Lefties, lead by example

For a while there I was very angry. Part of it was because of the loose rhetoric used against President Bush (even today) and part of it was due to the Plague Year. Put together that combination and then respond by:

A) Not answering my questions
B) Telling us to "up our game" after scorching the Earth against President Bush,

Well.....

Around the Net, I found a combination of rules that Left Bloggers went by these rules:
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1) Question The Motivations: When liberals are losing an argument, they love to shift the discussion not to the facts at hand, but to the motivation of the person on the other side. That's because it's almost impossible to prove what someone's motive may be for a particular action.

2) The Anonymous Smear: Want to launch an attack at a conservative, but don't have a credible source handy? No problem. Just take a vicious critic or an unreliable source and make them "anonymous."

3) The Teary Eyed Spokesman: One of the Left's favorite tactics of late is to pick pathetic figures we're supposed to feel sorry for as spokesmen. That way, if you try to respond to the lies of someone like Cindy Sheehan, you're accused of picking on the mother of a dead soldier. If you try to respond to the lies of Max Cleland, you're accused of picking on a crippled vet.

4) Rewriting History: The American public has a short memory and liberals count on that to get away with many of their most egregious lies. For example, that's the factor liberals count on when they try to pretend that George Bush lied about WMDs to get us into Iraq.

5) Everybody Knows: When liberals want to avoid a losing argument, they sometimes just refuse to have the argument at all and assure everyone that the matter has already been decided.

6) The Ransom Note method: One of the Lefts favorite tricks is to take something a conservative says completely out-of-context and to attack that comment, even if it's obvious that they're twisting the meaning of what was said. This is how the Left can accuse John McCain of wanting to fight for 100 years in Iraq or say Rush Limbaugh wants Barack Obama to fail even if it hurts the country.

7) The Straw Man: If you can't find a sin conservatives have committed to attack, then invent one. This is one of the most used arrows in the quiver of liberals who claim the Right wants to create a theocracy, kick senior citizens off of Social Security, or reward the rich at the expense of the middle class.

(h/t: John Hawkins -- Read the full piece at the Link)

Then there is the article the Andrew Breitbart wrote for the Washington Times:

A digital war has broken out, and the conservative movement is losing. Read the comment sections of right-leaning blogs, news sites and social forums, and the evidence is there in ugly abundance. Internet hooligans are spewing their talking points to thwart the dissent of the newly-out-of-power.

We must not let that go unanswered.

Uninvited Democratic activists are on a mission to demoralize the enemy - us. They want to ensure that President Obama is not subject to the same coordinated, facts-be-damned, multimedia takedown they employed over eight long years to destroy the presidency - and the humanity - of George W. Bush.

Political leftists play for keeps. They are willing to lie, perform deceptive acts in a coordinated fashion and do so in a wicked way - all in the pursuit of victory. Moral relativism is alive and well in the land of Hope and Change and its Web-savvy youth brigade expresses its "idealism" in a most cynical fashion.

The ends justify the means for them - now more than ever.

Much of Mr. Obama's vaunted online strategy involved utilizing "Internet trolls" to invade enemy lines under false names and trying to derail discussion. In the real world, that's called "vandalism." But in a political movement that embraces "graffiti" as avant-garde art , that's business as usual. It relishes the ability to destroy other people's property in pursuit of electoral victory.

Hugh Hewitt's popular site shut off its comments section because of the success of these obnoxious invaders. Breitbart.com polices nonpartisan newswire stories for such obviously coordinated attacks. Other right-leaning sites such as Instapundit and National Review Online refuse to allow comments, knowing better than to flirt with the online activist left.
During the Clinton impeachment scandal, a new group out of California called MoveOn.org employed a plan to get its members to dial into right-leaning talk radio shows with scripted talking points falsely claiming that they were Republicans. They said they would never vote for the GOP again if the case against Bill Clinton was pursued.

Rush Limbaugh was the first to isolate these "seminar callers," whose mission during the Lewinsky mess was to fool the listening audience into believing they were outraged conservatives willing to cut their ties to the Republican Party if the GOP-led Congress continued down the impeachment path

Eleven years later, "seminar callers" abound and call screeners are trained in the art of weeding them out. But the filtering does not always work.

