Playing the Race card
I think the NAACP may have played the race card once too often.
On Tuesday the organization “adopted a resolution condemning “racist elements” in the Tea Party movement and calling on the movement’s leaders to repudiate bigotry,” as reported by Fox News.
NAACP leaders have referenced an incident in March when Tea Party protesters allegedly hurled racial epithets at black lawmakers on Capitol Hill ahead of a health care vote.
No such incident happened. This is 2010 and the whole scene was videotaped and posted to YouTube. Despite the obvious false nature of the claims, this is used as a basis for the resolution. I’d call it pure Alinsky except that it is a Soviet-era propaganda trick that predates him. Keep repeating a lie until it becomes the truth. Layer lie upon lie and pretty soon the original lie becomes invisible.
Other liberal outlets take up the story and give it depth. The headline in the LA Times reads:
‘Tea party’ lashes back at NAACP over charges of racism:
Candidates and other sympathetic conservative leaders join in defending against assertions that the protest group is linked to white supremacists.
Notice the scare quotes around Tea Party and the phrase “lashes back.” I suspect if the cause were liberal the headline might read “defends itself against charges.” Notice the adjective “sympathetic” to describe those who defend the Tea Party movement. Wouldn’t you expect defenders to be sympathetic? Using that word tends to devalue the support given. And where did the links to white supremacists (and their websites later in the article) come from? Not from the resolution but from the Times.
An even-handed, balanced report–which the LA Times was not–thus gives credence to the outrageous charges and treats it as at least equal to the “denial.” What’s to deny? I’ve been to several rallies and the 912 March on DC; I haven’t heard racial epithets or seen racially motivated signs. Despite the left’s best efforts, the Tea Party movement is not about race, it’s not about what the left wants to talk about, it’s about fiscal responsibility, constitutionally limited government and free markets. Period.
Jenny Beth Martin and Mark Meckler, organizers of the Tea Party Patriots, have written an op-ed piece entitled On Being Labeled as Racist that appeared in Politico today. Read it: it is brilliant.
More Media Bias
I have to admit that I, at least, had fun with yesterday’s media bias on the Western Conservative Summit. It is instructive to see just how that bias is inserted into what is reported on, and how it is reported. The more you look, the more obvious it becomes.
Here’s some more fun with that most liberal of topics, the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. I already wrote about how Obama played golf while the gulf was polluted. The press would have crucified George Bush; Obama deserves to have been crucified, too. Cleaning up the mess is of concern to all Americans, regardless of politics.
When you’re a liberal, however, your driving concern is using everything to advance the liberal agenda along the Road to Socialist Utopia (or as we conservatarians like to say, the Road to Serfdom).
Remember that on June 4th, BP finally got a cap that worked. The AP’s headline:
BP: cap gets some Gulf oil, crude still spews
Guess the glass was half-full for the AP. I pick on the AP because their stories are picked up and repeated by a lot of new organizations. Well, BP was not content with that cap of course, so they remove it so that they can replace it with a better cap. AP’s Tom Breen writes on July 10:
BP: Cap on gushing well removed, oil flows freely
Damned if they do, damned if they don’t. BP and the U.S. Coast Guard had said that fitting the new cap would take a couple of days. Tom Breen of AP writes on July11:
For Now, Oil Spews Unchecked in Gulf: Hundreds of thousands of gallons of oil are being allowed to spew into the fouled waters of the Gulf of Mexico…
He really likes the verb “spew” doesn’t he? On July 12, the new cap is put in place on schedule. Here’s the lead from Breen, assisted by Harry R. Weber:
BP affixes new cap on Gulf oil well; tests ahead. BP robots attached a new, tighter-fitting cap on top of the gushing Gulf of Mexico oil leak Monday, raising hopes that the crude could be kept from polluting the water for the first time in nearly three months.
Well, maybe the bumbling capitalist exploiters might get it right yet. Remains to be seen. I almost hate to report the New York Times headline, which is quite neutral by comparison:
Critical Test Near for BP’s New Cap
Looks like someone could take lessons in objectivity from the New York Times! <giggle>
Although it is totally unrelated, I just have to report this AP headline about Louisiana U.S. Senator Vitter, also from July 12:
Republican senator says he backs birther lawsuits
And just the other day Peter Boyles was saying he hasn’t heard the term birther lately. Looks like somebody was too busy with spewing oil and didn’t get the memo.
