Disinformation from GOP, Inc.

More on the Republican platform.

In the face of the unpopularity of the Republican platform, the disinformation was easy. First, they worked the refs assiduously for a long time. If the media continued to report facts and call bullshit on the bullshitters, there was no hope.

But advertising provided the perfect model of field-tested deceit that was credible to mass audiences. It had worked beautifully with cigarettes for years. Clearly, for a manageable price - since corporations used it every day - it could convince Americans to believe many things that were not true.

Advertising was also a way to exert power over the media. After all, corporations were already paying news outlets for the eyeballs of their readers. Why weren't the newspapers, radio stations, and TV networks grateful to the very people who were paying the bills? Instead, the journalists would actually bite the hand that fed them. That had to stop. But how?

The answer was to appeal to the vanity, laziness, and greed of the reporters and editors. If flattery, convenience, and sales worked with products on essentially all Americans, why wouldn't it work on underpaid hacks?

Appealing to laziness was the easiest. Corporations had been writing press releases forever, but that hadn't done the trick.

Small papers might edit PR's pearls lightly and print them verbatim - the desired result - but hoity-toity outfits like the New York Times would still make Mobil actually pay for its advertorials on the op-ed page. Their flacks just didn't have enough letters following their names, or failing that, at least some impressive title. Manager of public relations just couldn't hold a candle to senior fellow.

What the conservatives needed to thrust their propaganda was to dress it up as serious intellect, an alternate academy. In the 1970s, they increased funding of the American Enterprise Institute by a factor of eight. In 1973, they started the Heritage Foundation. In 1979, they started the Claremont Institute and the Pacific Research Institute. In 1982, they started the Manhattan Institute (motto: "Turning intellect into influence"). John Stossel is a trustee, but he never thrusts the propaganda, right? More important, they turned their sights to the nefariously independent judiciary by starting the Federalist Society, expropriating the good name of historic liberals for their reactionary cause.

From all these hifalutin' drunk tanks, uh, think tanks, the conservatives generated a huge volume of thinly sourced "research" that was very useful when planting stories in the willfully naive press. Like their creationist friends, they started with their ideologically correct conclusions and searched for fig leaf rationales to fortify them, not even bothering to justify them. It's enough to fog the subject with doubt so that people can believe what their prejudices tell them.

Besides, a white paper is sooo much more appealing than a press release.

Since the conservatives have ready access to piles of cash (Olin, Hertz, Scaife, to name a few), they found several ways to reward helpful journalists, so that they could buy houses on Martha's Vineyard despite toiling in a thoroughly middle class profession. First, of course, was the creation of parallel, ideological media such as Fox News and the Washington Times. This provided good conduits for cash to right-thinking (and I do mean right) journalists. Just look how often Anne Kornblut shows up on Fox in a red suit. Then, there's the rubber chicken circuit, which pays thousands to business-friendly reporters. Hello, Cokie and Stephen Roberts. Then of course, there are also the appearance fees for laughing along with Rush Limbaugh, Michael Savage, Sean Hannity, Bill O'Reilly, and hundreds of other wingnut gasbags on talk radio.

The conservatives are businessmen, of course, so they want value for their money. Accordingly, they exploited their foundations to start the gravy train rolling for young conservatives who otherwise would wind up drinking three-martini lunches near Wall St. Ramesh Ponnuru Dinesh D'Souza, for example, couldn't reason his way out of Hanover, but he has spent the last twenty years suckling at the teat of rightwing private foundations. Whew, at least he's not taking public money for his sinecures. (Corrected, with apologies to Ponnuru and thanks to Ben in comments.)

Ironically, the wingers have proven willing to buy and pulp hundreds of thousands of unreadable books in order to subsidize their greatest thinkers and writers. Maybe it's not so ironic. Their core constituencies are not great readers of anything other than the Wall Street Journal or the King James Bible. It is ironic that a subsidy method pioneered by Jim Wright would be acquired and used by Newt Gingrich, the very man who used its scandal to bring down Wright's Speakership, especially given its existing popularity in the Conservative Book Club and Regnery Press.

I suspect that conservatives also provide direct payments to favored journalists, but I don't have any evidence for this. If it's true, it's also easy to hide.

