Frisco_Slug_Esq
On Strike!
- Joined
- May 4, 2009
- Posts
- 45,618
We're just months away from what used to be termed the silly season now morphed into the mean season...
J.R. Dunn
The hated lying stupid rwingnutneocon American Thinker
Liberal hate campaigns are a product of the ideologization of American politics. As liberalism has shifted more to the left, the concept of "the opposition" has altered. Classic American liberalism of the mature period of American politics in the late 19th to mid 20th century held a pragmatic view of competition. By the very nature of things, the opposition was someone you had to live with amid the give and take of the political game. While at one point you might be up, the next week it might be the guy across the aisle, so you treated him civilly as a matter of simple good sense. FDR selecting Wendell Willkie as ambassador without portfolio for Latin America after defeating him in the 1940 election is but one example.
Contemporary leftists, on the other hand, view their opponents as people you send off to the Gulag, unworthy of any respect, deserving of any kind of low blow, no matter how foul. So you accuse Goldwater of insanity, slander Justice Thomas as a sexual monster, casually publish plays, books, and films calling for the assassination of President Bush, and assault the first serious Republican female candidate at her weakest point -- her family. And of course, you scream to high heaven if any form of turnabout occurs in your direction, as in the case of the Obama family, which was declared "off limits" early in the presidential campaign, at the same time that Palin's family was being stretched on the media rack. (Someday, somebody has to do a study of liberalism and hypocrisy. It'll be an awful lengthy volume.)
This style of political loathing has become effectively innate. It has been systemized to such a degree as to become integral. Modern liberalism cannot do without it. An entire structure has been erected on the basis of political hatred, and from that structure a whole new strategy has arisen.
Now, if this strategy were to be expanded to take in use of the Net, we'd expect to see certain things. We'd expect a networked form of attack based on the Internet's viral capabilities. A story would begin at one or two distinct nodes and spread through e-mails, thread comments, tweets, and Facebook entries. It's very similar to the activities of the botnets, the illegal networks of zombie computers used to spread spam, malware and viruses, except that here the machines are volunteers. There would be no point in specifically aiming at "target audiences" or "opinion leaders" because the story will reach them one way or another.
That includes the legacy media, which in recent months has begun treating the Net as an unimpeachable source when it's convenient for them. (These are the same people who dismiss bloggers as amateurish, undependable, and unsavory, but we'll overlook that). The story leaps from the Net onto the cable networks, where it receives its baptism as "news", in the process acquiring a patina of respectability. It then jumps to the big networks, and finally, after a considerable delay, to the print media. (We've all experienced the peculiar shock of seeing a respected paper "break" a story as much as a week after it began cycling on the Internet. It's like seeing old gramps decked out in a set of way-cool threads behind the wheel of a 60s muscle car remake. The only proper response is pity and embarrassment.)
After it hits major media, it then dips back into the Net, in supercharged form and on a more widespread scale, being accessed this time around by general readers with no direct interest in the subject. Eventually it ends up in the hands of editorial writers, late-night comics, politicians and their staffers, and even senior government officials (such as my crazy aunt in the White House). The entire media sphere is saturated, in an extremely short period, and with very little in the way of effort. (It might well pay large dividends to actually track such a story from point to point, from its beginnings on the Net all the way down the line. Who can guess what kind of connections would become evident?)
A useful analogy here would be Denial of Service (DoS) attacks, occasionally still carried out by the more twitchy examples of the hacking fraternity, in which a site or organization is jammed with so much traffic that no one can get through. In our case what is denied is the propagation of a political message by filling all possible pathways with a false story. This method of operating has predecessors in the natural world. Think of the "swarming" of bees, barracuda, or piranha. It is also common in military tactics. The steppe tribes utilized a method of surrounding enemy forces and "swarming" them that was brought to perfection by Genghis Khan in the 13th century. In WW II, U-boat "wolf packs" assaulted Allied convoys in much the same way, attacking simultaneously from all directions. In the Pacific, the U.S. Navy developed a tactic called "the big blue blanket" in which hundreds of carrier aircraft would smother the defenses of Japanese-held islands. In all cases, the core method was the same: combining large numbers of discrete, independent units to overwhelm a single defensive system.
The latest example of this method involves Rush Limbaugh and the NFL. Here we can clearly see the strategy at work in detail across every level of the media ecology. A bogus quote is planted in Wiki to serve as the equivalent of a time bomb. The dependable proprietors of this "encyclopedia" (as I guess you'd call it) refuse to remove it even upon direct request. At the right moment, the quote is "discovered" and spreads out across the Net, acquiring a bodyguard of equally meretricious quotations in the process. At last it reaches honest Rick Sanchez of CNN, who, acting as a second stage, boosts it into the purview of the legacy media. From there it spreads worldwide as a "scandal" of universal interest. At no point does anyone think of verifying the quote(s) or contacting the principle. And all this for the sole purpose of torpedoing a private business deal with no direct connection to Rush's radio efforts.
It's this last touch of dementia that truly reveals the left-wing character at work here. What appears to be a minutely-devised plan involving months of preparation and a large number of participants was triggered and carried out not to shut down Rush's talk show, destroy the Excellence in Broadcasting Network, and drive him off the air, but to interfere with a hobby; his involvement in pro football. It's as if the Imperial Japanese Fleet in 1941 accepted all the risk and effort of launching an air armada against Pearl Harbor in order to destroy the base's recreational facilities while leaving various battleships and cruisers intact to come raging after them. I imagine that the Limbaugh fleet will be setting out shortly.
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... The left is facing a historic debacle in 2010 as their Obamoid dreamworld continues to deteriorate. It won't get any better for them. They're bound to pull out all stops in an effort to save as much of a plurality in Congress as possible. If I'm correct, clear and obvious evidence of the defamation network will emerge at that time. Let's not be taken by surprise.
J.R. Dunn
The hated lying stupid rwingnutneocon American Thinker
