We Lose Because We’re No Damn Good At This Stuff
I subscribe to a few rightwing things, mainly to keep up with some crazy Republican Texans who keep creeping back into the mainstream GOP.
GOPUSA is one of my favorites. It is run by a prissy little man named Bobby Eberle, who used to be Vice Chair of the Texas GOP, and who rants about gays, Obama, gays, abortion, gays, guns, gays, how African Americans have it so easy, and gays from his very ungay column called, The Loft.
The problem, as I see it, is that we Democrats cannot scare people properly.
You wanna be scared? Hell, these people can scare you.
Here’s today’s email from GOPUSA. You may have to click the little one see the big one.
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Here’s the link. It’s loud so you might need to turn down the sound.
This link will make you a leader in your community when the USA collapses. And we have the Four Horsemen of the Food Apocalypse, zombies, Hitler and worst of all — The Obama.
The fun part comes when you try to close the window. You get a special message asking if you know what the hell you’re doing. Click YES and it finally, thank you Sweet Jesus, goes away.
We need to learn to scare people.
Ted Cruz is a zombie who has sold your children to Canada. Ron Paul will take away your guns and replace them with Ayn Rand books. Marco Rubio thinks he’s Jesus and will force you to bow down when he walks by. Rick Perry is really super smart and is just pretending to be dumb until he takes over and becomes Einstein Rick and makes you learn algebra.
Y’all, we gotta get good at this stuff because apparently white people are wimps.
Read FAHRENHEIT 451; now THAT will scare you. Book owners have to hide their books in cooling vents and go hide out in the woods along with other book readers. You think the money hidden under our mattresses will still be worth anything when his version of End Times comes along? We don’t have guns and don’t intend to get them. I still think homemade cookies are a better weapon.
1Sorry Juanita–I don’t think its in most liberal’s DNA to freak people out. Luckily, the GOP scares the hell out of everybody just by being themselves— so they do the job for us just fine.
2I very much admire your ability to read and listen to the loons. I have tried in the past – Limbaugh, Hannity, RedState, Fox Nation, et al, but my blood pressure simply cannot handle their outlandish (I’m tryin’ to be nice here) rhetoric that has no connection with reality or common sense. So, I will continue to rely on good folks like yourself, and the half dozen or so sites I read daily, to keep me informed about the uninformed right. Most of your readers probably are familiar with the following, but maybe not all. I particularly enjoy Ed Kilgore (http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/), Steve Benen (http://maddowblog.msnbc.com/), and, of course, Media Matters. There are others, but these, along with Juanita Jean, are my daily go to sources for accurate info concerning the shenanigans of the self-righteous right.
3Sorry, can’t tolerate the malarkey on that “link” for even 30 seconds. I’m afraid I may toss my laptop through the window. I’d really hate to replace that window.
4Dangit…..I made it all the way to the end and it never offered to double the offer for only postage and handling.
5BUSINESS ALERT doesn’t even mention its handmaiden, the AMERICAN LEGISLATIVE EXCHANGE COUNCIL which scares me plenty. When everyone that’s anyone drops out of it, what group do you think will replace it?
6So much dis- and misinformation, so little time. I had to laugh when the ad was talking about Mexico but the signs in the photo were written in Portuguese. When the 18 months are up and the world as we know it hasn’t ended, will this be attributable to an error in calculation like when some religious nut predicts the end of the world and it doesn’t happen? Sigh.
7No mention of global warning,but unions are blamed for killing twinkies. Twinkies are the new survival foods.
8I wonder what will happen in 2016 when the crazzzies transition their fear mongering messages from a Kenyan Born Socialist Communist Muslim Anti-Christ to Hillary. They’ve be beating on her for decades now. There’s nothing new there.
I think the TEAGOP originality competition in the next election will be quite the letdown for everyone. Especially late night comedians and TEAGOP emergency email donation requests.
9How I love to click on this site and read your never ending humor and patience with the idiots in the GOP, I always manage a chuckle.
10The trouble is when I read other sites it just makes me sad, the hate, racism and never ending lies about this president.
So please keep up the good work!
Sick Cheney learned early that it is much easier to control a population if they are afraid, and the Republican party has cultivated that meme to an extreme. People cannot maintain a high level of fear for a long time before going crazy, and that’s what the Republican party is attempting. But most of can see through the fearmongering and laugh at their attempts. Ultimately, nobody will take the fearmongers seriously. Remember the story “The Boy Who Cried Wolf”?
1130 Years ago I was a regular weekend women’s clinic escort. The anti-choice mob outside the clinic routinely screamed crazy crazy talk which they toned down a bit if a police officer appeared.
