Buchanan invokes Godwin’s Law on the Newtster
In a textbook case of the pot calling the kettle black, having professional bigot Pat Buchanan call Gangrene Gingrich “absurd” and “a political opportunist” for comparing the proposed Park 51 Muslim community center to the Nazis and the Holocaust is like being called ugly by the alien in Predator.
Nonetheless, Buchanan makes a couple of important points about how the political pornography propagated by the Professional Right works.
How do you get more attention than Sarah Palin, who’s very good at this, is to go two steps further. I mean, I think bringing the Nazis into the argument is always absurd in American politics because there is no valid comparison there. And secondly, you know, you bring that in and that’s all we start talking about.
Firstly, like sexual pornography which requires a constant escalation in provocative imagery to keep the brain from getting bored, political pornographers like Sarah Palin and Newt Gingrich have to keep upping the ante to keep their base engaged. IOW, they have to constantly out-crazy each other.
Secondly, even a manufactured controversy like the proposed Muslim community center, once the M$M starts treating it like it’s the most vital issue confronting the country today, it becomes a self-propagating feedback loop that gets discussed endlessly by every cable news anchor and the punditocracy their networks employ.
So fasten your seat belts– we have nearly another three months of this insanity before the November elections.
There is more stupidity than hydrogen in the universe, and it has a longer shelf life.
—Frank Zappa
if you want to talk about the lack of respect, begin with the fact that the republicans won’t even call the democratic party by its correct name. they deliberately call it the democrat party in order to denigrate everyone on the other side. it appears they don’t realize how stupid they sound, as though they don’t understand the difference between a noun and an adjective.
nonnie
As I understand it, the infamous Joseph McCarthy was the first slime ball to use that little trick. Rush Limpbot picked on it and it’s been with us ever since.
The reason it’s so effective is that rooted in the way the brain processes neuro-cognitive frames. The brain processes visual images in discreet frames, so many per millisecond. I remember an analysis of a particular anti-dem political ad (apparently using that knowledge) to split the word “Democrat” in such a way that what the brain saw and heard was “Democ- Rat.”
Similarly, someone with an axe to grind against psychotherapists could produce an ad or whatever that synchronizes individual video frames with the brain’s own cognitive frame processing rate, splitting the word “therapist” into “the-rapist”, which the brain would register at an unconscious level.
Such is the state of the art of the neuro-cognitive propaganda techniques that we’re dealing with these days.
you made me think of an old car commercial. i think it was isuzu, though i could be wrong. anyway, their slogan was ‘go farther.’ nothing wrong with that, but they would spell it out letter by letter on the screen, and i’d laugh every time they’d get to g-o-f-a-r-t. not really anything to do with the subject at hand, other than the power of repetition and advertising. then again, i do seem to feel gassy when i see a foreign car. 😉
I hear what you’re saying, Bill, and been there myself. But my growing understanding of neurocognitive science, modern propaganda techniques, and my intuitive sense of where were are in the present zeitgeist cycle leads me to conclude that the rational, thinking part of the brain doesn’t have a chance against the lizard brain once it has been fully aroused, as it has since Obama took office.
How can you have a reasonable debate with a party whose entire political strategy is based on obstructionism? Even their leader in the Senate, Mitch McConnell, said just the other day that he wishes they could have obstructed MORE on issues vital to the nation’s economic, social, and physical well being. Even when the Dems take a Republican idea and run with it, they still won’t vote for it because it might benefit the Dems politically– the public be damned.
The GOPers nihilistic political strategy is understandable, I guess, since all their big issues– trickle-down supply side economics, deregulation, permanent war, social Darwinism– have polarized and bankrupted the country.
Not that I’m any big fan of the Dems. They are only a little less controlled by the corporatists and lobby/cysts that have hijacked our government these last few years, the Supreme’s Citizens United ruling being just the capstone on the influence pyramid. Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp recent donation of $1 million to the Republican Governors Conference being just the first big post CU shot aimed at the heart of American democracy. But every once awhile the Dems throw the peasants a few more scraps from the table, proving at least that they still have a few functioning compassionate neurons to rub together.
I plan to say more about all this in an upcoming post, KEYWORD: Inertia.
i have a simple theory regarding the continual bashing that takes place between the left and the right in this country, from pure ideology to politics. It is called lack of respect. I see a dysfunctional family. Mommycrats and daddycrats stand in disdain of each other instead of realizing that two eyes allow for focus. Hello, Republicans can have some good motives and insights and Democrats the same. It is precisely by respect in a good family that insights and purposes and plans and decisions are honed. I cringe at this lack of community and respect.