comes across when you're watching the debate is this guy from Washington doing Washington-speak" [pages 68-69]. The irony of four Beltway media insiders denouncing Al Gore for being a Beltway insider, while delicious, was totally lost on Roberts.

It's also a tactic used against people like Bertrand Russell or Noam Chomsky, who are undoubtedly supersmart but got no common sense. It's usually backhanded, like Paul Berman's complaint in Terror and Liberalism (Norton, 2003, p. 150) about Chomsky's "customary blizzard of references to obscure sources" -- obscure sources like The New York Times and The Boston Globe, you know.

13. Guilt by Association.

“Just this week, we learned that one of the largest groups paying for these ads regularly takes in money from foreign corporations,” Mr. Obama said. “So groups that receive foreign money are spending huge sums to influence American elections.”

It didn't help that the administration had no evidence for these claims. (Or that the US spends huge sums of money to influence foreign elections.)

14. Diversion. Mic check!

“It’s OK,” the president assured the audience. “It’s alright. Listen, I’m going to be talking about a whole range of things today, and I appreciate you guys making your point. Let me go ahead and make mine, alright? And I’ll listen to you. You listen to me.”

I think we've listened to him long enough, far more than he has listened to us. But that's another topic. Meanwhile, this post may undergo revision after posting if I remember better examples of the principles in action.

The Pot Calling the Kettle FOX

My Tabloid Facebook Friend posted a link to an article called "Fourteen Propaganda Techniques Fox 'News' Uses to Brainwash Americans," which put me in mind of the Rules of Communist Revolution that used to circulate in mimeograph back in the good old days before the Internet, when you could believe everything you read. The Communists had only ten rules, Fox has fourteen! That shows the advantages of the Free Market!

The author of the article, Dr. Cynthia Boaz, is "assistant professor of political science at Sonoma State University, where her areas of expertise include quality of democracy, nonviolent struggle, civil resistance and political communication and media", so you know she understands media and politics very well. Let's go through her list of the techniques used by "Fox News and other propagandists disguised as media" to deceive We the People. To see her full commentary on them, just click the link. I'll add some more examples to show how uniquely evil Fox "News" is.

1. Panic Mongering. Oh, my, how awful! Other media, to say nothing of Democratic politicians and operatives would never try to scare us into supporting them by ginning up fake threats -- creating terrorist plots, for example, or pretending that another country poses a danger to us.

2. Character Assassination/Ad Hominem. “I hear these people saying [President Obama is] like George Bush. Those people ought to be drug tested,” [then-Press Secretary Robert] Gibbs said. “I mean, it’s crazy.” Or:

Democrats, just congenitally, tend to get -- to see the glass as half empty. (Laughter.) If we get an historic health care bill passed -- oh, well, the public option wasn't there. If you get the financial reform bill passed -- then, well, I don't know about this particular derivatives rule, I'm not sure that I'm satisfied with that. And gosh, we haven't yet brought about world peace and -- (laughter.) I thought that was going to happen quicker. (Laughter.) You know who you are. (Laughter.)

Or you can just focus on personalities instead of issues.

3. Projection/Flipping. "It involves taking whatever underhanded tactic you're using and then accusing your opponent of doing it to you first." I can't think of specific liberal/centrist examples of this offhand, though they're lurking in the back of my mind. Any suggestions? I'll add examples later as I think of them.

4. Rewriting History. Taking credit for withdrawing American troops for example, under an agreement that your predecessor negotiated. Never happen! And if it did, the liberal/left news media would catch you at it!Or

Obama, today: “We did exactly what we said we were going to do in Libya.”

"Something about a short-term no-fly zone, right?" Whatever It Is I'm Against It prompted helpfully.

5. Scapegoating/Othering. "The simple idea is that if you can find a group to blame for social or economic problems, you can then go on to a) justify violence/dehumanization of them, and b) subvert responsibility for any harm that may befall them as a result," says Dr. Against the crazies at Westboro Baptist Church, say. Or against anybody who engages in "hate speech."

6. Conflating Violence With Power and Opposition to Violence With Weakness."We came, we saw, he died."

7. Bullying. It's not exactly a new problem, nor is it limited to Fox.

8. Confusion. "The idea is to deliberately confuse the argument, but insist that the logic is airtight and imply that anyone who disagrees is either too dumb or too fanatical to follow along", says Doc. Erm, isn't that exactly exactly the liberal attitude to the "Reichtards" and Bible-thumpers?

9. Populism. "This," Dr. says, "is especially popular in election years." Indeed it is, indeed it is.

10. Invoking the Christian God. "My religious beliefs say that marriage is something sanctified between a man and a woman." Oh, and Rick Warren; remember him?

11. Saturation. "There are three components to effective saturation: being repetitive, being ubiquitous and being consistent," Dr. says. The message must be repeated cover and over, it must be everywhere and it must be shared across commentators: e.g. 'Saddam has WMD.' Veracity and hard data have no relationship to the efficacy of saturation." Or, as already noted, "Iranian nuclear weapons pose a direct threat to the U.S."

12. Disparaging Education. Again, this predates Fox News; it's part of the mainstream media. In The Bush Dyslexicon Mark Crispin Miller describes at length how, after the third debate between Al Gore and George W. Bush in October 2000,

the "analysts" at CNN said not one word about the substance of the candidates' exchange but just kept harping on the general "statements" were putatively "trying" to make about themselves through their tone and body language.

Although a waste of time, the postdebate bull session was at least not strongly biased, nor was its anti-intellectualism too pronounced. On ABC there was a far more noxious session on the subject of the third debate.

