They do not understand we are mocking them!!??
United Citizens Council!
Posted on 09/18/2009 6:32:58 AM PDT by markomalley
Conservatives are coming for the Democrats on their blind side — the left.
The evidence is everywhere.
At tea parties and town halls, conservative demonstrators oppose health care reform with signs bearing the abortion-rights slogan “Keep your laws off my body” or the line “Obama lies, Grandma dies” — an echo of the “Bush lied, they died” T-shirts worn to protest the Iraq war.
Conservative activists are yelling “Nazi!” and “Big Brother!” where they used to shout, “Nanny state!” and “Big Government!”
And the 1971 agitator’s handbook “Rules for Radicals” — written by Saul Alinsky, the Chicago community organizer who was the subject of Hillary Clinton’s senior thesis, and whose teachings helped shape Barack Obama’s work on Chicago’s South Side — has been among Amazon’s top 100 sellers for the past month, put there in part by people who “also bought” books by Michelle Malkin, Glenn Beck, and South Carolina Republican Sen. Jim DeMint.
Yes, the same folks that brought you Obama the Socialist have been appropriating the words and ways of leftists past — and generally letting their freak flag fly.
The left-wing rhetoric and symbolism is so thick on the right, in fact, that some conservatives have been taken aback by it: The logo for the Sept. 12 protest in Washington, which organizers called the “March on Washington,” featured an image that looked so much like those associated with the labor, communist and black power movements that some participants objected to it — until they found out that’s what the designers were shooting for.
“As an organization, we have been very closely studying what the left has been doing,” explains FreedomWorks press secretary Adam Brandon, who says he was given a copy of “Rules for Radicals” when he took his current job . Brandon describes the Sept. 12 rally in D.C. as the “culmination of four years worth of work,” and says that organizers were “incredibly conscious” of the symbols they chose.
With the logo, he explains, they were “trying to evoke the imagery of the counterrevolutionary protests of 1960s that captured the imagination of the world.” And as for the phrase “March on Washington,” Brandon says, “This is something people said in the office. If we had been alive back in the 1960s, we would have been on the freedom bus rides. It was an issue of individual liberty. We’re trying to borrow some from the Civil Rights movement.”
From the outside, at least, it doesn't look like an obvious fit.
Armey did not, in fact, participate in the freedom rides of the 1960s. Brandon said the former House majority leader was an undergrad in Jamestown, N.D., at the time, working his way through school putting up electric poles, and “wasn’t politically active at the time.”
And while they’re handing out Alinsky’s “Rules for Radicals” at FreedomWorks, Armey himself told the Financial Times last month: “What I think of Alinsky is that he was very good at what he did but what he did was not good.”
But if the tactics of the left helped end segregation and the Vietnam War in the last century, conservatives say there’s no reason those same tactics can’t be used to keep liberals in check now.
O’Keefe, the activist and filmmaker who posed as a pimp for an expose of several ACORN offices in the Northeast, told the New York Post earlier this week] that he, too, had been inspired by “Rules for Radicals,” which includes such tactical lessons as “Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon” and “Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules.”
O’Keefe told the paper he was trying to expose the “absurdities of the enemy by employing their own rules and language.”
“If you can make impossible demands on your enemy, you can destroy them,” he said.
This isn’t the first time the right tried on the ways of the left, says Julian Zelizer, professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University. “We actually did see some of that before, in the 1970s. When conservativism emerged as a new movement, they adopted some of the tactics of the New Left of the 1960s, really focusing on grassroots organizing, and kind of adopting a lot of populist language, and using some of the 1960s energy for their own purposes, and I think we’re seeing it again, very clearly.”
“There has been a conscious movement to do that for some time,” agrees George Lakoff, a University of California professor of cognitive science and linguistics. “There is a long history of it.”
Perhaps, but rarely has it been so blatant — or so provocative.
“They’re definitely throwing down the gauntlet and saying, if that’s what you believe, then come along,” says Teri Christoph, co-founder of the conservative women’s group Smart Girl Politics, who suggested that there also might be a touch of irony in some of the slogan-swiping as well.
The irony thus far seems to have been lost on the left, however, which has mostly voiced either disbelief or derision that the conservatives would be so shameless — or so clueless. In Democratic Underground’s discussion forum, a photo of a marcher holding a “Keep Your Laws of My Body” sign was captioned “OK, the cognitive dissonance hasn't hit them yet.” And of the 9/12-ers’ logo, one poster on Stephen Colbert’s site asks, “Did these guys grow a sense of humor overnight, or did they just skip history class?”