With all this money and ease floating around, maybe flattery is not really necessary. And, clearly, conservatives have not flattered journalists as a group. What they have done instead is to coopt journalists into the ruling class in Washington. The price has been low - a few shrimp here, a few canapes there. Invitations to the cool parties, once punished by their peer group, become the currency of influence. That's why Tim Russert is "tough" in the useless way of always reinforcing the conventional narrative.

Then, there were the end of the Fairness Doctrine and the erosion of ownership limits. What a bonus! The moneyed interests could now employ economies of scale to commoditize conservative messages, as they own more and more of the media.

The GOP board of directors probably didn't have the vision to set the steps from the beginning and then execute a fixed plan. That probably would not have worked in any case. Flexibility is essential in any campaign, and they read situations and media well and improvised well.

Update: Someone has been ego-surfing. No harm in that. How'd you think I found the link, anyway? I knew there had to be a reason this post got comments! The NRO denizens were probably starving for some place to comment.

Update (2/12/2012):  I had left out the word not in the sentence about the King James bible and the Wall Street Journal.

Republican platform

Finally getting back to how we got where we are today.

What Republicans want to do to America is not popular. Why have they had so much success implementing their platform?

First, what is their platform? I divide it into two parts, what the party elders really want and what issues they use to win votes. Naturally, there are issues that cross the line and play in both parts. There is even a small amount of heterodoxy in the Republican Party since it is a coalition between economic and social conservatives.

Still, the economic conservatives dominate the party's power. They toss the religious conservatives a bone now and then (and sometimes the fundie foot soldiers do notice that they are being taken for a ride), but the wealthy interests always come first.

So, the real platform:

• Low taxes for the wealthy
• Power concentrated in the hands of a few
• The end of unions
• Return to economic organization closer to feudalism than to laissez-faire
  
• The end of science-based and meritocratic regulation
• Foreign policy based on the economic interests of their real constituency
  
• Oh, and even lower taxes for the wealthy

Of course, these are all fundamentally elite economic issues with concentrated power and wealth as the end goals.

This sort of platform is, needless to say, difficult to sell to well-informed voters in a democracy. The Republicans have responded over the past 40 years with a mixture of:

• Disinformation
• Distraction
• Wedge issues

Coming when I get around to it: Details on the Republican tactical mixture.

Nice little business ya got there

Shame if anyt'ing happened to it. Powerful software companies threatening small businesses. Obviously, they're not doing it for deterrent effect. They're maximizing revenue. Would it be impolite to call it an extortion racket?

The asymmetry of power is what concerns me. This is what happens when campaign funding-raising is done from corporate interests, who then get to write the laws in a way that helps them.

SMOC SLAPPs

While I agree with most of SMOC's work, know and respect a member of its board, and don't find it hard to believe that both officials and private citizens may have crossed the line into bigotry, suing people who are exercising their Constitutional rights is bad and actionable when a corporation does it, and it's bad and should be actionable when a public agency does it.

I'll be interested to learn the specific allegations. If they are about speech, this lawsuit is worse than misguided; it's an abuse.

Count the votes

Imagine, a close election followed by a hand recount in order to get the result right, not just a fast result.

Self-satisfaction

Everyone who comments on the news is self-important, not excluding someone like me who doesn't even have much of an audience.

What's annoying about Katharine Seelye is her complete self-satisfaction. She's just thrilled she's writing about convention blogging nine months early. She's so smug to think that bloggers and useless MSMers like her will be interviewing each other in 2008. Most likely, she'll be interviewing bloggers, not the other way around. Not that I'm important enough to be there, but why would any of us want to hear the conventional wisdom from her?

And of course Seelye, typically, gives Republicans equal credit for something they're hardly even doing. You watch, their bloggers will all be from the MSM, trying to be cool and failing abjectly.

Bite your tongue

It's hard to understand how a teacher in the Sudan could be so obtuse as to not know that everything associated with the Prophet Muhammad is subject to primitive taboos and hypersensitivity. Here in the U.S., with only small direct exposure to Islam, I nonetheless refrain from nicknaming co-workers named Muhammad, in case 'Mo' would be offensive.

The power of names is a curious subject, not limited to Islam. Why else would an entire Commandment be wasted on taking the Lord's name in vain? Nonbelievers like me could suggest many other topics that seem to us more important or at least slip it into the prohibition of graven idols, but Yahweh put both of them into the top ten separately. Oops, there I go, putting vowels into the Tetragrammaton, which of course I shouldn't be using at all.

