Posted on 01/05/2003 1:14:16 AM PST by Cincinatus' Wife
NEW YORK -- Influential Democrats, worried that their party has been outgunned in the political propaganda wars by conservative radio and television personalities, are scouring the nation for a liberal answer to Rush Limbaugh and the many others on the deep bench of Republican friends.
For years, Democrats have groused about their inability to balance what they see as the increasing influence over the electorate by advocates of Republican policies.
But they say their concerns have taken on a new urgency because of the rise to the top of the cable news ratings by the Fox News Channel, considered by liberals to have a conservative slant, and the loss of the Senate to the Republicans in November. Some Democrats say the election outcome enhanced the influence of Fox News and personalities like Limbaugh.
The efforts among influential Democrats, particularly liberals, range from a grass-roots talent search for progressive radio hosts to the creation of think tanks to provide a Democratic spin for the news media, to nascent discussions by wealthy supporters about starting a cable network with a liberal bent.
People working on these projects acknowledged they were venturing into territory where liberals have failed and failed again, most notably with the short-lived radio programs of Mario Cuomo and Texan Jim Hightower, not to mention Phil Donahue's struggling, liberal talk show on MSNBC.
However, they said, the recent Republican gains have perhaps set the backdrop for the emergence of an angry liberal who could claim the same outsider status that worked so well for Limbaugh in the early 1990s.
The hurried efforts by Democrats to find more powerful media voices comes after years of carping but little action.
"If you start from the premise that the message was right, which we do, then the problem was that it wasn't getting out to the people," said one official of the Democratic Party who spoke on condition that his name not be used.
With that sentiment, there is a sense within the leadership ranks that the party erred in not building a media support system after the 2000 presidential election, when it lost the media coordination of the Clinton White House.
"Across the board, we need to muscle up," said John Podesta, the former White House chief of staff for Bill Clinton and now a law professor at Georgetown University. "That means from the congressional operations to the party committees to the think tank world to, most significantly, beefing up our capacity to communicate with the public in all forms of media, not just through obscure Internet Web sites but on television and radio."
For his part, Podesta is discussing with Internet entrepreneur Steven T. Kirsch and others the creation of a liberal version of the Heritage Foundation, the conservative research group that, along with others of its kind, is credited with helping start the modern conservative movement.
The foundation is part of a circuit of influential conservative groups that are credited with helping to hone a singular conservative message, bolstered each Wednesday at back-to-back meetings held by Grover Norquist, the head of Americans for Tax Reform, and the conservative activist Paul Weyrich. Those meetings are monitored and at times attended by some conservative commentators, columnists and Internet writers.
Democrats have long claimed that the circuit has corralled conservative thinkers, and more importantly, conservative media, into a disciplined message of the week that gets repeated attention from Web sites like The Drudge Report, Limbaugh's radio show, Fox News' prime-time talk shows and the editorial pages of The Washington Times and The Wall Street Journal.
Kirsch, chief executive of the Propel Internet service and a prominent Democratic fund-raiser, said the foundation he and Podesta envision would do the same for liberals.
"During the last 10 years the opposition has become more organized and the liberals haven't adapted to counter it," he said. "We will have components that will include messaging, message delivery and coordination of progressive groups so progressives will speak with more of a unified voice."
But if history is any guide, the soil may not be fertile. Liberal radio programs have not worked very well in the past. Liberals and conservatives said they believed this was in part because the most prominent liberal hosts have tended to present policy issues in all of their dry complexity while refraining from baring fangs against their conservative opponents.
"Most liberal talk shows are so, you know, milquetoast, who would want to listen to them?" said Harry Thomason, the Hollywood producer who is close to Clinton. "Conservatives are all fire and brimstone."
i vote for letting them go on and think that.
B-I-N-G-O !
Interactive. They don't want questions or challenges, just blind acceptance (a form of worship, in more abstract terms).
There are those who probably tire of me presenting Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan, but here it is anyway:
Part IV. Of the Kingdom of DarknessChap. xlv. Of Demonology and other Relics of the Religion of the Gentiles.
