Googlebombing...

Courtesy of MyDD...pay no attention to the links behind the movement.

 

-AZ-Sen: Jon Kyl
--AZ-01: Rick Renzi
--AZ-05: J.D. Hayworth
--CA-04: John Doolittle
--CA-11: Richard Pombo
--CA-50: Brian Bilbray
--CO-04: Marilyn Musgrave
--CO-05: Doug Lamborn
--CO-07: Rick O'Donnell
--CT-04: Christopher Shays
--FL-13: Vernon Buchanan
--FL-16: Joe Negron
--FL-22: Clay Shaw
--ID-01: Bill Sali
--IL-06: Peter Roskam
--IL-10: Mark Kirk
--IL-14: Dennis Hastert
--IN-02: Chris Chocola
--IN-08: John Hostettler
--IA-01: Mike Whalen
--KS-02: Jim Ryun
--KY-03: Anne Northup
--KY-04: Geoff Davis
--MD-Sen: Michael Steele
--MN-01: Gil Gutknecht
--MN-06: Michele Bachmann
--MO-Sen: Jim Talent
--MT-Sen: Conrad Burns
--NV-03: Jon Porter
--NH-02: Charlie Bass
--NJ-07: Mike Ferguson
--NM-01: Heather Wilson
--NY-03: Peter King
--NY-20: John Sweeney
--NY-26: Tom Reynolds
--NY-29: Randy Kuhl
--NC-08: Robin Hayes
--NC-11: Charles Taylor
--OH-01: Steve Chabot
--OH-02: Jean Schmidt
--OH-15: Deborah Pryce
--OH-18: Joy Padgett
--PA-04: Melissa Hart
--PA-07: Curt Weldon
--PA-08: Mike Fitzpatrick
--PA-10: Don Sherwood
--RI-Sen: Lincoln Chafee
--TN-Sen: Bob Corker
--VA-Sen: George Allen
--VA-10: Frank Wolf
--WA-Sen: Mike McGavick
--WA-08: Dave Reichert

Speaking of projection politics...

I've spent the morning visiting various conservative blogs and checking out Jonah Goldberg's editorial at the Chicago-Tribune (in which he hilariously asserts that he "doesn't carry water for the GOP").

The new meme is that Democrats are hypocrites because they are critical of a GOP leadership that smears gays, yet apparently employs them in spades. What’s hysterical about this immediately is that they are lying on the face of it. Democrats have not been critical of any such thing. If anything, they have quietly snickered at the supreme irony of this scandal.

Repugs have for years conditioned their base to hate gay people, to loathe them so much they were willing to pass laws prohibiting them from some basic rights. They have been fed a steady stream of hateful rhetoric about the gay “culture war,” implied that gays recruit (the height of projection, since that’s what all those evangelical ninnies do), and that they are pedophiles in pursuit of Your Children®.

That the Foleygate matter threatens to out apparently a legion of powerful gay House aids means this base, blind and small as they now are (the 30% evangelical base and about 5% more of just plain out stupid Repugs) will naturally turn on them. It gives new meaning to Ouroboros. Ultimately, and sadly, may be the real straw that’s breaking this camel’s back.

Naturally Dems are gonna snicker. And naturally, thin-skinned Republican wusses are gonna be offended, just like they were in the school yard every time they got beat up (nobody postures as much aggression as the GOP without a history of getting a beating). What Dems aren’t doing is demonstrating any kind of hypocrisy in their stance toward gays. Not that it'll matter since the POV comes from a fledgling blogger from Southern Indiana, but let's set the record on this nonetheless.

The majority of Democrats—both voters and leaders—believe in actual, realized equality. As such they support the full dispensation of rights for citizens. Of course this means that they support gay rights and gay inclusion in society. Gay marriage, equal opportunity, etc are issues of interest to Democrats and gays are an important constituency for them. Democrats have not changed their opinion on any of this. They remain as committed to the cause of equality for gays as they ever were.

