Who In The World Is Saul Alinsky?

Politicians who run in Republican primaries have learned that the key to success is mastering the art of sounding like a right-wing radio host.
A legion of hard-right talkers have saturated every square inch of the airwaves throughout the country and every place overseas where our troops are stationed.
The propaganda they spew is designed to damage the image of liberals, their beliefs and causes, and the government institutions and programs that implement their version of a civilized society.

Do you know what you get when you give a greedy and bigoted minded person a profit motive, three hours a day and a platform to launch his/her bigotry?
You get people like Rush Limbag, Sean Hannity, vile hate-mongers like Michael Savage and Mark Levin, and the increasingly irrelevant Glenn Beck.

Do you know what else you get?
A bigoted minded audience.

From Merriam-Webster:
Definition of bigot: a person who is obstinately or intolerantly devoted to his or her own opinions and prejudices

The right-wing talkers and Fox News have groomed this audience perfectly for Republican politicians to manipulate. They will believe just about any kind of bullshit as long as it feeds their hunger for vitriol, liberal-bashing and Republican style class warfare (denigrating the poor and union workers).

Factual accuracy doesn't matter.
Neither do contradictions, hypocrisies or logical fallacies.
What does matter is knowing the phrases, buzzwords and talking points that are repeated endlessly throughout the right-wing media world.

So who is the master of mastering the art of sounding like a right-wing radio host?

They all know the lines and phrases that will elicit and inflame emotions.
Even Romney, the former moderate, can't string two sentences together without stuffing "European welfare state" and ‘‘government takes from some to give to others’’ in there.

But no one does it better than Newt Gingrich.
There is something special about Newt. His personality is perfectly suited for this kind of pandering.
Belligerent, arrogant, condescending and completely impervious to any sense of shame or embarrassment.

Not only does right-wing bile and Newt's personality mesh perfectly together, but he has been a regular on Fox News for years.
Fox News is the West Point of right-wing politics - an elite training academy in the use of anti-liberal slurs and slanders. Where else would you learn to associate Barack Hussein Obama with the name Saul Alinsky?
Who the hell is Saul Alinsky?

Whenever Fox News wants to convince its audience that Obama is a dangerous left-wing radical who hates America, they'll bring up the names Rev. Wright, Bill Ayers and Saul Alinsky.
Because they haven't been able to point to anything that Obama has said or done himself to prove this allegation, Fox resorts to one of its favorite tricks of the trade: the "guilt by association fallacy".

From Wikipedia:
"An association fallacy is an inductive informal fallacy of the type hasty generalization or red herring which asserts that qualities of one thing are inherently qualities of another, merely by an irrelevant association. The two types are sometimes referred to as guilt by association and honor by association. Association fallacies are a special case of red herring, and can be based on an appeal to emotion."

Now, Obama's association with Rev. Wright cannot be considered irrelevant because Wright was Obama's pastor for years and Obama praised him in a book he wrote. But, again, Fox hasn't shown anything that Obama himself has said that is racist or America-hating (the two charges they make against Wright).

However, Obama's association with Ayers is totally irrelevant to the charges made about Ayers (former terrorist [?] who used explosives to bomb property in the early seventies).
Obama and Ayers were members of the board of an anti-poverty group which included prominent conservative Republicans and was funded by a conservative foundation (Annenberg).

Wait a minute, hold on there, Obama associated with prominent conservative Republicans?
And he worked on a board funded by a conservative foundation?

Now that I think about it, Obama has a long history of associating with conservatives.
Obama, in fact, as editor of The Harvard Law Review, "used some of his appointment power to place conservatives in key editorial positions on the Review. He asserted that each viewpoint deserved a fair hearing" [David Mendell, in Obama: From Promise to Power (2007)]

He appointed conservatives like Dennis Ross and Jon Huntsman as diplomats and ambassadors.
And I saw him paling around with John Boehner on a golf course!
I always knew Obama was a Nazi!

Ayers, by the way, had been a law abiding citizen for decades when Obama first met him.
Ayers was so law abiding, as a matter of fact, that in 1997 Chicago awarded him its Citizen of the Year award for his work on a school reform project.

In Oct. of '08, William C. Ibershof, the lead federal prosecutor of the Weathermen in the 1970s, wrote a letter to the Editor at the NY Times in which he said:

" I am amazed and outraged that Senator Barack Obama is being linked to William Ayers’s terrorist activities 40 years ago when Mr. Obama was, as he has noted, just a child.

"Although I dearly wanted to obtain convictions against all the Weathermen, including Bill Ayers, I am very pleased to learn that he has become a responsible citizen.

"Because Senator Obama recently served on a board of a charitable organization with Mr. Ayers cannot possibly link the senator to acts perpetrated by Mr. Ayers so many years ago."

You'd think that with all the time and effort Fox News spent researching and reporting on this "important story", they would have eventually come to the same conclusion.
But then Fox hosts like Sean Hannity would not have been able to use the words "terrorist" and "Obama" in the same sentence over and over and over again for months and months, even to this day.

Although hardly anyone in the rest of the world has heard of Saul Alinsky, anyone who has watched Fox News for any appreciable length of time, as I have, cannot have avoided hearing that name. Glenn Beck in particular loved to sprinkle that name around along with a book Alinsky wrote called "Rules for Radicals".

One of the many amazing things about Fox is their ability to create a seemingly clear image of someone or something despite presenting very little detail about the subject.
Well, you see, the more vague you are about a subject, the easier it is to manipulate that image.

Let me describe the image I got from Fox about Alinsky:
Alinsky, who died in 1972, was a sinister, anti-American America-hater whose goal was to overthrow our American way of life and replace it with a Marxist model that redistributes all the wealth to the poor.
His "Rules for Radicals" was a manifesto intended to groom agents like Obama and teach them how to infiltrate positions of power.