This session, featuring Sam Donaldson, George Stephanopoulos, Cokie Roberts, and George Will, "captures perfectly the the barbarous synergy between the right and TV news, each feigning populism for its own elitist purposes." Roberts complained that the issue debated by the candidates wasn't "the important point there. ... Because that's not what comes across when you're watching the debate. What comes across when you're watching the debate is this guy from Washington doing Washington-speak" [pages 68-69]. The irony of four Beltway media insiders denouncing Al Gore for being a Beltway insider, while delicious, was totally lost on Roberts.

It's also a tactic used against people like Bertrand Russell or Noam Chomsky, who are undoubtedly supersmart but got no common sense. It's usually backhanded, like Paul Berman's complaint in Terror and Liberalism (Norton, 2003, p. 150) about Chomsky's "customary blizzard of references to obscure sources" -- obscure sources like The New York Times and The Boston Globe, you know.

13. Guilt by Association.

“Just this week, we learned that one of the largest groups paying for these ads regularly takes in money from foreign corporations,” Mr. Obama said. “So groups that receive foreign money are spending huge sums to influence American elections.”

It didn't help that the administration had no evidence for these claims. (Or that the US spends huge sums of money to influence foreign elections.)

14. Diversion. Mic check!

“It’s OK,” the president assured the audience. “It’s alright. Listen, I’m going to be talking about a whole range of things today, and I appreciate you guys making your point. Let me go ahead and make mine, alright? And I’ll listen to you. You listen to me.”

I think we've listened to him long enough, far more than he has listened to us. But that's another topic. Meanwhile, this post may undergo revision after posting if I remember better examples of the principles in action.

In the Latter Days There Shall Arise Many Anti-Obamas

There's another Facebook friend of mine, let's call him the Tabloid Friend because of his fondness for linking to stories of sensational crime stories and sex scandals. He's a devout Obamanian -- in fact a few weeks ago he urged me in evangelical terms to let Obama into my heart, it would change my life the way Obama had changed his -- so he also links to Obama apologetics and material that mocks the Stoopid Republicans. But he's mad hot cute, so I keep him on my friends list while annoying him and his many allies in comments. (I'm not such a slave to lust as to let my politics be compromised by it.)

Today he wrote something that surprised me. He'd linked to a political cartoon that showed Qaddafy waiting to be admitted to Hell, while the Admissions Demon complains over the phone that Obama is killing too many Muslims: "Things were sure quieter here under GW Bush's watch." I commented that Bush killed a few hundred thousand Muslims, so of course it was hardly quieter then; and if you believe in the Christian Hell, that of course is where they went. Another commenter replied, "Duncan..get an education!! Ignorance sucks!!"

It now occurs to me that the person was upset that I'd said that Muslims would go to Hell; I didn't realize that because I thought I'd made it obvious that it was only "if you believe in the Christian Hell." If you don't, as I don't, then of course they won't. I thought the complaint was about the subject of the cartoon, the large number of Bad People with Arabic names being sent to Hell on Obama's watch, and that the person disagreed that Bush killed a few hundred thousand Muslims. Certainly the cartoonist was ignoring that fact. The joke demands that selective amnesia to work.

Tabloid Friend then addressed the other commenter: " He was being facetious. I know the snark is a bit over the top at times but he's generally harmless." I was not being facetious about the number of people Bush killed, nor about Christian belief in Hell. (And being criticized for "over the top" snark by TF is like being accused of rudeness and meanness by Ann Coulter: like getting an A on my report card.)

Still, given the cartoon itself, it seems that even Obama fans are forgetting the murderous record of his predecessor. Is it because their policies are too similar for comfort? Or is it that they're so busy rewriting and obfuscating Obama's record that they're whitewashing Bush too, just to be safe?

In the Latter Days There Shall Arise Many Anti-Obamas

There's another Facebook friend of mine, let's call him the Tabloid Friend because of his fondness for linking to stories of sensational crime stories and sex scandals. He's a devout Obamanian -- in fact a few weeks ago he urged me in evangelical terms to let Obama into my heart, it would change my life the way Obama had changed his -- so he also links to Obama apologetics and material that mocks the Stoopid Republicans. But he's mad hot cute, so I keep him on my friends list while annoying him and his many allies in comments. (I'm not such a slave to lust as to let my politics be compromised by it.)

Today he wrote something that surprised me. He'd linked to a political cartoon that showed Qaddafy waiting to be admitted to Hell, while the Admissions Demon complains over the phone that Obama is killing too many Muslims: "Things were sure quieter here under GW Bush's watch." I commented that Bush killed a few hundred thousand Muslims, so of course it was hardly quieter then; and if you believe in the Christian Hell, that of course is where they went. Another commenter replied, "Duncan..get an education!! Ignorance sucks!!"

It now occurs to me that the person was upset that I'd said that Muslims would go to Hell; I didn't realize that because I thought I'd made it obvious that it was only "if you believe in the Christian Hell." If you don't, as I don't, then of course they won't. I thought the complaint was about the subject of the cartoon, the large number of Bad People with Arabic names being sent to Hell on Obama's watch, and that the person disagreed that Bush killed a few hundred thousand Muslims. Certainly the cartoonist was ignoring that fact. The joke demands that selective amnesia to work.

Tabloid Friend then addressed the other commenter: " He was being facetious. I know the snark is a bit over the top at times but he's generally harmless." I was not being facetious about the number of people Bush killed, nor about Christian belief in Hell. (And being criticized for "over the top" snark by TF is like being accused of rudeness and meanness by Ann Coulter: like getting an A on my report card.)

Still, given the cartoon itself, it seems that even Obama fans are forgetting the murderous record of his predecessor. Is it because their policies are too similar for comfort? Or is it that they're so busy rewriting and obfuscating Obama's record that they're whitewashing Bush too, just to be safe?