BeezleBub didn’t get as much done as he usually likes to do on a Saturday. That happens when he sleeps until just past noon. It’s not like he’s done that before. It’s certainly screwed up his circadian rhythms, so……

I just lost a longer reply to your comment (for no obvious reason). I don’t feel like writing it again, so here it is in a nutshell: I think the Left is functioning very much like Orwell’s Animal Farm. We can’t reach the true believers. We can’t reach the pigs in the house — the ones profiting from running the show for their own power and profit. But we CAN reach the animals in the barn, who are the idealists like me.

However, the idealists, including in the PUMAs, are afraid of us. They do not know they just have to embrace fiscal conservatism and can choose their other positions. The more we demonize them, the more we polarize them and keep them stuck on the Left.

As a recent convert, this is not old for me, so I am going to try to reach the Leftie idealists and show them how fiscal conservatism fulfills their ideals, while Leftism does not.

Cynthia

Woman seems kinda slow.
.-= Richard McEnroe´s last blog ..Federal Building Obamacare Protest, Los Angeles, 11/21/09 =-.

See, the thing is, one of Alinsky’s rules is to engage your opposition in pointless debate, because while they’re talking to you, you’re not getting your message out to someone who might listen. They’re wasting your time and resources.

It’s hard to be sure when they’re giving you an honest debate anymore; I suspect the number of ‘liberals’ and ‘progressives’ who will is rapidly dwindling. Much like the PUMAs… they screamed loudly about their anger at Obie, made much of making common cause with conservatives, but voted for him anyway.
.-= Richard McEnroe´s last blog ..Federal Building Obamacare Protest, Los Angeles, 11/21/09 =-.

The only thing I don’t love about the idea is that I didn’t think of it. Muahahah! Genius!!! Let’s figure out a way to blame The View as well

I get the anger and pretty much agree with you, but as grown-ups we serve our cause better by talking to people at their own level. Plus, when I was a liberal I thought I was a very well-informed and engaged person, but I was not because the mainstream media do an extremely comprehensive job of making sure only liberals, turncoat conservatives (David Brooks, David Frum, Katherine Parker at NRO) and conservatives who have a gift for getting people to hate and disagree with them (George Will, the late Robert Novak) get to mainstream public forums. For example, Phyllis Chesler notes that the instant she began to question the ever-increasing anti-semitism of liberalism and the anti-womanism/cultural relativism of feminists, poof!, she was persona non grata.

The liberals we want to reach — the ones who are reachable — are comparable to the animals in the barn in Orwell’s Animal Farm. They are idealistic and do not know how badly they are being duped and exploited because the mainstream media is controlling their reality and claiming — falsely — that it is presenting a fair picture of all sides of the issues of the day. Instead of denouncing liberals for being so stupid that they were duped into voting for Obama and are being exploited, we need to magnetize them to us by showing them how fiscal conservatism serves their ideals of opportunity, equality and security far better than liberalism does. We just need to keep connecting their ideals to the realities of how they will be realized through fiscal conservatism. When you use a stick to persuade people, they will run in every direction just to get away. Right now we have the advantage that the Obama-induced deliberate collapse of the U.S. economy is a huge stick driving people away from the Democrats. What we need to be doing to persuade people to run in the direction of fiscal conservatism is to be making it clear to people why it is the BEST CARROT EVER. I am going to start doing that more here.

As for blaming Oprah, besides choosing one person to be the face of the opposition being an Alinsky rule, Oprah really does have the most appalling taste in spiritual leaders and she goes for the false ones every time. One of the first indicators of this was choosing Dr. Phil over John Gray, of “Men Are From Mars Fame.” (I haven’t really written about it, but I attended quite a number of workshops John led in Washington, D.C., between 1983 and 1985 or ’86 and was almost immediately invited to be a member of the team of assistants who did the workshop processes with people who needed extra help. Frequently I was assigned to work with extremely shut down men, partly due to my compassionate nature but also because I don’t make men wrong for being men and they could cry in my arms if they needed to because I am a woman, but as a lesbian we had in common an attraction to and sexual relationships with women, so there was the guarantee that I could RELATE, so to speak. Anyway, John is an absolute genius on how to heal emotions and it is a terrible loss that he’s never had the recordings of those seminars edited into books.)

Anyway, Oprah’s unerring choice of the false prophet and the dead end road over the genuinely miraculous people and path to enlightenment she could have chosen, is the most certain indicator that she chose the people who appeased her narcissism to her satisfaction. For the good she could have done, and wanted to do, but didn’t on account of her narcissism, she is in class of evil with Deepak Chopra — I don’t feel like explaining why right now, but in my opinion he is worse than Obama, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot, Idi Amin and Stalin PUT TOGETHER.

In fact, the more I think about it, the more Oprah DOES have it coming that we blame her for selecting Obama over Hillary and making him president — especially since she bought Obama’s argument of race loyalty over qualifications, policies and the content of his character.

So: all the bad things happening now because Obama is president ARE Oprah’s fault. Pass it on.

Cynthia

Con piacere! I used to sing a lot of opera….was a lyric soprano.

It’s not Soros’s money, it’s not the SEIU goons, it’s not ACORN stuffing the ballot boxes.

It’s that “liberals” and “progressives” (though they aren’t and don’t) still need their lollipop. They didn’t do anything bad. Someone else knocked over the lamp, mommy. Their vote was not their fault…

It’s human nature not to want to acknowledge our mistakes, but part of growing up is to learn to take responsibility for them. That hasn’t, it seems, happened for much of the Democratic base (oh, base indeed…)

The usual progress of discussions on Obama and the Democrats (when you can have a civil one, which is increasingly rare), runs:

Blame Bush (Point out they still had jobs last November)
Blame GOP (Point out the stimulus, Obamacare, mortgage bomb, etc., were Democrat projects)
“Aah, all those politicians are alike!” They won’t countenance for an instant that nobody held a gun to their heads to make them vote for Obie. If it didn’t work better there must have been no possible way it could have turned out differently. Their actions couldn’t possibly have had the negative consequences they were warned about.

Ah, but give them a scapegoat… we are dealing with an infantilized population, who for all their nominal education, unearned wealth and undeserved arrogance are no more socially astute than medieval peasants who could be distracted from the depredations of the nobles and bishops by cries that Jews were eating their babies and Freemasons were poisoning their wells.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m all for the Hillbuzz suggestion as a tactic of cynical manipulation. But don’t delude yourself that you’re talking to grownups when you try it.
.-= richard mcenroe´s last blog ..Rule 5 — Hooters Girl Beer Trick! =-.

As for Oprah Winfrey, I can’t say I’ll miss her megalomania and egotism. It would be amusing were it not for those who followed her blindly.