November 26, 2009
November 25, 2009
November 24, 2009
November 23, 2009
November 22, 2009
November 21, 2009
The Tattlesnake – Frank Luntz is a Scum-Sucking Pig Edition
(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.
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November 20, 2009
November 19, 2009
November 17, 2009
The Tattlesnake – Palin: the GOPs Political Poison Pill Edition
“Her agenda was not necessarily to show me in the best light.”
– Sarah Palin to Oprah Winfrey, complaining about Katie Couric’s 2008 interview that revealed her to be an uninformed pageant sash, as quoted at NBC’s Today Show website, Nov. 16, 2009.
As this quote shows, Sarah Palin still has no idea what the role of the news media is in a Jeffersonian democracy, apparently believing that reporters should have the ‘agenda’ of lobbing affable Wiffle balls that make her look good rather than exposing a candidate’s fitness for office. That she was so vexed by Couric’s mild inquiries – asking her what she reads, for instance, becoming in Palin’s mind a ‘gotcha’ question without parallel – and then whining to Oprah that she had just been ‘pumped up’ by walking a rope line of enthusiastic followers only to encounter the bummerooski of Katie the ‘Perky One’ with microphone and camera ready to pounce on her with school-test interrogations suited to a spiteful teacher – well, it was just too much to bear!
This, then, is the Beauty Pageant Contestant (BPC) view of the world; you memorize certain attractive-sounding answers, such as advocating world peace or groceries for the hungry, and it’s not fair of the judges to delve into what particular set of policies you would promote to achieve those goals. Isn’t it enough that you have shown yourself to be a really good caring ‘people person’ by just desiring such cures for the world’s ills?
In the same way, Palin thought it was sufficient that she merely presented herself as informed on a daily basis by newspapers and magazines without actually having to bother to learn some by name or talk knowledgeably about their contents. Isn’t it enough that she said she reads all that intellectual stuff, for Pete’s sake? Hey, Real America doesn’t care – they’re too busy shooting wolves from circling Cessnas.
She showed a similar BPC understanding of the law in the campaign of 2008 when she failed to come up with any Supreme Court decision other than Roe v. Wade that entered her memory – but, then, come on — a real leader can always call on her staff to review such inane details for her, as befits a princess with a yen for higher office, such as Ms. Vice President of America.
As for calling Couric ‘The Perky One’ – the giddy Sarah often gives irony a hernia from too much stress, but this was an entry worthy of an Olympic record.
The late Kurt Vonnegut would have heartily appreciated the alternately peevishly snippy and wholesome Hockey-Mom vacuity of Sarah Palin. The Tattler can picture him with his kindly grin, the world-weary eyes twinkling in satirical amusement, a Pall Mall with a droopy ash poised in mid-air, observing one of his more incongruous characters come to life and dominating the American political landscape – always slightly absurd, now keeled over into open farce — promulgated by a national news media that is no longer paid to tell the difference.
For incongruity is the Barracuda’s calling card – she supports the infallible efficacy of sexual abstinence for teens while her own 16-year-old daughter swells in unwed pregnancy; she bleats about clean government while papering over her own administration’s manifold corruptions; she assaults small-minded cruelty while delivering velvet-gloved blows to those who dare criticize her; she talks of lofty Christian ideals while she’s perpetually immersed in petty paybacks; she decries government bailouts while the citizens of her home state accept nearly twice as much in federal money than they pay in taxes; she insinuates darkly of the evils of socialism and nationalization while Alaska annually divides its energy wealth equally among its inhabitants; she natters on about responsibility while refusing to own up to her own mistakes; she deplores politicians abusing their power while she used her office to settle personal scores; she hails freedom while sentencing other members of her gender to do without it; she supports the troops while wanting to prolong their agony in lost wars; she respects tough people who stay in the race, and then quits halfway through her stint as Alaska’s governor when either her ambition or her malfeasance, or both, catch up with her. Most of all, she admires honesty while practicing its opposite, either the result of intentional deception or the BPC’s natural tendency to slap sweet frosting on the ugly realities of human existence, especially when those realities are embedded in one’s own character.
The Tattlesnake – Some Things Not to Be Thankful For Edition
Or, What a Curmudgeon Does on Thanksgiving
Major minor aggravations that ‘wear on the mind and make you old before your time.’
– These people who leave comments on various websites claiming they’ve been to teabag rallies and never once saw anyone who was a racist. Really? Not even a single racist? This is just as incredible as those who say there’s not a Republican in the land who hates Obama because he’s black — nope, it’s all about his policies, and that’s why we’re waving this here Confederate flag.
– The Obama/Hitler, Obama/Stalin comparisons. Seriously, think about this for a minute, paranoid teabaggers: If Obama were really anything like Hitler or Stalin, Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Michael Savage, et al, would all be off the air. For that matter, you wouldn’t be listening to crazy Michele Bachmann at a teabag rally, because government troops would have closed down the event long before she had a chance to speak. In fact, there wouldn’t be any teabag rallies and Bachmann and her GOP ilk would be in jail for treason by now, if not executed. Of all the Obama smears invented by the fringe right, this is, along with the Birther nonsense, the most ludicrous and easiest to disprove.
– Then there are the good Christopublicans praying for Obama’s death or bodily harm. Saved by Jesus were you, you hateful little twit? Did you ever bother to read what the man you worship is quoted as saying about those who judge others, engage in hypocrisy, and misuse his name for spite and revenge or their own advantage? Hint: It’s all in the first four books of the New Testament.
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