Right wing leader said they must be willing to be obnoxious.

madfloridian

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Tue Dec-04-07 02:52 PM
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Right wing leader said they must be willing to be obnoxious.

When the Republicans determined to have their permanent majority, they decided being nice was not going to work. They became ruthless.

To combat their tactics, still going on today...our Democrats will have to be tough and dare to be almost ruthless as well. The soft kind of talk we are hearing from them is not going to get the job done.

Several years ago Eric Heubeck set forth a new program which was posted at Paul Weyrich's Free Congress Foundation. It was called:

A Program for the New Traditionalist Movement

It is still posted at Yurica Report, but the other archives seem to be missing it. If you read what Heubeck and Weyrich wrote about their new plans... you see ruthlessness.

Our movement must be highly provocative. The thing we have most to fear is that we will be ignored.

Cultural conservatives must understand the predicament we are in. We must be willing to take measures that perhaps we would be unwilling to take under different, more ideal circumstances. We will have standards--we will never try to justify dishonesty, destruction of the personal reputation of our opponents, cheating, assault, etc., in the service of victory for our movement. However, we will not consider ourselves above appearing "unseemly" or surrendering some our personal dignity. We must be willing to shake people out of their complacency--which means being obnoxious if the situation requires it--because given the fact that the dominant leftist culture is safely ensconced, complacency only serves the interests of our opponents.

It is not enough to say that conservative philosophy is more sensible than that of the Left. If we leave it at that, we will only attract "sensible" people to our movement. But "sensible" people do not go to the barricades, they do not make great sacrifices for a movement. And the experience of the conservative movement has shown this to be the case. We need more people with fire in the belly, and we need a message that attracts those kinds of people. As Plato said, "madness comes from God, whereas sober sense is merely human."

But that was just the beginning of the fearless tactics they would use. More from Heubeck:

We will maintain a constant barrage of criticism against the Left. We will attack the very legitimacy of the Left. We will not give them a moment's rest. We will endeavor to prove that the Left does not deserve to hold sway over the heart and mind of a single American. We will offer constant reminders that there is an alternative, there is a better way. When people have had enough of the sickness and decay of today's American culture, they will be embraced by and welcomed into the New Traditionalist movement. The rejection of the existing society by the people will thus be accomplished by pushing them and pulling them simultaneously.

We will use guerrilla tactics to undermine the legitimacy of the dominant regime. We will take advantage of every available opportunity to spread the idea that there is something fundamentally wrong with the existing state of affairs. For example, we could have every member of the movement put a bumper sticker on his car that says something to the effect of "Public Education is Rotten; Homeschool Your Kids." This will change nobody's mind immediately; no one will choose to stop sending his children to public schools immediately after seeing such a bumper sticker; but it will raise awareness and consciousness that there is a problem. Most of all, it will contribute to a vague sense of uneasiness and dissatisfaction with existing society. We need this if we hope to start picking people off and bringing them over to our side. We need to break down before we can build up. We must first clear away the flotsam of a decayed culture.

Not surprisingly, Karl Rove is closely allied with this group of people. This is from a Time Magazine article in 2001.

The Bush administration is apparently quite cozy with Weyrich. This quote from a Time magazine article is apropos, Time Magazine wrote this:

"Each Wednesday Rove dispatches a top administration official to attend the regular conservative-coalition lunches held at Paul Weyrich's Free Congress Foundation. When activists call his office with a problem, Rove doesn't pass them off to an aide. He often responds himself. When Weyrich heard a few weeks ago that Bush's budget slashed funding for a favorite project called the Police Corps, which gives scholarships and training to police cadets, he complained to the White House. To Weyrich's surprise, Rove called back. �We've taken care of it,� Rove said. �The problem is solved.� Weyrich, who says his memos to the Reagan and Bush Sr. White Houses were rarely read, was impressed. �That,� he gushes, �is what it means to have friends in the White House.�

Sunday, Apr. 22, 2001
The Busiest Man in the White House
BY JAMES CARNEY AND JOHN F. DICKERSON
http://www.time.com/time/nation/printout/0,8816,107219,00.html

Rove has been continuing this tactics of humiliation, vitriol, and anger.

The GOP's "controlled controversy"...outrageous enough to make us angry. Deliberate.

Image courtesy of Salon graphics

Yet Blackwell's foundation, the Leadership Institute, is not a Republican organization. It's a nonpartisan 501(c)(3) charity, drawing the overwhelming majority of its $9.1 million annual budget from tax-deductible donations. Despite its legally required "neutrality," the institute is one of the best investments the conservative movement has ever made. Its walls are plastered with framed headshots of former students -- hundreds of state and local legislators sprinkled with smiling members of the U.S. Congress, and even the perky faces of two recently crowned Miss Americas. Thirty-five years ago, Blackwell dispatched a particularly promising 17-year-old pupil named Karl Rove to run a youth campaign in Illinois; Jeff Gannon, a far less impressive student, attended the Leadership Institute's Broadcast Journalism School.

......."The Leadership Institute teaches the same principle. Controlled controversy -- making your point in a manner so bombastic that your opponents blow their cool -- is a Blackwell specialty. Before the 2004 Republican Convention, the conservative elder personally went to a drugstore and bought little pink heart stickers, bandages and purple nail polish. At home, he made the "Purple Heart Band-Aids" that he later distributed in Madison Square Garden to mock John Kerry's war wounds. From Blackwell's perspective, the Kerry camp's outrage at the gag was a tactical disaster. Democratic Party chairman Terry McAuliffe, Blackwell says, kept the story alive for days by "running around like a chicken with its head cut off."

It is not easy to beat a party that stoops to this level. It is not easy to beat a party led by a president who says he will keep on talking about Iran just like he has....facts don't matter to him at all.

The only way to combat such tactics is to understand them, study them, acknowledge and make public the use of them by the other party. Publicize it, speak out about it. Stop being fearful to let our powerful voices on TV....stop apologizing when the other side attacks them. Quit putting the wishy washy folks on the air.

They have no intention of being nice. They will use their "controlled controversy" to anger us, to appear obnoxious, they will do what they have to do to win.