(With apologies to our porcine friends who also happen to suck scum, but don’t have much influence on the electorate.}
While some readers may chastise me for gross understatement in the title, and I take their point, I decided to keep this clean, or as clean as you can when describing the contents of the sole working Port-O-Potty on free chili and beer night at a baseball game.
“[A]sk a question in the way that you get the right answer.”
– Frank Luntz on his ‘fair and balanced’ polling methods.
What makes Republican word-whacker Frank Luntz my target is that he is an intentional and dedicated deceiver of the public, smart enough to know full well what he’s doing, but blithely willing to trot out his wares — borrowed from the misuse of modern psychological techniques to sell the gullible what they don’t need joined with a carnival conman’s shell game pitch — for the temporary benefit of his bank account, while his country slides into a wreckage of divisiveness and debt. If you’d like to find the home base for the decimation of our public speech into ignorant, inflamed, fearful, flag-draped hatred; the revision of our history into a reeking bonanza of selfish suicidal capitalism, evangelical Christian crapola and nasty neoconservative warhawk bilge; and the reduction of our political discourse into so much overheated, oversimplified, covertly racist, sound-bite slag, you can point to three names: the late Lee Atwater, Karl Rove, and the lesser-known, but every bit as important, Frank Luntz as the authors of the meltdown in progress.
“Luntz is glibly amoral, worrying only about whether language has the right effect, not whether it’s true.”
– Steven Poole, commenting on Luntz’s book “Words That Work” in The Guardian (UK), July 21, 2007.
It was Frank’s notion to rename a bill allowing more pollution as the ‘Clean Air Act’; it was Luntz who told the GOP to re-label estate taxes as ‘death taxes’ so that the wealthy paid less while the rest of us took up the slack; it was his demented mind that connected Iraq to 9/11 and instructed Republican pols to always preface any mention of the failed Iraq incursion with ’9/11 changed everything’; behind nearly every current and past GOP talking point, endlessly repeated in the Right-Wing Echo Chamber, you’ll find Frank’s pasty round face, tirelessly choosing just the right words to convince a malleable faction of the American public to eat corporate Republican turds and think it’s prime rib.
The Conservapedia Delusion of Andrew Schafly
As Stephen Colbert remarked during a speech at the 2006 White House Correspondents Dinner at which a visibly uncomfortable ‘President’ Junior Bush was on the dais, “Reality has a well-known liberal bias.”
To counter that perceived ‘bias’ at Wikipedia, Eagle Forum nutcase Phyllis Schafly’s kid, Andrew, mounted a dimwitted Christopublican-Free Market-Literal Bible site in 2006 to spread the neoconservative message with bile-laced faith-based delusion, the same delusion that’s damn near destroyed the country, and may succeed in tearing it apart yet. But, hilariously enough, even the Bible as it’s written is not conservative enough for raggedy Andy – he actually launched a ‘Conservative Bible Project’ to rewrite those portions he considers too ‘liberal.’ (One would guess that would be any passage expressing kindness for the homeless and poor, berating the rich and telling them to give their possessions away, or asking the reader to forgive one’s enemies and renounce the judging of others.)
Here, Bob Carroll of the Skeptic’s Dictionary drags the little Liar-For-Jesus and his buncombe-packed ‘encyclopedia’ over the glowing hot coals of rationality:
While I’m not necessarily an atheist – deeply cynical agnostic is more like it — and tend to agree with J.B.S. Haldane’s quote: “Now, my suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.… I suspect that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of, in any philosophy,” I admire Bob Carroll and his Skeptic’s Dictionary for attempting to bring some needed rational and scientific enlightenment to a country that’s drowning in revisionist history, goofball religious gullibility, and pure idiotic tripe.