They’re onto something

NOW-NY released a blistering response to Ted Kennedy’s endorsement of Barack Obama. Just go read it and after you’ve cooled your eyeballs down, come back.

The day the Equal Rights Amendment died, I was sitting at The Point in Pittsburgh at a rally with my precious 5 month old little girl on my back. I thought it was just a minor setback. Jeez, we women are so used to minor setbacks that it becomes almost routine, a part of our lives, the background noise.

But when a high profile liberal senator, member of a presidential dynasty, swoops in to plant defeat in the jaws of a woman’s victory, I get a tad PO’d. If you weren’t born female, you won’t identify with this sensation. But trust me, we know when the guys have gotten together to pow-wow without us and have decided that the prize is too high for us.

It’s too risky.

Our time will come later.

It’s much better for a totally green candidate with waaaaay less experience do the heavy lifting because he has a penis, after all and other men respect that. By golly, that outty of dynamic vascularized tissue just trumps everything, doesn’t it?

Now, many people will point to Caroline Kennedy by his side and say that it’s not a gender issue. But Caroline Kennedy’s father was president. She has a bit of a different take on this whole thing than we do and she was only 6 when he died so her childhood memory is all she has to go on. As for Ted, the possibility that he could live his brothers’ dreams vicariously through Barack is just too irresistable.

Let’s face it: Hillary is more qualified and a harder worker and she just got passed over for promotion. We’ve been here before.

No wonder NOW is on fire.

What did I miss? Everyone drunk already?

The adolescent had an appointment with an educational specialist. It turns out the gifted one may be suffering educational abuse at the hands of her teachers. The Ed Specialist sounded pretty steamed. Why one of the brightest kids in school is being treated like an emergent juvenile delinquent just because her schoolwork is duller than mud is beyond me. But I digress…

Anything new? I am starting the DVD from about 45 minutes behind. I have my Ruby Red Absolut at my side. At what pomt do I skip ahead?

OTOH, it *is* Bush’s LAST SOTU. That’s reason to celebrate right there.

“Trussssst in me…”

Warning! The following post is written by a half-mad, conspiracy theorist.

No, I’m not going near 9/11. You wanna know what happened that day? Go rent United 93 and watch Nova.

I’m going to talk about infiltration of the blogosphere by Republican operatives. Ok, yeah, I’m nuts. Not so much, actually. Think about it. If you were Karl Rove and you wanted to keep Republicans in the WH indefinitely, what is the easiest way to do it? Well, first, you have to take out your competition’s strongest candidate. No matter how you slice it, that’s Hillary Clinton. And the reason she’s the strongest is because she started the race with certain built in advantages. The media is forced to cover her because she is a former first lady, the wife of a popular former president and a woman. She’s the best thing we have to an incumbent. She’s also intelligent, knowledgeable and knows executive branch ins and outs. She’s also had her life turned inside out and all that was ever found were some stray pieces of lint. She is the killer candidate and Karl knows it. Therefore, she must go.

But since the last election, the media has been joined by the lefty blogosphere. Now, the blogs are neonates but the Republicans figured out long ago how to trigger a message cascade through their own top down blogs, in conjunction with their media collaborators. Lefty blogs are a little trickier because they are more democratic. There’s no one person in charge whipping the others into line. There are diverse voices. Nevertheless, they are all united in one goal: kick the republicans out of power.

Hmmm, what to do, what to do. Well, there are at least two main modes of attack. But first, Karl and his droogs would have studied us carefully. Because, we don’t respond well to authoritarian tactics. So, the focus of Karl’s attention would have been the ideas that flipped our triggers. Words like “corporation”. “triangulation”, “lobbyist”. John Edwards campaign has also been doing some online focus group studies. He and Karl had the same goals, after all.

Then, the lefty coalition has to be broken. This is easy. As soon as the topic gets personal, the issues get ditched and infighting ensues. Keep repeating the trigger words about Clinton. Use negative affect techniques. Count on Hillary’s campaign to completely ignore Peter Daou and focus its resources on traditional media. Pretty soon, pro-Clinton voices are a tiny minority on the lefty blogs.

But that’s not enough. These tiny voices must be humiliated and thrown out of the tribe. Use bait “ball frenzy techniques” and overwhelm the opposing voices with negativity and viciousness. Use group dynamics to isolate your target’s supporters and reward the supporters of your chosen candidate. Your target’s supporters are “older women” and “high school dropouts with limited skills”; your chosen candidate’s supporters are “young”, “successful” and “college educated”. The goal is to unite the blogosphere around the champion of the Republicans choosing, someone who will be very vulnerable when they start beating the national security tom-toms.

Make it look like the Republican’s choice for Democratic nominee is preferable to the stronger candidate by alarming the target about Hillary’s electability. Flood the lefty blogosphere’s comment threads with so-called Democrats who vow to vote for John McCain. The number of voices must be of a critical threshhold value so that blog owners and nascent pundits take notice.

Further weaken the strong candidate by going after her strongest asset. Again, flood the blogosphere with commenters complaining about the Big Dawg’s “attacks” on the candidate of choice. Make this number of commenters very high so that, once again, the bloggy pundits start to take notice and become uneasy. They can’t quite put their finger on why the Big Dawg’s presence in the race bothers them but it does. Well, all of their readers are saying it, right? It must be true among the voters and Democrats in general. And those bloggy pundits have staff to pay and servers to buy and children to feed and who wants to piss off their audience? They will ignore the readers who go elsewhere to post because they seem small in number.

The media is already in your hands. The lefty blogs are reluctantly jumping on your preferred bandwagon even though in the back of their minds, there is a disquieting sense that all is not kosher.

The message is out of their hands. They are listening to the hypnotic suggestions you’ve planted in their subconscious. That weekend course in psy-ops thrity years ago really paid off. The blogs are firmly in your grip as you apply pressure to squeeze the life out of them and your job is done. Turn your attention to suppressing the vote.

Laugh evilly and slither away.

Random Thots- Monday, Jan.28

• Breathless headline du jour: “Bill Clinton orders coffee black. African-American leaders see signs of latent racism.”
• Paul Krugman says, “Focus, people! Focus!” Let’s hope that Hillary learned her lesson from Bill regarding health care and that John Edwards’ message gets more attention.
• NPR is live blogging the SOTU tonight?! Damn! Is liveblogging still cool?
• Paraphrasing Emmanuel on Morning Edition: “The rift between Obama and Clinton isn’t like JFK or LBJ. It’s not like when Ted Kennedy tried to shiv Jimmy Carter in 1980. Heck, it’s not even like George Bush vs John McCain in 2000. No, Hillary vs Obama is just a slight misunderstanding brought on by her loudmouth husband who we want to STFU. I’m not endorsing. I’m hiding under my desk.” In other words, typical Rahm.
• Ahhh, but does NPR have a drinking game to go with their SOTU liveblogging? Betcha they don’t. Add your words, phrases and # of prescribed gulps in the comments.
• SusanG is channeling the chaos? Ayayay! Must be pretty tumultuous behind the scenes.
• Matt Stoller issues a warning. I have to agree with him. There is something very spooky here with so many people who are normally clear thinkers start jumping aboard the Obama bandwagon. The synergy of the media, some influential bloggers and others is directed primarily at taking down the Clintons not necessarily at putting Obama in the WH. I still think there are a lot of Republican operatives trolling the web, dominating comment threads at TPM and DailyKos and manipulating the discourse to make it look like Obama, not Clinton is the inevitable candidate. And when they finally have Clinton out of the way, Obama will be a sitting duck because he is a stump speech, an intelligent man and not much else. God help us.