"This is nothing more than the Internet version of Soviet disinformation," Human Events editor Jed Babbin told me. "MoveOn.org and the little boys from 'Lord of the Flies' who run Media Matters want to make it appear that there's huge dissension within conservative ranks on issues on which we're most united."

The left also uses disinformation to inundate the advertisers of conservative-leaning talk shows to intimidate them from financially supporting popular mainstream shows.

Media Matters even offered its services to an autism support group in its attempt to bring down talk-show host Michael Savage. It had nothing to do with Mr. Savage's underlying offense.

Would Media Matters go after Keith Olbermann if he made a tirade against the afflicted? David Brock and company certainly didn't raise a peep when President Obama made a joke at the expense of the Special Olympics.

So now that the right is vanquished and thoroughly out of power, why doesn't it learn from its conquerors and employ similar tactics?

The answer is obvious. The right, for the most part, embraces basic Judeo-Christian ideals and would not promote nor defend the propaganda techniques that were perfected in godless communist and socialist regimes. The current political and media environment crafted by supposedly idealistic Mr. Obama resembles Hugo Chavez's Venezuela more than John F. Kennedy's America.

The Huffington Post, Daily Kos and other left-leaning sites benefit from the right's belief that there are rules and decorum in political debate and civic engagement. Of course, every now and then, a curious right-winger will go in and engage in discussion at a left-wing site, but rarely under purely disingenuous and mass coordinated means.

David Brock, John Podesta, am I missing something?

As a prolific consumer of online content, I value nothing more than the sincere expression of opinion that differs from mine. Sometimes I am even moved or swayed from my dogma. But that was not the type of communication that got Mr. Obama elected.

The American right is in a heap of trouble in a media age that doesn't shun the goons and liars that have poisoned the political process and won the American presidency by breaking the rules of fair play. It is time to fight back, but it won't be easy. The enemy is willing to do and say anything in order to win."

And finally there is Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals (h/t: Wizbang):

1. Power is not only what you have, but what the enemy thinks you have.

2. Never go outside the experience of your people. You never want your own people to be disoriented, confused, and disheartened by your own tactics. Save that for the other side.

3. Whenever possible, go outside the experience of the enemy.

4. Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules. Alinsky's example is controversial, but effective -- the Christian Church has never lived up to all the rules of Christianity.

5. Ridicule is man's most potent weapon. It is almost impossible to counterattack ridicule, and it infuriates the opposition.

6. A good tactic is one that your people enjoy.

7. A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag.

8. Keep the pressure on. Utilize a mix of different tactics and actions on a continual basis. Tie them into current events.

9. The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself.

10. The major premise for tactics is the development of operations that will maintain a constant pressure upon the opposition.

11. If you push a negative hard and deep enough, it will break through into its counterside. Alinsky illustrates this point with the story about a break-in where his home was ransacked, followed by a break-in at the Industrial Areas Foundation offices using keys taken from his home. The only thing stolen at the IAF office was a set of files concerning a particular corporation that the IAF was targeting. Police noted that "the corporation might just as well have left its fingerprints all over the place."

12. The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative. This is an extremely important goal for the organizer. Organizing isn't about rabble-rousing or agitation; it's about solving problems. Alinsky notes that a successful organizations are the ones whose actions actually result in positive change.


13. Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it. Rule number 13 is all about ending the "dog chasing its tail pattern" of entities shifting blame from one to another -- it's the CEO's fault; no, I answer to the Board of Directors, so it's their fault; no, we answer to the shareholders, so it's their fault, etc. Blame-shifting is an effective stalling tactic and unless it is undermined it can quickly disorient an organizing program. Alinsky says that when you "freeze" a specific target, you not only end the blame-shifting game, but you also smoke out the other targets as they come forward to defend your primary target. The target must also be personal, not an ideology or some other abstraction.
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Now that we know what rules the Left follows, here is my challenge, especially to the Bloggers out there.

First, I never got an answer to these two Questions:

A) Was Rush right (especially after 2003)?
B) Was Olbermann right (for attacking a charity for Political points)?

Answer these in the respective posts or here, but read them first.

C) To "Up our game" against President Obama means that between 2003- 2007, Bloggers on the Left "Upped their game" as well. Show me the links and the Blogs. Were these Blogs popular or not?

When I ask "A", answer "A" then go off on the next tagent. Otherwise, you are following the rules from above, which means you are not "upping your game,"

Lead by example or not at all.