I have also heard Christians from evangelical Protestants to mainstream Catholic priests utter the name Jesus in self-conscious tones of piety. Jesus Christ, what's up with that? I also remember my own youthful and failed attempts to strip these petty blasphemies from my speech.

J.K. Rowling wrote the latest naming taboo for He-who-must-not-be-named. I always cheered Harry's casual use of Voldemort, even when his elders were uncomfortable.

Still, the Sudanese response is wildly disproportionate, typical of sharia advocates throughout the Islamic world. No doubt there's a thread of misogyny in it. Let's lash another uncovered Western slut! Yay! Honestly, the irresistibility of female skin and hair to fundamentalist Muslims is something they confess every time they put their chattel women in another shapeless bag.

Can Islamic societies ever be truly pluralistic? Not without the liberation of Muslim women. If they're married to a man named Muhammad, they've got to be able to yell his name in less than pious tones.

Update: Another thought - this is a great object lesson for the 7-year-old students in the severe limits that sharia places on democracy. Religious law can be such a potent tool for tyrants.

Case of missing perspective

OK, I'm a New England Patriots fan. Yes, I think they could go undefeated and win the Super Bowl. But I have no desire to replace Yankees fans from the 1990s. So, I'm obliged to slam the idiots who wrote the first and the last of these letters.

Both call this objection to running up the score "politically correct". Seriously. It's elementary good sportsmanship not to run up the score. These are the kind of people who can see the offenses of their opponents but not of their team. It would not surprise me to find out that they also believe torture's fine so long as we're the people doing it but is outrageous from anyone else.

Good sportmanship is PC. OK, we liberals who get blamed for PC will take this one.

Beyond vanitas

No idea why I'm blessed with free copies of the Harvard fanzine, 02138. However, as a compulsive reader, I crack it open to see what my most self-involved classmates and fellow alumni most desire in flattery.

The November/December issue (not online yet but presumably destined to show up here) does have a significant story in it, "A Million Little Writers", by Jacob Hale Russell. It explains why there have been so many recent plagiarism scandals at the self-appointed capitol of American intellec-, uh, power elitism (and I say that with the greatest affection).

The long-time practice in the natural sciences has been for grad students to do the experiments but for their professor the principle investigator to be primary author on all publications. I've seen this up close from a responsible scientist who was significantly involved in steering research and in editing resulting papers. I've also known many grad students who resented a system built on expropriation of their work.

The article makes it clear how widely this practice has spread to the social sciences and humanities. Charles Ogletree's accidental theft of verbatim paragraphs from a Yale professor (how embarrassing!) happened because of the mistake of an assistant. Ogletree acted as manager of the team that wrote "his" book but put his own name alone on the title page, having consciously taken ownership of someone else's words, thinking they were written by a research assistant.

It's hard to see how putting your name on someone else's words is not plagiarism just because you hired that person for starvation wages. Yet that seems to be how the academy treats it.

Ogletree, by the way, is by no means the only Harvardian to succumb to this temptation. The story also names Alan Dershowitz, Doris Kearns Goodwin, and Roland Fryer.

In business, this is nothing new. Vice presidents who share credit are as rare as CEOs who share their multimillion dollar bonuses. After all, sharing is regarded as weaknesses among executives and would-be CEOs.

Not that individual artists haven't tried this before. When I read The Executioner's Song, what, 30 years ago, it seemed to me a poorly constructed pastiche of the work of research assistants. It hadn't even been effectively edited, which would have helped immensely to improve a book that had about half as much to say as it actually put into print. And of course, there's the "atelier phenomenon" of Renaissance artists, as Dean of Arts and Sciences Harry Lewis is quoted describing the story's subject.

Shorter Mark Halperin

"I've totally screwed up my readers since 1990, but listen up: A pox on both parties' houses, and here's my 'deeper question'."

Sunday comics blogging - more torture

After you've followed the link on the image to Salon, stick around and read Glenn Greenwald here and here on Joe Klein, Time, and the thorough irresponsibility of the Beltway pundits.

Glasnostalgia

Remember those heady days when Russia was a fledgling democracy trying to build institutions of democratic succession? Well, the new tsar has put an end to that Western nonsense.