They’re not wrong to ask the question. It is unclear, for example, whether Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.), whose office did not respond to POLITICO for this story, was intentionally invoking the rhetoric of the pro-choice movement (which she most emphatically does not support) when she urged people last month to let their representatives know that “under no circumstances will I give the government control over my body and my health care decisions.”
Nor is it clear that all those who sang “This Land Is Your Land” at the tea parties were aware of its pro-labor, fellow-traveler roots.
Still, enough of the co-opting is intentional that the Democrats might be wise to stop snarking, sit up, and take notice. And some of it is already working, notes Lakoff: In the health care debate, he says, the right has taken “all the progressive arguments and made them conservative arguments.”
Says Zelizer: “The tactics can be powerful. Direct confrontation, community organizing, in-your-face politics, as we’ve seen in August, can get a lot of media attention and can scare politicians away from taking certain positions.”
They can also be their own reward. At FreedomWorks, says Brandon, “We’re having fun. I have been pissing people off left and right calling myself a progressive, because I’m fighting myself against the establishment.”
And, according to Alinsky, that’s one of the keys to a good uprising: As he put it in “Rules for Radicals,” “A good tactic is one that your people enjoy. If your people are not having a ball doing it, there is something very wrong with the tactic.”
We were taught by very GOOD teachers(rats)!!
We’ve got advantages the left has never had. We don’t have much in the way of leadership which means no one to target. We self organize and don’t rely on tax dollars to fund ourselves.
First half of the article is good. The rest is garbage.
The one point it makes is clear. What is good for the Goose, is good for the Gander. If Obama says get in their face, then get in THIER face.
There are More of us, than there are them.
As we say in the Navy, Get hot.
About time the conservatives went to the left hook.
Yup...and it’s time to abort ACORN and other commie programs before they are born into another program.
They do not understand we are mocking them!!??
United Citizens Council!
First half of the article is good. The rest is garbage.
The one point it makes is clear. What is good for the Goose, is good for the Gander. If Obama says get in their face, then get in THIER face.
There are More of us, than there are them.
As we say in the Navy, Get hot.
followed by a left overhand and then a max power left upper cut square on the jaw.
Senators are elected unless they resigned or were booted from office between elections.
Exactly my point.
Look folks, we are conservatives. WE'RE the ones who are supposed to have facts and logic and reason and common sense. My concern is that in the process of "using the liberal playbook" that many conservatives are going to confuse what works (subverting slogans, popular agitation) with what doesn't (XXXX=Hitler signs, shouting down, violence). If we stick to making our case forecefully and subverting leftist paradigms, then we'll be A-OK. If we go Code Pink, we'll lose the goodwill we're generating.
See my #31.
And if our founding fathers weren’t radical, then nobody ever has been.
Radicalism that combines sound intellectual reasoning, a willingness to use violent and heroic means and which respects the rights of man is in our very political DNA as Americans.
I'm one of those who posts a lot of silly pictures on FR but I agree with you completely on this and feel that it is way too easy to overdo it on the signs carried in public.
Verifiable facts, politeness and massive, peaceful crowds are what we need to win this one. We need to be firm and dedicated.
Let’s make it unfair and ramp it up by using John Boyd’s OODA Loop. Make them totally unsure of what we’ll do next. Get inside their decision loop. Act before they can respond to our last act, and have our next act ready to go.The kids with the Acorn vids and Andy Breitbart are on that page. Alinsky may be a good start. It may win community battles. John Boyd wins wars.
For far too long the Left has been using an arsenal of tactics while the Conservatives consigned themselves to spitballs.
The fact are on our side, and if the tactics work - let’s use them.
It’s about fricken time we started playing hardball.
Wish our side would play hardball on the abortion issue.
“We’re on the right track. As long as we stick to verifiable facts we’re in good shape.”
“When the legend is better than the fact, print the legend.” - the Man Who Shot Liberty Valence.
Did the left care that Robert Bork was none of those things Dead Ted labled him as? Does the left care that people think that Sarah Palin said that she could see Russia from her house? Bottom line - rumor and urban legend can be effective weapons, don’t leave them in our holster.
Do you think they could still win by frauds and illegals?
He further goes on to explain that the leftward tilt of the examples used on his book were just due to the time at which the book was authored (i.e. Castro, Che, etc).
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