Western Conservative Summit
This past weekend I attended the Western Conservative Summit in Denver, sponsored by the Centennial Institute at Colorado Christian University. There’s already plenty of reporting about the event so it would be pointless to repeat simply what happened. Just google the event.
What is a little more interesting is how the event is reported. By now the obvious bias in the media is a byword but how exactly is it done? What makes it biased? Let’s look at the headlines:
From the Denver Post, in the Denver and the West section, the headline reads:
First Western Conservative Summit draws a crowd to Littleton with Tom Tancredo, Michelle Malkin
Tom Tancredo wasn’t even a keynote speaker–Michele Bachmann was and Dick Morris closed out the event on Sunday. But the liberal media in Colorado love to hate Tancredo so I guess the fact that he showed up Saturday was significant to them. The first line of the article is equally perceptive:
The Marriott Hotel South in Littleton is not a place to find liberals this weekend.
Really Bianca Davis? What was your first clue? She went on to describe a little bit the speeches of Tancredo and Malkin. Michelle Malkin gave a powerful story about being discriminated against by the left, describing her assignment to Asia House upon attending Oberlin College, accusing the left of a “plantation mentality.” I think Bianca missed that part too. In fact, the report reads as though she dropped in for lunch and a couple of speeches, took some notes and left.
But to be honest, that was good reporting compared to the Denver Post opinion page, which blasts the conference on 8 July–two days before anyone said anything. Don’t let the facts get in the way of your reportage, DP.
Kevin Diaz of the Minnesota Star-Ledger was content to re-post comments originally written about Michele Bachmann by the Colorado Independent and run an old stock photo of her wearing something brown. How do I know it’s old? Here’s her photo Friday evening: I’d say not brown but Gadsden yellow.
It was a keynote: meant to highlight and set the tone for the conference. It was entertainment and I was both entertained and energized. She’s no intellectual lightweight and she quoted the Founders, encouraging us to immerse ourselves in their writings.
So if you want to read about what was said instead of the usual tired rant about how conservatives and Republicans–by the way, there not exactly the same thing–are obstructing the progressive Road to Serfdom, here’s some places you can go:
- Joshua Sharf’s blog, which is also on the Rocky Mountain Bloggers
- Ben DeGrow’s Mount Virtus blog, part of the People’s Press Collective
- the People’s Press Collective itself, which carries Ben, Joshua and me and video-taped the whole thing
You don’t need the formerly mainstream media any more. They can rant to their echo chamber all they want; you can see and hear the truth for yourself.
Logical fallacies
I’ve been wanting to write about how the left’s arguments are full of logical fallacies for some time. I remember learning debate in speech class and there was a list of some half-dozen or so common logic fallacies commonly used in debate. I couldn’t quite remember what they all were, so I looked up the term “logical fallacies” and I was quite surprised at just how many there are. A really good, concise site is Logical Fallacies and of course Wikipedia has a list of fallacies as well. I used these sites as reference for what follows.
Overwhelmed by the sheer number of fallacies, I thought I’d present just a few common ones. I recommend going to those sites for more types and examples. Remember, the majority of politicians these days are lawyers and lawyers are taught to debate. They may commit any number of logical fallacies and if the opponent in the debate does not point it out, it stands. As Logical Fallacies points out:
Fallacious reasoning keeps us from knowing the truth, and the inability to think critically makes us vulnerable to manipulation by those skilled in the art of rhetoric.
We can lay aside the more formal deductive reasoning errors for the more interesting informal fallacies because we hear a lot of that in political discourse. There are three general types: fallacies of relevance, ambiguity, and presumption. I’ll give some examples of relevance.
One common fallacy of relevance is the ad hominum attack: attacking the person instead of the argument. The perfect example of this is the left attacking Sarah Palin personally because rather than her beliefs. Alinsky takes this further in advocating making fun of someone so that nothing that person says will be believed. They also try this with Glenn Beck and with the Tea Party movement in general. Once you know the game, it’s over: the more they attack someone, the more right that person must be.
Another is the bandwagon fallacy. The mere fact that an idea (or person) suddenly attracts adherents is given as a reason for us to join in with the trend and become adherents of the idea ourselves. Barack Obama’s cult of personality worked in this way. Fueled by social networking tools such as Facebook, it became “cool” to support him. Why? Because your friends did. His real persona and past were–and are–carefully hidden. But as he began to have a track record in public office, his popularity dropped faster than any previous president.
