Imitation is the sincerest flattery, so I thank the author of this note posted at Moon Griffon’s web site, although I’m not sure whether this blog qualifies me as a member of the “right-wing destruction machine” because, as readers know, it focuses on policy and fact, not a “goal of personal ruin through vicious attack politics.”
(However, it doesn’t seem to work the other way. Since I started this blog mere months ago, I am told that more than one disgruntled person with some power in politics has gone complaining to my public university employer, all over postings that often get fewer than 100 hits a day, and a university representative has made certain inappropriate requests regarding modification of material on this university-unrelated blog. But this is a story for another time.)
Even if this note were a forgery it captures perfectly the zeitgeist/kultursmog of establishment political elites in Louisiana, of the indignance that their divine right to rule be questioned. Regardless, if indeed there is some kind of move afoot to create a Democrat/Blanco/Landrieu etc. spin machine on the web designed to “highlight their inconsistencies, or deconstruct their policies and reframe them to our advantage, in our own language … [o]r we point out where they’re engaged in folly or mendacity or just plain old greed or meanness,” it largely will fail, mainly because this strategy totally does not understand what those of us who have raised their ire are trying to do.
For one thing, I use fact and logic in my postings to demonstrate the fundamental errors Democrats have in their guiding political philosophy (if it can be called that) or the conclusions they draw from selective use of information. The Democrat left does not understand this because they cannot bring themselves to admit that their views are, as proven by events, bankrupt, and long since have been replaced by a politics of personal, rather than community, interest, based on the wielding or power rather than doing the right thing. Thus, because they now resort themselves to a strategy of “personal ruin through vicious attack politics” in the absence of any valid ideology, they mistakenly assume all others do as well.
In short, they have disarmed themselves intellectually and thinking, reasoning persons realize this and thus gravitate to the arguments myself and others present. Personally, I welcome any attempt to do what the memo says. I challenge them to find “inconsistencies … folly or mendacity or just plain old greed or meanness” in what I write; I urge them to try to “deconstruct” and “reframe” because, by their self-handicapping, the reasonable person easily sees the vacuity of their arguments. By the very nature of the fundamental differences between views, mine based on truth, reason, and coherence, and theirs, unmitigated emotion without fact or logic to substantiate except the notion that they want to take what they think is theirs from those who have genuinely earned it, they surrender in the battle of ideas.
The memo’s concern for anonymity also is illustrative. I freely admit who I am (indeed, to the endangerment of my career) and what my ideas are. The memo writer recognizes the fraud that his allies’ ideas are and so counsels to keep the identities and agendas of the efforts contributors as secret as possible. This is an obvious admission of the weakness of their arguments.
Finally, while the idea of trying to use humor is a winner, it’s clear the writer does not understand it. The idea of calling their masterminds behind the effort the “Working Group” is itself funny, but surely not in the way he intended. Because, when was the last time you could honestly say the liberal Democrat agenda actually championed the “working man?” These people seek to take more and more of the “working man’s” resources through higher and higher taxes and fees, strive to restrict his liberties more and more through government regulation of the crassest kind, and seek to disempower him through disinformation – the thing I try in my postings to correct. For ultimately, if I tell one side of the story and they tell another, what really burns them up is, by definition, my side is more persuasive. Which is why they must adopt, as the writer urges, this strategy of projecting what they falsely see in their opponents to what they do.
So, let’s bring it on! And to make it easier to distinguish the sides involved, if the defenders of the status quo, the ones how have helped Louisiana into the fiscal, ethically-challenged mess that we are in want to call themselves the “Working Group,” then I’ll gladly take the appellation that they would give to those like me – the “Serfs.” Because that’s how they think of us, here to serve them as they pursue their political careers and any enrichment they see themselves worthy of accruing as a result of that activity – at our expense, of course. This “knighted” and “royal” classes in reality have it all backwards, and, as long as people like me, Moon Griffon, C.B. Forgotston, and others many of whom appear on the left-hand side of this page continue to point out this highly inconvenient fact, they are going to try to distract people from a debate on the issues because, frankly, they think you’re too stupid to know any better.
At present we may be Serfs in Louisiana, but one thing we are not is stupid.
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