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.