There are many irrelevant appeals as well. An appeal to authority is an argument from the fact that a person judged to be an authority affirms a proposition to the claim that the proposition is true. Since we assume our presidents to be truthful, we expect that when Barack Obama says that the Statue of Liberty was purchased by Americans donating small amounts of money, we assume it to be true. We would be wrong.
An appeal to fear is a specific type of appeal to emotion–an irrelevant appeal sometimes classed as a red herring. This is as much a debating tactic to distract the opponent (or the listener) as it is a fallacy of logic. In the appeal to fear, an argument is made by increasing fear and prejudice towards the opposing side. Examples of this include the classic Democrat strategy of telling the elderly that if they vote for Republicans, they will lose their Social Security or telling legal immigrants that they will be deported if the Republicans win. The left is masterful at playing on emotions. Conservatives are not exempt from this tactic either.
How do you avoid falling into logical traps? It can be challenging. Read, study, listen carefully. Look for the traps and apply what you know to be true. With a good internal moral compass you cannot be led astray.
Stay Focused
Forget everything I’ve written in the last two days.
Well, not exactly. As Harry Nilsson wrote in The Point!, “A point in every direction is the same as no point at all.” We must remain focused because the left is using the arguments and issues I discussed as distractions.
“Focus, Daniel-san,” said Mr. Miyagi.
Indeed we must. The Tea Party movement is focused with laser-like intensity on fiscal responsibility with the related ideas of limited, constitutional government and free markets. Not the laser-like focus that Obama had on jobs just long enough to appoint big labor leader Andy Stern to lead a government study panel. Whatever became of that effort, anyway? But I digress. We’re so easily led astray….
We must keep our focus on the massive out-of-control spending that is rapidly pushing our economy past the point of no return and the huge government that is being built to run it. That means our focus is on only two things:
- Throw out the bums who vote for this stuff, regardless of party
- Replace them with people of integrity who will return us to our Constitutional roots
The left would like to focus on social issues. The Tea Party movement and resurgent conservatives have a variety of opinions on social issues such as abortion and what to do about healthcare and immigration. We don’t agree on everything: we are conservatives after all! Unlike the left, we don’t march in lockstep or goose-step. Those debates are well worth having–later. Now we must maintain focus.
It’s pretty simple. Common sense. You don’t need a Harvard degree to understand it; in fact, I think a Harvard degree inhibits understanding. The left knows this. The left knows that they cannot win on the issues because the majority of Americans don’t agree with them on the issues. They believe in the collective; we believe in the individual. They believe in remaking humans into their ideal of socialist man; we believe in striving to match God’s ideal.
The left is moving to dig up dirt on conservative candidates; we know that human beings are not perfect. Certainly we want the best to represent us. We know that no matter how bad they try to make conservative candidates look, they will be far, far better than anything the left can muster.
If we stay focused we will win. We will win because we value eternal truths while they embrace only the momentary advantage. The leftist Democrat I debated Saturday made fun of Glenn Beck tearing up while talking about these truths. They make fun because they don’t understand, because there is nothing they believe in.
We believe. We will win.
Overcome Subtle Lies
Yesterday I wrote about nonsensical arguments that the left puts out to support their essentially untenable positions. Even the Propagandist-in-Chief plays the game, saying last week that the Statue of Liberty was funded by subscription instead of given to us by France. (The pedestal was funded by subscription.) Then on the 4th of July he dismissed the Founders as wealthy white men:
“We celebrate the principles that are timeless, tenets first declared by men of property and wealth but which gave rise to what Lincoln called a new birth of freedom in America — civil rights and voting rights, workers’ rights and women’s rights, and the rights of every American,…”
You have to be quick as he sneaks it right past you, just as that clown in Monument tried to do. Their theory is that the Constitution is somehow invalid because black men and women didn’t participate. Did they participate anywhere in 1787? Sam Adams didn’t have a suit to wear to the Continental Congress–his neighbors took up a collection to buy him one, a far cry from the president whose 2009 tax return shows $5.5 million in income. Men of wealth? I think not, but they were willing to risk all they had for the principles they believed in.
Notice also the insertion of workers’ rights. What is that all about? Perhaps he got confused between the Declaration of Independence and the Communist Manifesto.
