Author: up2date

Cross posted from It Affects You

Any Conan fans out there?  If you are, than you’ll understand the thread title…

I’m going to make a few not-so-bold predictions about the 2006 races.  It’ll be far from all-inclusive, and pointing that out just provides me with a way to save face later.

At any rate, here goes:

   
• Many Republicans will continue to distance themselves from Bush.  He won’t receive many invites to congressional districts with competitive races, and candidates will avoid presidential photo-ops and otherwise avoid appearing buddy-buddy with Bush.  At least a few candidates will make significant noise running openly against Bush’s policies in Republican primaries.

   

• Rather than allow this growing wing of the Republican party to have a voice in the national debate, the Conservative core of the Republican party will be unforgiving of this trend and stubbornly hold their ground.  There will be no internal compromises and no policy shifts.  The two sides will grow farther apart until signs of a clear split begin to emerge.  The current leadership will retain control over the party, but there will be some important fallout.  Moderate Republicans, already being pushed out, will be forced further into the fringes of the Republican party and beyond.  Many will find themselves voting for moderate alternatives in Republican primaries and Democratic candidates in general elections.

That’s the good news.  Here are two we need to be concerned about:

   
• Conservatives will attempt to draw attention away from unpopular and failing policy by focusing on new “crises” and new “enemies.”  I expect over the next 18 months to see a sharp rise in xenophobic propaganda from the Republican Noise Machine.  Immigrants will be the scapegoats in 2006 and 2008 the way gay Americans were in 2004 (which is not to say Conservatives will pull back their attack on gay rights — sadly there’s still plenty of gas left in that tank.)  

   

• While Republicans may not be able to stop their own bleeding, they can certainly try to attack our flanks.  It has long been one of Rove’s strategies to directly attack an opponent’s strengths, and that will continue in 2006 and 2008.  Whether Rove retains involvement or not, Conservatives will go after traditional core Democratic supporters.  Tops on their list will be African American churches.  They will continue their policy of ideological gerrymandering by appealing to this group on the same basis they appealed to Evangelicals.  Once again, gays will be figuratively sacrificed to gain votes.

By all accounts 2006 should be a good year for Democratic candidates.  We absolutely cannot, however, count on that.  The Republican Noise Machine’s track record of sleight of hand politics is far too extensive to ever assume things will follow a set course.  They will do everything possible to create new crises to divert our attention while undercutting traditional Democratic support.  We cannot let them dodge their fate.

Hello all.  I just found this place yesterday.  I was a long time poster and frequent diarist at DailyKos and MyDD (and frequent doesn’t necessarily mean good as you’ll no doubt soon learn), but I dropped off for a while.  I recently started posting again, and when I came back I found Booman Tribune.

I don’t know if this is my best work, but I guess if I’m going to do it I have to jump in somewhere, so here goes, cross posted from It Affects You:

Yesterday I wrote a particularly brief post drawing attention to what was at the time the top three headlines at WorldNetDaily.  (True story: the first time I saw an article on WorldNetDaily, I actually thought it was Weekly World News – that trashy “Aliens stole my turnips and impregnated my wife” rag next to the National Enquirer in checkout lines everywhere.)

Not long after, politica took me to task in the comments:

And posting them and giving them extra traffic for this is a good thing?

If you have nothing to write…don’t write.

Now, I understand exactly what politica was saying.  Admittedly my post was far from the most insightful, well thought out piece I’ve ever published on the site.  And I generally have subscribed to the philosophy that you don’t help sell the other guy’s story.  If someone is telling outrageous yarns, you don’t lend credibility or publicity by responding. But that doesn’t always work in the real world.

Is it better to allow these things to spread unchallenged, or oppose them and risk unintentionally aiding the filth dispensors?  I pondered this briefly as part of a larger post the other day, but it’s worth a closer look on its own.

Hate feeds on darkness.  Ignorance thrives in the absence of light.  Misinformation festers in isolation.  

There are a few things we know about the Republican Noise Machine, one of them being that it will continue to crank out noise whether we ignore or directly oppose it.  The Noise Machine is going to try to assassinate the character of people like Cindy Sheehan regardless of how we oppose them.  And their messages will spread ever wider until they begin to seep into the mainstream from seemingly a hundred directions at once.  Would we rather it grow in the darkness, or would we rather shine a spotlight onto their mechanizations?

Our potential responses fall under those two broad areas: we can ignore them, thinking any response will dignify their actions while helping their messages spread; or we can oppose them, worried about lies and half-truths spreading with nothing to counter their misinformation.

I used to be much more firmly in the camp which held it would be a mistake to dignify such tactics with a response.  But, whether we like it or not, some Totally Fucking Insane arguments are going to be taken seriously by more people than we realize no matter what we do.  The Noise Machine has grown too large.  O’Reilly will repeat the messages.  Maglalang will repeat the messages.  Conservative rags will repeat the messages.  And people will hear these messages and they will spread.  As I wrote yesterday, people who ought to know better will find themselves considering ridiculous arguments based not on the merits of those arguments, but based instead on the size of the supprt for those arguments.  (“Well, it doesn’t sound right, but so many people are saying it.”)  Allowing these messages to grow unchecked in the dark means they will be larger and more formidable by the time they reach the light.

Responding isn’t all good either.  The last thing we want to do is get into a serious debate on some made-up, outlandish point fabricated simply to prop one side up or take the other down.  A parrot can be trained to repeat the phrase “I know you are but what am I?” over and over.  If you suddenly found yourself in a debate with that parrot, and you grew angrier and angrier with each of his rebuttals, who is playing the part of the fool?  So clearly our goal should not be to engage these wholesalers of misinformation as one would engage a friend in a serious, spirited discussion on an issue where there are honest differences.  The goal should be to expose them for what they are and what they are doing.

I may not be wise enough to always recognize the appropriate method of response for every case, but when in doubt I will always err on the side of shinning a flashlight in the dark and watching these cockroaches scurry.