“Tell the officer what you were telling us about the demons,” one of us would suggest. But they were temporarily silent on that subject.
Now I’m reading and hearing the same madhouse crazy stuff the protesters knew would undermine their credibility. And I’m hearing it shouted from state houses and Congress.
12The thing is that there are so many things we informed have to be really, really scared of: not having health insurance at a time when we have corrupted the Earth so badly that it is exacting revenge upon us; oil spills and pipeline breaks; human-encouraged weather change; engineered food; bee kill-offs; fracking; disappearance of polar ice; insane, unbalanced people with semi-automatic weapons; diminution of civil liberties in the US; corporate control of our government… need I go on? I don’t quite agree that we sane people don’t know how to frighten people, we frighten the hell outta me! The problem seems to be that only sane people LISTEN to the horrors that are out there.
13I’ve become convinced that there has to be some kind of genetic link for the levels of insanity being displayed by the GOP of late. Seriously. I mean, normal people can’t sustain the sheer levels of crazy and hate (or just crazy hate) that these folks have shown now for the last 5 years running, and in some cases for 10 years or more. A normal person would have mentally burned out trying to stay at the levels I’ve seen some of the crazy folks at.
Yet these people are voting equally crazy folks into office, eventually making you wonder if the country is going off the deep end at the rate the crazies are taking over.
14“Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to do the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and for exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.”
15—- Hermann Goering, Nuremberg Trial, 1946
Ok Rhea, that worked. Quoting any of Hitler’s propaganda machine minions scares me – especially since a lot of that crapola seems to be heard around these parts lately!
16I appreciate Juanita Jean’s point that we need to learn to use some of the right-wing’s methods of communication. Back in the early 1970’s, I and a few other wild-eyed feminists put together a right-wing pro-ERA flyer. In addition to having lots of laughs writing it, we learned a bit about how that rhetoric works. Best of all, we sowed some confusion among the enemy.
17Are you sure this guy isn’t a liberal in crazy clothing? Ignore the scary zombie hordes and evil FEMA rhetoric, and there’s all that lefty talk about commodities speculators and climate change as a threat (and they sure are) … not to mention learning from Palestianians and Argentines. Maybe the tin foil hat act is for real, but it is a pretty sneaky way of making even the craziest of the crazies learn to “act locally and think globally” .
18Sorry, folks. This may take a while.
My brother-in-law, Jimmy, died of lung cancer in 2001 one week after I moved to FL to help my sister who was care-giving. I miss him. This is not about him as much as what he left behind, mainly this — If a person was blowing smoke out of his butt about politics, Jimmy would say: “You’re full of sh*t, and here’s why….”. He didn’t mince words and he definitely knew what he was talking about. His favorite channel on cable was C-span. Even when he napped it was on!
We don’t have to scare people and we shouldn’t. We have to let them know that when someone tries to scare you it’s because they think you’re dumb and easy to scare. Now there’s a wake-up call!
We’ve been too polite for too long. We need to get LOUD! We have the facts on our side. Every tactic the RWNJ’s use (which is mostly LIE. ALOT.) can be undermined with the truth. They throw a bunch of bull out there? Fine! Make them back it up with facts! Force them to answer questions: How? When? Why? Our “liberal” media doesn’t want to do it so we have to.
A relation of mine does not like confrontation. He refuses to “sink to their level”. I’ve told him: Hell with that! If someone’s being rude or disrespectful or just plain full of it I will tell them to their face that they’re a jerk and why!
JJ, love what you do. You are the vanguard of truth in a world of users and liars. Keep doing it. I intend to.
19Gosh, I remember the TV ad for Barry Goldwater, the one of the little girl plucking petals off a daisy. It flopped! People found it so over the top that they skittered away from Barry and elected a Democratic President.
See, that’s actually the pay-off in such ads. Their appeal is so damn limited cuz of the content and the way the content is presented. Everybody has their gag level and such ads really hit where most people have theirs.
20Jaunita, I think the Republicans have the “White cower movement” all sewn up.
21“I’ve become convinced that there has to be some kind of genetic link for the levels of insanity being displayed by the GOP of late. Seriously. I mean, normal people can’t sustain the sheer levels of crazy and hate (or just crazy hate) that these folks have shown now for the last 5 years running, and in some cases for 10 years or more.”
Lead. For a long time, while leaded gas was spewing tons of lead into the air every day. it did a lot of damage. It may have produced a great amount of criminality, and I have a feeling it’s got something to do with the character and emotional defects which produce today’s “conservatism”.
22I make sure to get my MDR of irony every day, but leave lead alone.
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