They tell you that the Constitution was written for a world that no longer exists. What they mean here is that America in the 18th century was agrarian, a pre-industrial society. This is significant for Marxists who believe that agrarian society is a stage in the evolution of history followed by the industrial age. Marxism belongs to the industrial age and the struggle between capitalists and workers which will eventually be won by the Marxists. Um, hasn’t happened so far and we’re in a post-industrial economy by now. So how exactly is Marxism better?
The indictment also glosses over the fact that slavery was a big issue in the colonies and in the Constitutional convention itself. They charge that the Founders counted slaves as only 3/5 of a person, when in fact the Three-Fifths Compromise reduced the representation of the slave-holding states who wanted their non-voting slaves to count fully one-for-one for representation in the House. Come to think of it, that’s a little like today where the Democrats want non-citizens counted in the census, which is used for representation in the House.
They only get away with such distortions of fact if we don’t know our history. Glenn Beck is doing a great job on his Founders’ Friday shows and others, such as Wall Builders, do as well. Listen, read and educate yourself and those you know. We have a lot of work to repair the damage of at least twenty years.
Overcome the Propaganda
I was at the Monument 4th of July Parade Saturday collecting signatures for the Right to Health Care Choice petition (Initiative 45) when a leftist Democrat came up to he booth looking for a fight. He picked the wrong rattler to step on.
The difficulty in talking to these people–besides the fact that they are true believers for whom no logic will ever work–is the sheer amount of lies that come rushing out. It is hard to catch them all; it’s as if they come from an alternate universe. For example, in describing the benefits of the free market system I told him that the great advances in medicine had some from this country. His reply was that all of modern medicine stemmed from two discoveries, germ theory and vaccines, which were discovered by two Frenchmen, Louis Pasteur and Jonas Salk. Oops. Germ theory wasn’t discovered by Pasteur, although he certainly had a role in developing that theory, and of course Salk was American. All of those advances occurred in free-market capitalist systems but before you can prove it, they’ve shifted the argument.
You can’t call it “socialized medicine” he said, because the government doesn’t own it and run it. That’s the definition of socialized medicine. That may be true as far as it goes. When it comes to single payer it will be full-fledged, European-style socialized medicine and it is clear that’s where this government wants to take it. It was the second time I’ve heard that argument from widely divergent sources, so I’m guessing those are OFA talking points. So I concede the point: it’s really not socialized medicine, it’s fascism. In fascism, the state allows private industry to exist in a tightly controlled form. Think Fascist Italy, Krupp Industries under the Nazis or even China today. They don’t like being called fascists any better, but they do like the “China model.”
Then there was the argument that Canada has a better healthcare system because seniors go to Canada to buy their drugs more cheaply. Of course: Canadian drugs are subsidized by Canadian taxpayers and we are free to buy them (today). Here a specific fact is used to prove a general statement: a feat of inductive reasoning that doesn’t work. And he said cancer survival rates in Canada and Europe are higher than in the U.S.–easily and demonstrably false. In fact, survival rates are, in some cases, dramatically better in the U.S.
The fact is, you can’t pin these people down. They’re slippery creatures, sure of their conclusions and willing to trot out any argument, no matter how fanciful, to prove their point. They are eager to score debating points and quite frankly that’s all they are. They seek to overwhelm you, Alinsky-style, with a mountain of supposed facts, assuming that if you don’t counter each and every one they must be right.
There’s an old saying: Never wrestle with a pig: the pig loves it and you just get dirty. They’re not pigs, of course, but Aristotle did know who they were: Sophists. All argument and no truth. All style and no substance. Yet the Sophists were able to convince the Athenian masses to poison Socrates.
This is a full-fledged culture war and we have a lot of work to do if we are to avoid our dose of poison. Bill Whittle, always great, is never better than in this recent video on PJTV, telling us how bankrupt their ideas are and how we need to forge ahead.
This week I’ll be posting more on their plans, methods, and how to counter them.
Happy 4th of July!
Here’s the perfect video for the 4th. It’s the 4th and final verse of the Star Spangled Banner:
I’ll bet that unless you are a Service Academy grad and had to memorize all four verses you probably didn’t even know there was more than one. You can find a the lyrics here.
Did you know that the music is the tune of a British drinking song? Other interesting trivia about the song can be found here.
Fiscal Responsibility is Hard
The senatorial candidate debate last night highlighted how hard being a fiscal conservative it is going to be after the November elections.
