July 18, 2005

A Much Smaller Cornucopia Of Political Links

Hustler columnist (and good friend of mine) Michael Wilt was famous around Vanderbilt for rewriting Republican talking points as columns. He's been doing more of the same on his blog now for several months. Very recently, he has begun renovating his site, the upshot of which is that Michael Wilt's blog now supports commenting! This is potentially one of the best sources of fun that has come along for me in years! Now, liberal hordes, attack! But do so civilly, and no name-calling. Like me, he's always up for a good debate.

Via Wonkette, there is a very, very interesting NYT article about how Democrats are starting to get better at communicating with the public. How are they doing this? By sticking to talking points. The article says that the Democrats won the filibuster thing and are winning the social security reform thing because they are repeating the same phrases over and over again, towing the party line, and sticking to their talking points. This is called "framing" the debate. We are learning to control the language of the debates. Our failure to do that is why we've been losing. The Republicans do it all the time. They make sure there is no dissent in the party, and they repeat their catch phrases until everyone is forced to debate everything on their terms.

While I think what the article says is true, I also think it's sad that we have to be as mindless, watered down, monolothic, and conformist as the Republicans or else people are too dumb to understand us. This all relates to what I mentioned the other day about manipulating the public by controlling the language of the media.

On a related note, the LA Times has an article about how Republicans' party unity and media manipulation are making them lose big on the [Rove|Leak|Plame|Wilson]gate thing. Again, dissent is a good thing. Shouldn't Republicans be just as concerned about this whole thing as Democrats? Why aren't they asking more tough questions of Rove, DeLay, McClellan? Should closing ranks and huddling around their wounded take precedence over curbing ethical abuses and making sure they don't keep happening?

Unsurprisingly, the US was planning to control the Iraqi elections. It angers me greatly, though I know we've been doing this sort of thing for many years, that the US would even consider backing certain candidates in foreign elections. And the whole time his people were debating how best to ensure that their hand-picked candidates won, Bush was squawking about how great it was that Iraq was having "free elections," and would finally have a "government of the people." Disgusting.

The FBI is collecting large files on organizations critical of the Bush administration, such as the ACLU and Greenpeace. There could be "an innocuous explanation... like preserving requests from or complaints about the groups in agency files." But some are charging that the FBI is conducting political surveillance in order to stifle voices critical of the administration: Is the information collected (ostensibly in order to make sure protests remain civil) instead being used to stifle the protests and dull their impact, resulting in first amendment violations?
"Protest groups charge that F.B.I. counterterrorism officials have used their expanded powers since the Sept. 11 attacks to blur the line between legitimate civil disobedience and violent or terrorist activity in what they liken to F.B.I. political surveillance of the 1960's."

And another from the LA Times, about how atheists are powerless in today's hyper-religious political climate. Also check out the brazenly named No God Blog. Yay, atheists!