A Textbook Right Wing Lie...
Right here at Green Eagle. Yesterday I wrote a post about my belief that Romney's run to be the Republican nominee was in fact little more than a business transaction on behalf of his backers, not really a political campaign in the traditional sense at all. This is something that I have been thinking about for some time, but due to some pretty demanding work and family situations, I hadn't managed to put my thoughts down on paper. What interested me is that, as far as I could tell, no one else was looking at Romney's attempt to capture the nomination this way, and yet it was really the only explanation I could see for his conduct. I may be wrong about this, particularly given that I am the only person I know of who has said this, but it is my opinion.
Well, my post garnered a comment from Anonymous, part of which I want to repeat here:
Looks like you all get the same memos and then run with them."
Well, I just went back and checked all of the major left-wing blogs that I read, and sure enough, not one single one of them has a similar story.
Now, as we know, Republicans do have real talking points- instructions passed out by the likes of Grover Norquist and Richard Viguere regarding what they are required to say in public. Anyone who has followed politics in the last couple of decades has seen these actual documents revealed on a number of occasions. What's more, we see over and over again, nearly simultaneous posts all over the right wing blogosphere and rants in the Conservative media making the same points, often with very similar language. On the other hand, there has never been the slightest evidence of the issuance of formal talking points by Democrats.
Thus we come to a simple fact: Anonymous' claim is a lie, no more and no less. Furthermore, it is an example of a phenomenon that has become common the last few years- the accusing of liberals by conservatives of the dishonest tactics that conservatives most commonly practice. Some people have called this projection, but it is not projection. Projection is a psychological phenomenon; what is going on here is an attempt by Conservatives to muddy the waters and disguise their own vile behavior by falsely claiming that everyone does it. They know they are lying; as usual they don't care.
Well, my post garnered a comment from Anonymous, part of which I want to repeat here:
"Anonymous said...is this he left's new strategy to go after the "enemy dujour",because i seems all the left wing blogs have the same story.
Looks like you all get the same memos and then run with them."
Well, I just went back and checked all of the major left-wing blogs that I read, and sure enough, not one single one of them has a similar story.
Now, as we know, Republicans do have real talking points- instructions passed out by the likes of Grover Norquist and Richard Viguere regarding what they are required to say in public. Anyone who has followed politics in the last couple of decades has seen these actual documents revealed on a number of occasions. What's more, we see over and over again, nearly simultaneous posts all over the right wing blogosphere and rants in the Conservative media making the same points, often with very similar language. On the other hand, there has never been the slightest evidence of the issuance of formal talking points by Democrats.
Thus we come to a simple fact: Anonymous' claim is a lie, no more and no less. Furthermore, it is an example of a phenomenon that has become common the last few years- the accusing of liberals by conservatives of the dishonest tactics that conservatives most commonly practice. Some people have called this projection, but it is not projection. Projection is a psychological phenomenon; what is going on here is an attempt by Conservatives to muddy the waters and disguise their own vile behavior by falsely claiming that everyone does it. They know they are lying; as usual they don't care.
Comments
Disagree in so much as that it is more than a lie - in that the likes of Anonymous actually believe it.
It IS a psychological phenomenon, different to projection but allied to it. Like false memory.
He or she read want ever he or she expected to read, regardless of what was written.
Usually I hesitate to get into psychological explanations of Right Wing cant, because it dehumanizes the banality of the evil by making it clinical… but sooner or later you have to ask why people believe it is midnight at noon. Why they believe Obama is a Muslim on Iranian payroll. Why they believe so much that is utterly absurd and – I can tell you – has near to nil currency outside America and its media bubble.
It’s not because they are on the committee of a vast conspiracy. No.
It is because they do not self reflect.
They cannot comprehend racism, for example, as a human failing… rather, it is something black people thought up to inflict on them.
(I encounter a parallel mode of thought in Japan – Japanese commonly tend to believe there is no racism in Japan because there is overwhelmingly one racial group. They don’t get it. They don’t see it as a failure of empathy and reason that they, me, you or the guy next door could have. The concept is simply externalized instead – ‘Someone else is responsible for it’. They are however hypersensitive to what other people think of them.)
They (the US Right) do not understand 'freedom' as live and let live. Rather, they understand it as exclude everything they don’t like.
It is an infantile state of mind, made possible by being allowed limited economic, educational and professional aspirations – limitations created and sustained by Republican politics - doped up on fundamentalism of the worst sort, and powered by an endless series of authority figures and archetypes that look vaguely like a movie Western they once saw.
They don’t want an intelligent sophisticated man like Obama for president, they want a cowboy who will bomb the fuck out of people.
These people could walk into a barn where 20 people were dressed in KKK hood and robes burning effigies of Obama’s kids and walk out the other side claiming all they’d seen was 20 good ole folk having a nice square dance.
Magpie thank you for your perceptive and insightful post.
I can understand fully the concept of a mind set described as the "infantile state of mind, made possible by being allowed limited economic, educational and professional aspirations" Certainly that applies to many people who are blindly following the current Republican party line. I know more than a few people like this who are poor poor poor, and yet they continue to vote Republican. Sadly they seem fixed in their orbits, though I try to shake them up at times.
I suspect that the person we see post here as "Anonymous" is not someone who has been deprived of any of these things....he/she is too polished. My hunch is that he/she is someone whose mission is to undermine anyone whose political analysis is based on fact and truth. I suspect that Anonymous is in fact someone who knows better, but has a vested interest in seeing the Rebublican Party gain greater power.
I'd lay odds that when Anonymous posted what was supposed to be an insult to Green Eagle that he/she was fully aware of it being a lie. I don't think he/she believed a word of it.
Thus, my opinion only, I'd say Green Eagle was accurate when he wrote "Anonymous' claim is a lie, no more and no less."
This particular anonymous is not about to tell us whether he's lying or just brainwashed, unfortunately.