How the GOP gets away with it

How the GOP gets away with it
It's pretty simple: They repeat the same thing over and over until everyone gets tired of correcting them
By Gene Lyons


Has the Republican Party gone completely off into Cloud-Cuckoo-Land, or have its leading spokesmen simply decided to mimic the party's entertainment wing: trusting its loyal audience to believe even the most brazen falsehoods, and, equally important, to remember nothing?

snip//

Specifically, McConnell came up with the "bailout" fiction immediately after meeting with Wall Street high-rollers who a) want to keep placing risk-free bets with other people's money; and b) certainly don't want to pay for what amounts to bankruptcy insurance. Sympathetic to the McDuck point of view, McConnell evidently figures that if he can stall the bill for a while, he can get Uncle Scrooge (and eventually himself) a better deal.

Blogger Matt Yglesias fears that such tactics do nothing but work. "True or false," he writes, "the overwhelming evidence is that the media gets bored with these fact checks very quickly and that if you just put your head down and charge forward, you come out a couple of weeks later back into 'he said, she said' territory. The only real test for whether or not lying works is whether or not you can bring your ideological fellow travelers along. Will Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck echo your line? Will the Weekly Standard and National Review? Will the bulk of your legislative caucus? The answers are yes, yes, and yes."

Actually, we're already there. Just watch. Virtually every TV report on the financial-regulation bill you see will feature a sound bite from McConnell, who'll continue to shill for Citibank and Goldman Sachs while pretending to defend the little guy. Bailout, bailout, bailout. The fact that he's engaging in pure doublespeak is highly unlikely to be mentioned. Instead, you'll likely see a snippet from a Democrat making the opposite claim. For an awful lot of viewers, that's like flipping a coin.

For Fox News viewers and Limbaugh listeners, it's actually easier than that. Conditioned by decades of propaganda about liberal media bias, many react with overt hostility to any and all information from other sources. I must get 50 angry e-mails a week calling me a liar for citing some easily verifiable fact at odds with right-wing doctrine.

more...

http://www.salon.com/news/bank_reform/index.html?story=/opinion/feature/2010/04/28/how_gop_gets_away_with_it

This hit us when watching the Frontline on vaccines. Once people put out YouTubes with faked cases or mis-truths, that's it - a significant portion of the population will believe the lie instead of any scientifically-backed truth. One of our failings as human beings....inability to critically think.

stuff, when members of congress actually spoke their minds. In at least one instance, that led to a violent confrontation w/a Congressman and a Senator on the Senate floor.

What happened was that the honesty of the institutions changed radically, and when one adds a complacent media, (all aspects of the media, print, radio, TV, etc), the recipe is in for disaster. The decorum of both Houses, but particularly the Senate, requires, "niceties", produced theater instead of a legitimate legislative body. I yearn for the day when a D stands up, and calmly states to Grassley or McConnell, "You know, you are full of shit." No need to be wild about about it, no reason to get all "uppity", just state a fact, and then listen to the wailing and gnashing of teeth as the opposition goes into a tailspin.

Grassley and his "Death Panel" crap...just think of this, another Senator standing up and saying, "Senator, you are an idiot, and you are full of shit. I know it, my colleagues know it, and it's about time you realized it. You sir, are an embarrassment and should just sit down and shut up until you come to grips with the truth."

I suspect however, I'll be ice skating in hell long before that happens...:D

it's like they were in the room...waiting...based on previous experience...:rofl:

one for rain and one for eggs.

doubt if it will get through the censors though...:D

I'm one of the 28 "pending"...:rofl:

Think about it, in any job you have. If you had an employee, a subcontractor, or just a general source of information that proved itself to be unreliable, especially after that got exposed to your customer, would you let that person or source near your customer again?

But the news shows, the news in general, and to a greater extent the newspapers and magazines will continue to use sources and commentators that engage in these repeated falsehoods. Who would hire a Rove to be a source for anything? The man is a documented serial liar. He lied to Bush, he lied to McClellan and yet he's put on ABC or Fox as a commentator. Why would anything proporting to sell news in any form accept information from such "tainted" sources without extensive fact checks or corroboration from a "trustworthy" source.

Read Cronkites book. There was a day that the newspapers HATED getting any detail wrong. He cut his teeth as a young "reporter" being sent to fires to get the basic information. He'd catch hell if the address was wrong, the street name was spelled incorrectly, the correct owner was mis-identified. As such, he was wary about from whom he'd accept info, and he'd ALWAYS check them anyway. Ya think THAT goes on anymore?

to push our national discourse to the Right. Calling the media too liberal is the technique known as "playing the ref"-- accuse them of being too liberal and they'll bend over backward to prove they are not.

But that's just one part of an intense campaign on many levels, funded by right wing billionaires.

We used to have many more broadcast media companies. Now they are conglomerated into conservative hands. Yet the cynical Right still pushes the liberal media lie because as the article above mentions, it gets people to dismiss reporters or others who insist on presenting verifiable facts that contradict the right wing dogma of the week.

“The most brilliant propagandist technique will yield no success unless one fundamental principle is borne in mind constantly - it must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over."

http://thinkexist.com/quotation/-if_you_tell_a_lie_big_enough_and_keep_repeating/345877.html

Success is the important thing. Propaganda is not a matter for average minds, but rather a matter for practitioners. It is not supposed to be lovely or theoretically correct. I do not care if I give wonderful, aesthetically elegant speeches, or speak so that women cry. The point of a political speech is to persuade people of what we think right. I speak differently in the provinces than I do in Berlin, and when I speak in Bayreuth, I say different things than I say in the Pharus Hall. That is a matter of practice, not of theory. We do not want to be a movement of a few straw brains, but rather a movement that can conquer the broad masses. Propaganda should be popular, not intellectually pleasing. It is not the task of propaganda to discover intellectual truths.

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Joseph_Goebbels

It seems that it is too easy for the Dems to ask for "bipartisanship" when the opposition continues to spread their vile and vitriolic rhetoric in any medium they can find. On the air and in front of the camera, the republicans can bully us, shout us down and keep on yelling until the show is over.

And the viewers learn that the RW message is the strongest one--especially those tinged with racism and oppression.

That's why the Dems (and liberals in general) must put on the boxing gloves and the brass knuckles and fight back with our own messages. Whenever the GOP release another lie, fight back swiftly and fight back hard instead of preaching "togetherness" with our enemies.

The republicans do not want to be friends with us. They want to conquer us and everyone else for all the marbles.

Knowledge is split by different perspectives, and by the open mindedness that comes from allowing that different facts could come along at any moment to contradict prior knowledge.

Beliefs are chosen, and work on the binary system. You either believe or don't believe whatever mantra Hannity, Rush, etc. repeats each day. Belief doesn't flip-flop. One of our flaws as humans is that people who seem absolute in their confidence gain more followers than open-minded academics.

We have to realize that the great debate is being gamed, and reality is being swept under the rug.