Replies

Isn’t it the dems who decried the “politics of personal destruction?”

Yes, and they hate it when you quote them and remind the public how they voted too.

But the New Democrats' playbook is Saul Alinsky's Rules For Radicals (a book dedicated to Satan).

They are permitted to lie like Stalinists with this text.

"There's another reason for working inside the system. Dostoevski said that taking a new step is what people fear most. Any revolutionary change must be preceded by a passive, affirmative, non-challenging attitude toward change among the mass of our people. They must feel so frustrated, so defeated, so lost, so futureless in the prevailing system that they are willing to let go of the past and change the future. This acceptance is the reformation essential to any revolution. To bring on this reformation requires that the organizer work inside the system, among not only the middle class but the 40 per cent of American families – more than seventy million people – whose income range from $5,000 to $10,000 a year [in 1971]. They cannot be dismissed by labeling them blue collar or hard hat. They will not continue to be relatively passive and slightly challenging. If we fail to communicate with them, if we don't encourage them to form alliances with us, they will move to the right. Maybe they will anyway, but let's not let it happen by default."
....
Rule 1: Power is not only what you have, but what an opponent thinks you have. If your organization is small, hide your numbers in the dark and raise a din that will make everyone think you have many more people than you do.
Rule 2: Never go outside the experience of your people. The result is confusion, fear, and retreat.
Rule 3: Whenever possible, go outside the experience of an opponent. Here you want to cause confusion, fear, and retreat.
Rule 4: Make opponents live up to their own book of rules. “You can kill them with this, for they can no more obey their own rules than the Christian church can live up to Christianity.”
Rule 5: Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon. It’s hard to counterattack ridicule, and it infuriates the opposition, which then reacts to your advantage.
Rule 6: A good tactic is one your people enjoy. “If your people aren’t having a ball doing it, there is something very wrong with the tactic.”
Rule 7: A tactic that drags on for too long becomes a drag. Commitment may become ritualistic as people turn to other issues.
Rule 8: Keep the pressure on. Use different tactics and actions and use all events of the period for your purpose. “The major premise for tactics is the development of operations that will maintain a constant pressure upon the opposition. It is this that will cause the opposition to react to your advantage.”
Rule 9: The threat is more terrifying than the thing itself. When Alinsky leaked word that large numbers of poor people were going to tie up the washrooms of O’Hare Airport, Chicago city authorities quickly agreed to act on a longstanding commitment to a ghetto organization. They imagined the mayhem as thousands of passengers poured off airplanes to discover every washroom occupied. Then they imagined the international embarrassment and the damage to the city’s reputation.
Rule 10: The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative. Avoid being trapped by an opponent or an interviewer who says, “Okay, what would you do?”
Rule 11: Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, polarize it. Don’t try to attack abstract corporations or bureaucracies. Identify a responsible individual. Ignore attempts to shift or spread the blame.
...
(Alinsky continues by stating several rules of the ethics of means and ends...)
The judgment of the ethics of means is dependent upon the political position of those sitting in judgment.
In war, the end justifies almost any means.
Judgment must be made in the context of the times in which the action occurred and not from any other chronological vantage point.
Concern with ethics increases with the number of means available and vice versa.
The less important the end to be desired, the more one can afford to engage in ethical evaluations of means.
Generally, success or failure is a mighty determinant of ethics.
The morality of a means depends upon whether the means is being employed at a time of imminent defeat or imminent victory.
Any effective means is automatically judged by the opposition as being unethical.
You do what you can with what you have and clothe it with moral garments.
Goals must be phrased in general terms like "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity," "Of the Common Welfare," "Pursuit of Happiness," or "Bread and Peace."

We have to push back and make THEM live by THEIR own rules too. Bill Clinton excused Robert Byrd's time as a KKK recruiter (he was a young man at 51) because he needed to get the votes (and suppress those black voters who might think about voting Republican...). And the media gave Bill Clinton a pass for this. So different than the media fabricated kerfuffle over Trent Lott's birthday comment to Strom Thurmond.