They would be, however, stupid not to point out that the GOP isn’t, as well as the fact that Republican congressmen in positions of highest authority employ known gay people, but have hidden that fact from their constituents at home. Democrats do not approve of the fact that this riles the ever-shrinking base of the GOP against the GOP. But they are not changing their opinion on gays. And they aren’t being hypocritical—the GOP is. When you got nothing and have been exposed for the dirty, lying bastard you are to the people who love you most, project, project, project in hopes of saving your own ass. And now the base at home—who always knew the Repugs were lying, but thought they were only lying in order to fulfill a righteous (yet curiously unsupported by the general public agenda)—know they themselves have been lied to.  <snicker>

He's on crack, part 1

Here's AP writer Jim Kane's article as published in the Houston Chronicle. The article is about Senator Frist and his belief, some might say compaign for, Taliban involvement in Afghanistan government. That is, of course, crazy talk. We just cleaned the Taliban from Afghanistan because they were the problem, and now you wanna work with them? Fucking ninny. Every third world dictating charlatan can see that kind of rhetoric for what it is: appeasement--and they know why: Iraq (and/or Iran). It's just so beyond fucked up my mouth actually dropped open for the first time in two years. Check out his reasoning:

The Tennessee Republican said he learned from briefings that Taliban fighters were too numerous and had too much popular support to be defeated on the battlefield.

"You need to bring them into a more transparent type of government," Frist said during a brief visit to a U.S. and Romanian military base in the southern Taliban stronghold of Qalat. "And if that's accomplished, we'll be successful."

Could you imagine the outrage if a Democrat were to say this? If anyone said it about Iraq or al Qaeda? Why exactly doesn't it apply to Hamas?

Free Campaign Advice for Democrats

The gas issue. The price has deflated more than a dollar in less than a month. Think that's election-related? I do. Can I (or any Democrats) prove it? No. But what if Dems just said this:

 

Gas prices have gone down more than a dollar in less than a month. Why is that? We suspect because it will help our Republican opposition this Novemeber. We can't prove the fix is in, but we can pledge to make sure that oil companies are scrutinized should prices soar again after the election. Republicans won't investigate them, but Democrats will. If you want to find out why oil companies are jacking around with prices, vote for a Democrat this fall. 

5 Years Later, a photo essay

This This is not a belly original idea. I actually saw some commenter named pmooney  dreaming about a video based on this while browsing an article at TPM Cafe. I don’t have video capability, so this photo essay will have to do until a real artist comes along.

While I’m fully aware that the timeline is a bit off (it actually us less than five years), I do think the comparison stands, especially in light of all the World War Wishing and WWII comparisons coming out of the Administration in recent weeks. It wasn’t liberals and progressives that started harkening back to World War II, it was conservative leadership and their barking pundits. This is just an example of how it can be used to advantage.

Identifying GOP Projection in the 2006 Election

A Democratic victory this Fall may be assisted by a single word, a psychological creation with such a successful pop cultural infiltration that just about everybody can understand it: Projection. If we get voters to understand how this phenomenon works, we may just have a shot at surviving the GOP PR blitz planned for the next two months.

Projection is a defense mechanism in which the individual attributes to other people impulses and traits that he himself has but cannot accept⁽¹⁾. We see it every day in people we know—the aggressive co-worker who sees every other communication as a challenge, or the guy who cheats but keeps tight reins on his wife, ever fearful that she will cheat. Just about every talking point coming out of the GOP is subject to this theory, mainly because just about every talking point coming out of the GOP is about defining Democrats. 