[10] Another relic of Gentilism is the worship of images, neither instituted by Moses in the Old, nor by Christ in the New Testament; nor yet brought in from the Gentiles; but left amongst them, after they had given their names to Christ. Before our Saviour preached, it was the general religion of the Gentiles to worship for gods those appearances that remain in the brain from the impression of external bodies upon the organs of their senses, which are commonly called ideas, idols, phantasms, conceits, as being representations of those external bodies which cause them, and have nothing in them of reality, no more than there is in the things that seem to stand before us in a dream...
Informal fallacy: begging the question...
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Also...
"If you start from the premise that the message was right, which we do, then the problem was that it wasn't getting out to the people," said one official of the Democratic Party who spoke on condition that his name not be used.
Formal fallacy in logic. (If/then statement. Premise statement used in propositional logic - - invalid form. Truth table shows two true premises leading to a false conclusion. If p, then q. Not q, therefore p.)
So conservatives were right all along, and the "media" got its marching orders from the faxes in the White House basement? Aren't the faxes coming from Hitlery's office good enough for them? The sanctimonious "nonpartisan media" needs direction from a democRAT president?
It's not that their message isn't "getting out". It "got out", and got rejected. But that's the fundamental problem with liberals. It's not that they think their way is best, they believe it's the only way.
To them, liberalism is as natural as the air they breathe, and as constant as gravity. It doesn't require thought, or even an act of faith. Liberalism, to them, is just "there", like a law of nature.
When I say, or Rush says to his 20 million listeners, "liberalism sucks", not only are we guilty of maligning the source of all good in the universe, but we also identify ourselves as crazed and irrational for not accepting what to them is the very foundation of the universe. We are more dangerous than the raghead mullahs proclaiming a new jihad against America every Friday afternoon.
Part IV. Of the Kingdom of DarknessChap. xliv. Of Spiritual Darkness From Misinterpretation of Scripture
[1] Besides these sovereign powers, divine and human, of which I have hitherto discoursed, there is mention in Scripture of another power, namely, that of "the rulers of the darkness of this world," [Ephesians, 6. 12] "the kingdom of Satan," [Matthew, 12. 26] and "the principality of Beelzebub over demons," [Ibid., 9. 34] that is to say, over phantasms that appear in the air: for which cause Satan is also called "the prince of the power of the air";[Ephesians, 2. 2] and, because he ruleth in the darkness of this world, "the prince of this world":[John, 16. 11] and in consequence hereunto, they who are under his dominion, in opposition to the faithful, who are the "children of the light," are called the "children of darkness." For seeing Beelzebub is prince of phantasms, inhabitants of his dominion of air and darkness, the children of darkness, and these demons, phantasms, or spirits of illusion, signify allegorically the same thing. This considered, the kingdom of darkness, as it is set forth in these and other places of the Scripture, is nothing else but a confederacy of deceivers that, to obtain dominion over men in this present world, endeavour, by dark and erroneous doctrines, to extinguish in them the light, both of nature and of the gospel; and so to disprepare them for the kingdom of God to come.
(bold added)
Someone should tell them the story about the man who built his house upon the sand...
Ding ding ding. Move to the head of the class.
Shhhhh! ;)
Ben Chao
Julianne Maurveaux
Lanny Davis
Anne Lewis
Paul Begala
Got more? This could be over pretty soon.
I'm gearing up now for the bashing party. Edwards' media exposure is just that.....exposing the emptiness under his hair. I'm already sick of hearing about "regular folks", aren't you?
On another thread I read that he said he'd visited all 100 NC counties. Was that during his senatorial candidacy? I really doubt that he has done so since he was elected. Any way to find out?
Nahh....let 'em find out the hard way.
I did think it was funny this week when they talked about Edwards being in town for "events" for the next four days; of course, most people KNOW he's never here.
And those "events" turned out to ALL be fund raisers. HAR.
What in the world can be said that they haven't been saying against the truth these many years?
The only response they have or would allow themselves to use is the same old putrefying and stinking mantra, class warfare!
Daschle like any parasite is constantly weaseling around trying to find fault with all the President is doing or attempting to do and like any parasite is depending upon the host to furnish sustenance to continue his destructive existence.
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