As often is the case with Fox's depictions, a little research reveals a starkly different reality, and in the case of Alinsky, one that appears to be much closer to the exact opposite of what Fox wants you to believe.

I came across a brilliant article online for The Atlantic by Andy Horowitz, a Ph.D. candidate in American History at Yale. This article appears to be much more honest, and certainly much more detailed, than Newt's, Beck's and Fox's hogwash. I strongly recommend it:

Click here: Saul Alinsky: A True American Exceptionalist - Andy Horowitz - Politics - The Atlantic

After reading this and other articles about Alinsky, I began to understand that he had more in common with Thomas Paine than Mao Zedong. What an irony it is that conservatives should miscast this great American hero while they unwittingly use the very tactics he outlined in his "Rules for Radicals" (only for the opposite ends -- empowering the wealthy elites rather than the poor and middle class.)

In my next post I will offer that scrutiny of right-wing campaign rhetoric -- that I promised in my last post -- by entering the mind of Gingrich:
Janitors, Food Stamps and Redistribution of Wealth.

Santorum: "That's Latin for Asshole"

I heard someone say recently that the Republican primary field is like Baskin-Robbins, there are so many great options to chose from that it's difficult to pick just one. I couldn't tell if the person was being ironic or not, but if these primaries were a contest to choose the stupidest, most obnoxious and backward thinking moron in the country, it would indeed be too close to call. As a matter of fact, the only candidates who could be eliminated from contention would be Jon Huntsman, the only reasonable one, and Ron Paul, a creep of a completely different stripe.

Rick Santorum's recent bid to be the latest flavor of the month has given him the media spotlight during the Iowa caucuses.
His post-caucus speech was so nauseating that it moved me to write this blog post. Before doing so I wanted to "bone up" on Rick by going to my computer and accessing that "series of tubes" known as "the interwebs".

We all know about Rick's "google problem" and of course I encountered the notorious search result during my investigations. I used to think that that google bomb was too mean spirited and that the gay community should "think about the children," "hate the sin but not the sinner" and be more tolerant of Rick's intolerance. But after getting a dose of his relentless obsession with homosexuality and his non-stop campaign to treat it like a contagious disease, I'm not so sure that he's not just receiving, as the free market worshipers would say, "the fruits of his labors".

As Jeffrey St. Clair, a writer for the political newsletter "CounterPunch", wrote:
"Like most religious zealots, Santorum is obsessed not just with homosexuals but with visualizing the postures and physical mechanics of homosexual love."

In honor of Rick Santorum’s sudden emergence in the Iowa caucuses "as the anti-Romney du jour", CounterPunch reprinted a 2003 profile by St. Clair of the "Pennsylvania zealot". It descibes his career in the United States senate, "where he was almost universally reviled as both stupid and mean by his colleagues and staff."

You might enjoy the first three paragraphs of St. Clair's article, as I did:

"Rick Santorum had only been in the senate for a few weeks when Bob Kerrey, then Senator from Nebraska, pegged him. 'Santorum, that’s Latin for asshole.' It was probably the funniest line the grim Kerrey ever uttered and it was on the mark, too.

"Such a stew of sleazy self-righteousness and audacious stupidity has not been seen in the senate since the days of Steve Symms, the celebrated moron from Idaho. In 1998, investigative reporter Ken Silverstein fingered Santorum as the dumbest member of congress in a story for The Progressive. Considering the competition, that’s an achievement of considerable distinction.

"Even Santorum’s staff knows the senator is a vacuous boob prone to outrageous gaffs and crude outbursts of unvarnished bigotry. For years, they kept him firmly leashed, rarely permitting him to attend a press interview without a senior staffer by his side. They learned the hard way. While in serving in the House, Santorum was asked by a reporter to explain why his record on environmental policy was so dreadful. Santorum replied by observing that the environment was of little consequence in God’s grand plan. 'Nowhere in the Bible does it say that America will be here 100 years from now.' The reference was to the Rapture, which apparently is impending."

I like this guy's style (St. Clair's, that is).

This article reminded me of when I first heard of Santorum. I remember Kerry's line and also hearing that Santorum is of Italian descent. I was a bit surprised because his name did not end in a vowel like almost all Italian surnames do. The ones that don't are often Latinized variants that are derived from base forms of Italian personal names and nicknames, or vice versa. (I own a copy of the Oxford "A Dictionary of Surnames")

I got this from Italyworldclub.com's Origin and Etymology of Italian surnames:

"SANTORUM: From the medieval first name Santoro, derived from the Latin word Sanctus = Saint, the genitive plural form is "Sanctorum", used also to indicate the All Saints feast. Possibly connected to someone acting as a saint, or who has connection with religious things (a sacristan)"

If Santorum is acting as a saint, he ain't acting like any saint I ever heard of. Saints are New Testament creations and have a liberal sensibility. Santorum, like other religious conservatives of his ilk, has an Old Testament sensibility and has learned to filter out the lessons of the New Testament.

This dude is the antithesis of, say, Saint Francis of Assisi, who was born not too far from where Santorum's father came from in Northern Italy.
St. Francis was born into wealth but, after seeing the hardships and misery that befell the poor, was moved to give up his riches and devote his life to helping the poor.
Santorum sees the poor as having it too easy and, after getting voted out of office in 2006, was moved to trade on his political connections and devote his life to helping himself get rich.

Anyway, his post Iowa speech was filled with the kind of rhetoric that the ultra-conservative Republican base just can't seem to get enough of. Like Pavlov's dogs, they are conditioned to drool at the sound of any right-wing blowhard who talks about food stamps, European welfare states or the government giving the poor "other people's money".

In my next post I will give this rhetoric the scrutiny it deserves.