• The Democratic Party is being taken over by the extreme left: This is clearly a projection of what has happened within the GOP in the last ten years. This train actually got rolling some ten to fifteen years before that, but it has really gained speed in the last decade. What has happened is that a rag tag collection of neocons, religious extremists, and well-connected lobbyists have conspired and succeeded in wresting control of the party from moderates. They have done this not through reasoned debate, but through fearmongering and other selective provocations.
• The Democrats are weak on National Security: In a word: Osama. Borders, port security, air travel—neither have the Republicans been strong on any of these. They have let technology funds lie and rot at Homeland Security, cut terrorism funding in some of the most critical places, muddied databases with the names of their friends and enemies, and provoked more unrest in the Middle East than we have seen since the 1980s. And the Democrats are supposed to be weak on national security? I don’t think so.
• A Democratic victory this Fall will encourage “al Qaeda types”: It’s plain as day who is already encouraging “al Qaeda types,” and it ain’t Ned Lamont or the Democrats. It’s the current administration and their failed plans and policy, their chaotic disarray, and their power-grabbing that have decreased empathy for the US in the Middle East and around the world.
• Democrats are more concerned with the privacy of phone calls than terrorism: Karl Rove used this one recently, and it’s a classic example projection. It’s the Republicans who couldn’t care less about terrorism, which is why they put our soldiers in a Middle Eastern country that had no record of terrorism and no ties with terrorists. It is Republicans who are obsessing about the privacy of phone calls, mainly the lack of privacy, which is why they incurred the expense of suing Maine simply because it asked Verizon to say whether the company told the truth earlier this year in statements related to the NSA wire-tapping fiasco.
• The Liberal Media: Can this meme still exist? I suppose it can, and the argument has been ratcheted up by the recent smearing of the NYT as “traitorous” amid calls for criminal prosecution. Meanwhile, it is the right-wing that has managed to talk a major network into airing a 4.5 hour pornographic betrayal of the 9/11 tragedy. GOP operatives in the press, as well as employees of this administration have leaked classifiedinformation and treated the press as a ball meant for volleying rather than the informative, unbiased institution it should be. It is they who have acted traitorously, disregarding the constitution at every turn, acting openly in their own best interests, which happen to be at odds with the interests of the American people. It is they who should be subject to criminal investigation.

As with all Freudian projection, GOP leaders and their operatives accuse the left of what they themselves do for one or both of two reasons: 1) They lack insight and are flailing in the dark, unable to see anyone else for anything more or less, or simply different, than they themselves are; and/or 2) The smoke clouds such accusations throw up are often useful for shrouding one’s own wicked motives. 

If this is their strategy for the 2006, then let’s use it to our advantage. If they had a record they would run on it. They have had six years to build that record. This country has never seen a Congress and Executive branch so in sync, so why don’t they have a record to run on? That’s the question Democrats should be asking, once they point out that so much of the rhetoric on the right is projection. Turn their topsy-turvy world view, so eerily reminiscent of pre-World Wars propaganda, on its head, so up is up again and down is down. 

Corresponding to the points on projection are some points on how Democrats are different:

• The Democratic Party has a record of long been diverse. Moreover, Democrats see the point in listening to all reasonable sides of an argument, even if they disagree. Democrats agree that democratic governance is subject to consensus. Citizens have a voice with the Democratic Party.

• The Democrats have a plan to refocus the US Armed Forces on the real War on Terror. This involves going after bin Laden and de-escalation in Iraq. It involves strengthening the US Armed Forces ability via better economic management and re-institution of standards that have been disregarded in recent years. Our soldiers will be of better character and feel more secure that the leadership has their best interests at heart, and would not unnecessarily subject them to war.
• That the Bush Administration and Congressional Republicans have encouraged “al Qaeda” types cannot be ignored. It is vital to our national security that voters recognize this. Our status in the world must be improved. Democrats will not acquiesce to the terrorists. Democrats will open serious negotiations with countries in the Middle East—without showing preference—in an attempt to address the unrest. Democrats will re-establish diplomatic relations where possible and restore them if they are strained.
• Democrats are concerned with constitutionally protected privacy and terrorism. Moreover, they understand that combating one does not mean sacrificing the other. If our values and lifestyles change as a result of 9/11, then terrorists will have won. We should also point out that all of these challenges to constitutional authority have one common result: they are good for corporate business. They do not make us safer.  

It might be worth pointing out that the ABC “docu-drama” is a perfect example of how GOP projection works. We know that Clinton actually became increasingly concerned with terrorism, while George Bush was dismissive of those concerns immediately. We also know that the absurd Monica Lewinsky scandal was a colossal waste of tax-payers’ money, even while it was a gross abuse of political power, but it was never a distraction from terrorism for Clinton, as demonstrated by the many accounts of members of his cabinet. We know that the absurd Iraq war has been another colossal waste of tax-payers’ money, another gross abuse of political power, as well as a disgusting exploitation of a national tragedy. Moreover, it has been a major distraction from terrorism. That this film targets Clinton with so little attention paid to Bush is classic GOP projection. And who is responsible for the colossal waste and the abuse, the exploitation and distraction? Easily it’s the elephant in the room, so pink with embarrassment over its shrinking power and bailing base, but not with the shame it should so obviously feel.