There were a couple of questions last night about healthcare; both candidates were in favor of repeal. Ken Buck acknowledged that Congress, even with conservative majorities in both houses, could not repeal Obamacare over a presidential veto; Jane Norton said we need to pull it out by the roots. Ken gave some options to deal with it in the short-term by not funding it and then going for the repeal in 2012. Jane, reflecting her background in the Department of Health, gave practical alternatives to Obamacare such as the kind of tort reform we have in Colorado. Both favored a balanced budget amendment. So far, so good.
Later, Jeff Crank asked a question about budget cuts: with $13 Trillion of debt, what five programs and two agencies would they eliminate? It was a tough question which appeared to have caught both candidates a bit flat-footed. Ken mentioned a few pieces of low-hanging fruit and described how education should be pushed down to the state and local level; Jane said that cutting spending was “the absolute reason” she’s running and gave examples of foolish spending on the part of government. No real specific examples, though.
Jeff was not satisfied and with the aid of modern technology when it came his turn again he said that the amount of cuts Ken had suggested off the top of his head amounted to “only” $6.7 billion—the amount, Crank said, that the federal government spends in 2 ½ days. Sobering. Jane began by saying that we should abolish the Department of Education and block-grant the money to the states. However, since 80% of the department’s budget is already going directly to the states, this is no savings at all. She also mentioned Social Security and Medicare saying that we wouldn’t touch 55+ but would revise it for those under that age. Ken mentioned cutting the Department of Energy and said we should look hard across the board.
I don’t think either of them had great answers; the questions highlighted just how serious the budget crisis is and how much must be cut. I’ve mentioned before the Cato Institute’s Downsizing the Federal Government site for a great analysis, department by department, of how cuts can be made. The House GOP has also started the You Cut! program which highlights five wasteful programs every week.
These are all great ideas but the problem is that this administration is spending so much, so fast, that it will be very difficult to fix. Just wait until they lose in November: see how much pork they can pass between November and January. That’s exactly the way the Democrats want it. Obama has already dared us to cut. We’ll see how serious you are, he said.
He’ll find out. We’re dead serious.
How are we going to win?
We have the answer. We are the answer.
Our institutions of government are not designed to rule over us and make life care-free; our government is designed simply to free us from the mundane tasks of self-government while we pursue life, liberty and happiness. To win this struggle we have to start by remembering that.
Fellow activist Linda Hoover recently wrote of our task:
I don’t see where we have the same abilities to push back that they have to push us around. I think a big piece we have to face is that we are out-financed (they have George Soros, all of our tax dollars, you name it), out-muscled, out-infrastructured, out-prepared and otherwise largely sitting ducks for this takeover.
The politicians are all sworn to uphold a corrupt system that is being manipulated with both skill and speed.
As I see it the goal is clear: the river of government has overflowed its banks and flooded the country. It is our job now to control the flooding and put government back within its banks. Maybe the protective levees of the Constitution were not strong enough; maybe they were in disrepair. Mitigating the damage before all is swept away has to be the first task. 2010 is damage control.
Here’s what the liberty movement is doing, with great success:
- Articulating broad goals and objectives
- Supporting and electing candidates who believe in these goals
- Learning or re-learning the principles of our citizen-led republic
- Teaching, communicating and organizing
From out of nowhere in February 2009, today polls show as much as 36% of the population self-describe as tea partiers. We have had tremendous success: That’s a higher percentage than either political party–yet the movement is not and has never claimed to be a political party.
We are not sitting ducks. We were sitting idly by, but not now. They only have power because we gave it to them, temporarily. Either they surrender it peacefully when we ask for it back in November, or they will try to seize it illegally. If they do that, they will cause a civil war which they will surely lose. Either way, we win.
Don’t waste your time and energy hating Barack Obama or trying to figure out where he was born: he is nothing. I have more respect for a dung beetle, which at least performs a useful function. He is neither Messiah nor demi-god; he is merely the end-product of a process of historical development whose end was predicted centuries ago. He and his kind can never succeed because they can never create, they can only destroy.
Likewise, it doesn’t matter very much if they are socialists, Marxists, statists, thugs, or a combination of all of the above. Either way, they’ve got to go.
So stay the course. Continue to organize, to educate, to recruit, to vote. And to pray. As Linda concluded:
Me, I’m going to church this morning, and going to keep asking for a miracle — not from the couch mind you.
In looking back at the Revolution, the Founders believed it was nothing less than Divine Providence that allowed them to prevail against the greatest power of the day. God will again provide a miracle.
We are that miracle.
