Response to GatorLarry (Reply #27)
Wed Nov 21, 2012, 06:11 PM
calimary (37,535 posts)
57. Welcome to DU, GatorLarry!
Yes. This is one giant machine. Very well-researched, very well-funded. And they do coordinate.
The bad guys - koch brothers and US Chamber and the shel adelsons and the like write the checks. They fund "think tanks" and "foundations" that were set up to develop and disseminate wrong-wing propaganda, design this wonderful alternate-reality world of theirs, and then talent-hunt, develop, and groom mouthpieces to go out and sell it in the media, whether it's Pox Noise, or CNN or ABC News or NBC or CBS, The "700 Club," or whatever. These are the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, the Eagle Forum, the Family Research Council, the American Enterprise Institute - there are HUNDREDS of them by now. These are the foundational building blocks - the viper pits where the eggs are laid and the reptile-brain babies are hatched, fed, nurtured, and taught how to crawl and walk and fly.
That funding also supports "authors" like ann coulter, and of course, limbaugh and that-guy-whose-name-rhymes-with-Vanity and glenn beck and all these other assholes, providing them entree into their own publishing houses like Regnery Publishing and offshoots of Random House and other established imprints. Those authors crank out crank books full of nothing but shit, and then the same major funding sources buy truckloads of them, and those bulk buys then qualify them as best-selling authors. I remember when limbaugh had a TV show and his whole set was filled with stacks of his books. There was literally a WALL of books that stretched across his entire set. Well, your foundations or sponsors or wealthy sugar daddies buy those up and suddenly you've got thousands of sales and the New York Times puts you on its bestseller list. It's often noted as a "bulk buy," but it's still a buy.
Then those authors are encouraged to fan out over the talk show landscape, especially all those friendly talk and hate-radio shows - and get exposure, with their "credibility" as best-selling authors. They then start disseminating the shit they wrote to mass markets, while at the same time, they're writing columns for many friendly newspapers - mostly owned by the same handful of CONservative corporations, and of course they're frequent guests on "Meet the Press" and "Face the Nation" and other prestigious shows. They say things that friendly media pick up to do follow-up stories on, the following morning, and the talking points are allowed to spread.
These people are VERY media-savvy. Public-opinion mavens like frank luntz and other word-crunchers do focus-group testing on buzz phrases and campaign slogans and special word combinations and talking points, and then those are blast-faxed and emailed and texted and otherwise transmitted to all their operatives all over the media. Notice how at certain times, ALL the talking heads and talk show guests and guest commentators - ALL say the same things, same wording, same phraseology? Watch for it. I remember when all the "recruits" were saying the same "well, they counted, and then they counted again, and then they counted a third time..." during Selection 2000 when they were trying to stop the vote count so bush2 would win. Notice how every "good" entity is a "job-creating fill-in-the-blank-here"? And every bad entity is a "job-killing fill-in-the-blank-here"? Notice how you've started hearing people parrotting "makers and takers"? All those phrases and slogans and quick-hit catchy-as-hell bumper-sticker fodder start popping up on the radio, on cable and conventional TV, in print, online, at about the same time. And now, of course, they've got a whole frickin' cable NETWORK parrotting this same crap 24/7 to the angry old resentful white crank demographic.
Notice how all the same wording is being used by multiple different people from the Senate to the talk shows, criticizing Susan Rice? Notice how so many of them had the same pull-the-string-and-Chatty-Cathy-speaks stuff in criticizing President Obama, defending paul ryan, defending their policies, defending all kinds of crap, attacking on Benghazi, etc etc etc. Notice the same sentences coming out of their mouths all the time? Notice how when they're asked a point-blank question that's meant to rattle their conventional wisdom, they ALWAYS detour off to the talking points? I used to marvel at the way, whenever somebody brought up the divisions over a woman's right to choose - whoever wanted to take that right away would always start blabbing away about how "well, this is a VERY SERIOUS PROBLEM, and blah-blah-blah..." with a bunch of smoke and mirrors and fast talk that says NOTHING. But they'd never actually answer the question. Notice how their precious little token Latino, marco rubio, couldn't give a straight answer to the simple, fact-based question - "how old is the Earth?" He rattled on for several minutes in this convoluted verbal mess about how he's no scientist and well there's this idea and that idea and blah-blah-blah until the untrained ear starts drowning in that morass of words and you sort of get lost and forget and ... "now my next question is..." THIS IS ALL DESIGNED. THIS IS ALL DELIBERATE. It's TESTED, HOMOGENIZED, PROCESSED, AND PLANTED.
You've seen in this past election cycle how they even went so far as to set up their own polling people. "Unskewed Polls" is actually some asshole on the internet in his mom's basement artificially inflating GOP voter numbers so they "reflect more accurately" the pool of voters. HAS NO BASIS IN FACT!!!!! And for many, his miscreant "polling company" was covered as news and included in the same lists with PPP, Rasmussen, Gallup, Quinnipiac, and Nate Silver. And it was all PRETEND. MADE UP. BASED ON NOTHING!!!! Nothing but pure fantasy, with NO bearing on the real world, or facts, or even the most basic truths. They've sold us "trickle-down" this way for years. When objections are made and evidence or credible studies or other information is presented that disproves the point they're trying to drive home, they challenge and question and criticize the sources of that information and say they're bogus or biased or - "well OUR information says the opposite." There was this line in the movie "Network" where Robert Duvall says "you get your psychiatrists, I'll get mine." In the dispute over global warming, they dig up their own cockamamie "scientists" who'll say what they want said, and write papers and dissertations and presentations and op-ed pieces that say what they want said, and then point to that as evidence that THEIR take on global warming is the correct one.
They've spent about 40 years and probably a few trillion dollars by now, building this infrastructure. And it's so solid by now that they swallowed whole and declared as cold-hard-FACT the landslide victory that myth wrongney was going to enjoy, and it was nothing but a fictitious invention. And so many low-information voters are SO damned conditioned by now, that they bought that whole bill o' goods and now they're shell-shocked because they believed their own crap-filled nonsense, since they all live in this imaginary world that says liberals = BAD and CONs = good.
The machinery is really quite awesome and impressive, but it's a house built upon shifting sands rather than firm, solid rock - to use a metaphor they might actually understand. It's really quite sad, and pathetic. And horrifying - when you think how close they've come to taking over. wrongney never should have gotten within 10 points of President Obama. Shows you how many people are still fooled and totally taken in by this long-term snow job. It's a superstorm of the political kind, and it's going to take longer to clean up after - than Hurricane Sandy and Hurricane Katrina combined.
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Replies to this discussion thread
|Mike Daniels||Nov 2012||#3|
|Jackpine Radical||Nov 2012||#8|
Welcome to DU, GatorLarry!
|Surya Gayatri||Nov 2012||#42|
|Andy Stanton||Nov 2012||#39|
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