As for who lost Russia back to authoritarianism, there's plenty of blame to go around. Most of it belongs with Russians, of course, but a couple of U.S. Presidents failed to engage strongly, and there's then-Harvard economist Jeffrey Sachs, whose plan to reform the post-Soviet economy was an abject failure.

Of course, I'll always remember Duhbya's insight-free assessment of Vladimir Putin's (non-existent) soul. Not that Bill Clinton did much better.

Will turning off your cell phone be suspicious?

A journalist gets around to a story that was implied a couple of months ago but not clearly stated. The government can track you by your cell phone if it wants to; all it needs is a judge who's not conscientious about the Fourth Amendment.

It's great to get this story at all, but it was obvious to me nearly two months ago. Doesn't that mean it should have been obvious to many more knowledgeable people - including a few journalists who presumably should have sources I don't have - long before that? Aren't they even trying to read between the lines?

How long before a prosecutor argues in court that the mere fact a defendant turned off his phone is suspicious? If he had nothing to hide, why would he want to be off the network?

Maybe this has happened already. If so, did anyone notice?

Marketing debases

All the major corporations jumping on the green bandwagon really care about only one kind of green. As soon as the environment is no longer profitable for them - or no longer as profitable as they think the next trend could be - they'll drop it.

Most Americans don't seem to distinguish between the underlying truth and marketing truthiness. We need to.

A little random history:

• We bought cigarettes because they were associated with coolness.
• We bought beer because it was associated with sex (never goes out of style).
• We bought SUVs because they were associated with macho and safety.
• We bought Duhbya because he was associated with regular guys (despite the patent, obvious unreality of this claim).
• We bought bad loans because we were suckers.
• We bought the Iraq war because it was associated with al Qaeda (only in the marketing, of course).

We really need to turn our collective bullshit detectors back on and then turn them up.

3% solution

Getting an initiative petition onto the Massachusetts ballot takes 3% of the voters. So, we'll get to consider again repeal of the state income tax, which we voters defeated in 2002.

It's ironic that the same people who yell at the Legislature for ignoring the expressed will of the people, say, on the surtax, are so keen to do it themselves on taxation as a whole.

Last, anti-tax advocates who want to live in a state like Alabama go visit and see if they really like the consequences in poverty, subsistence economics, low education levels, pollution, and lack of public institutions before they bring it home to successful, wealthy, well-educated Massachusetts.

What these "libertarians" are really trying to do is solve a problem for about 3% of the population, the people already at the top of the heap, who think they should be paying less than their share because they can.

Linking one thing to another

On a lazy day after feasting, a link to Paul Krugman is always worthwhile. To think that I was just saying the same thing, though not as well, to my mom last night.

Speaking of corporate governance, the Boston Globe catches up a bit today on the narrow opaque governance of Fidelity. I'm sure I wasn't the first to notice, but I did scoop the Globe by two weeks.

Thanksgiving

The Native Americans who mourn on Thanksgiving are missing the point, I think. Thanksgiving is a holiday of aspirations. No, the pleasant mythic story of a feast of cooperation at harvest time does not reflect the harsh, real history, but it reminds us of what gifts we have received and what gifts we should give. The history is in fact a goading reproach to European-Americans to remember the deeds of our forebears and to better them.

At least that's what I think, sated on turkey and every starch under the New England sky.

Duhbya "truly is somebody who believes in democracy"

Pervez Musharraf believes in democracy, just not for Pakistanis. Like our Dear Leader.

Wait for Dana Perino's tell-all

So.

Scotty McClellan now teases his White House memoir, implicating the whole Bushist conspiracy in the outing of Valerie Plame. Duh!

Odd how obvious lies become credible news instead of he-said-she-said-shrug news only when a Republican confesses.

And, of course, Dana Perino, instead of resigning on principle when asked to lie, follows Scotty's example and ignores the plain meaning of words. When she publishes her memoir of lying for a living, I'll bet they put a picture of her on the cover.

No one who has worked in the Bushist apparatus has any credibility at all. They should be believed only when what they say is obviously true from other sources.

Seriously

Tom Friedman has been insane for quite a while, but it has never been so obvious as now. Maybe he thinks he's George Lucas or Steven Spielberg, but he's really a bad novelist trying to plot the world so that all the roles are filled by people has already heard of. That way, no one has to hire a new casting director.

Could we furlough him back to shifting the toy soldiers around his counterpane?