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dmaestro 12-Nov-12, 13:47 |
Tea Party Bubble of IllusionObjectively, the country needs responsible conservatives who can work with moderates and liberals to get something done, not irresponsible tea party coneheads who are so gullible as to believe their own hype and are sure absolute victory is just around the corner. It is good to see that a younger generation of conservative who will have to live in the world for a long time is rejecting the tea party strangle hold and media echo chamber and facing reality. Younger generations, particularly minorities and women, are NOT going back to rigid social conservative biblical values or religion, are sick of the neo-cons insatiable desire for wars everywhere, of the right's divisive racial and lifestyle politics, and of the tea party's refusal to pay for anything, but do see a place for responsible fiscal conservatism, the only place where compromise across the political spectrum is possible. Anything other than responsible fiscal conservatism is NOT going to be an area where others can compromise, and this other nonsense only plays well to aging tea party folks stuck in the past whose time is limited anyway. While it is going to be a bloody war on the right with the tea party, in the end, the tea party must be put down like a mad dog, the way that Eisenhower and responsible conservatives like William Buckley put McCarthy, the Birchers, Skousen, and similar wingnut ilk down. Romney tried to have it both ways, no future GOP Presidential candidate in their right (pun intended) mind would look at the changing country and think they had a chance to win. I hope someday you all tea party folks can leave the cocoon and find out what really matters to the rest of the country. You have no clue... ===================================================== The GOP's media cocoon By: Jonathan Martin November 12, 2012 04:36 AM EST A long-simmering generational battle in the conservative movement is boiling over after last week’s shellacking, with younger operatives and ideologues going public with calls that Republicans break free from a political-media cocoon that has become intellectually suffocating and self-defeating. GOP officials have chalked up their electoral thumping to everything from the country’s changing demographics to an ill-timed hurricane and failed voter turn-out system, but a cadre of Republicans under 50 believes the party’s problem is even more fundamental. The party is suffering from Pauline Kaelism. Kael was The New Yorker movie critic who famously said in the wake of Richard M. Nixon’s 49-state landslide in 1972 that she knew only one person who voted for Nixon. Now, many young Republicans worry, they are the ones in the hermetically sealed bubble — except it’s not confined to geography but rather a self-selected media universe in which only their own views are reinforced and an alternate reality is reflected. Hence the initial denial and subsequent shock on the right that the country would not only reelect President Barack Obama — but do so with 332 electoral votes. “What Republicans did so successfully, starting with critiquing the media and then creating our own outlets, became a bubble onto itself,” said Ross Douthat, the 32-year-old New York Times columnist. “The right is suffering from an era of on-demand reality,” is how 30-year-old old think tanker and writer Ben Domenech put it. Citing Kael, one of the most prominent Republicans in the George W. Bush era complained: “We have become what the left was in the ’70s — insular.” In this reassuring conservative pocket universe, Rasmussen polls are gospel, the Benghazi controversy is worse than Watergate, “Fair and Balanced” isn’t just marketing and Dick Morris is a political seer. Even this past weekend, days after a convincing Obama win, it wasn’t hard to find fringes of the right who are convinced he did so only because of mass voter fraud and mysteriously missing military ballots. Like a political version of “Thelma and Louise,” some far-right conservatives are in such denial that they’d just as soon keep on driving off the cliff than face up to a reality they’d rather not confront. But if the Fox News-talk radio-Drudge Report axis is the most powerful force in the conservative cocoon, technology has rendered even those outlets as merely the most popular destinations in the choose-your-own-adventure news world in which consumers are more empowered than ever. Facebook and Twitter feeds along with email in-boxes have taken the place of the old newspaper front page, except that the consumer is now entirely in charge of what he or she sees each day and can largely shut out dissenting voices. It’s the great irony of the Internet era: People have more access than ever to an array of viewpoints, but also the technological ability to screen out anything that doesn’t reinforce their views. “The Internet amplifies talk radio and cable news, and provides distribution for other sources like Newsmax,” said Trey Grayson, 40, the former Kentucky secretary of state and the current head of Harvard’s Institute of Politics. “Then your friends, who usually agree with you, disseminate the same stories on Facebook and Twitter. And you assume that everyone agrees with you!” Grayson continued: “It’s very striking for me living in Cambridge now. My Facebook feed, which is full of mostly conservatives from Kentucky, contains very different links to articles or topics than what I see in Cambridge. It is sort of the reverse up here. They don’t understand how anyone would eat Chick-fil-A, watch college sports or hold pro-life views.” “Social media has made it easier to self-select,” added 45-year-old GOP strategist Bruce Haynes. “Who do you follow on Twitter, who do you friend on Facebook? Do they all look the same and say the same things? If so, you’ve created a universe for yourself that is wedded to its own self-fulfilling prophecies.” Like Grayson, Haynes and many of the approximately two-dozen young Republicans interviewed for this story noted that Democrats have their own self-reassuring echo chambers. What worries Republicans, though, is that their Kaelism may be harder to overcome in the short term. “Unfortunately, for us Republicans who want to rebuild this party, the echo chamber [now] is louder and more difficult to overcome,” said Grayson. That’s partly because of the difference between the two cocoons in the two parties. First, the Al Sharptons and Rachel Maddows of the left don’t have the same influence as their counterparts on the right. There are as many, if not more, NPR-oriented liberals as MSNBC devotees on the left; the Democratic media ecosystem is larger and more diverse. Further, and more importantly, the Democratic Party has a leader in Obama who for over four years has sought to appeal to a majority of Americans for the obvious political reasons. “Being a Democrat means being identified with Barack Obama, not Ed Schultz and Martin Bashir,” said Douthat, citing two liberal MSNBC hosts. Conversely, for nearly six years, since President Bush’s second term went south, Republicans have been effectively without a leader. And into that vacuum has stepped a series of conservative figures whose incentives in most cases are not to win votes but to make money and score ratings by being provocative and even outlandish. “Their bottom line is their main goal, but that doesn’t mean they’re serving the population that buys their books,” said Domenech. And this, say next-generation Republicans, is where cocoonism has been detrimental to the cause. The tension between the profit- and ratings-driven right — call them entertainment-based conservatives — and conservatives focused on ideas (the thinkers) and winning (the operatives) has never been more evident. The latter group worries that too many on the right are credulous about the former. “Dick Morris is a joke to every smart conservative in Washington and most every smart conservative under the age of 40 in America,” said Douthat. “The problem is that most of the people watching Dick Morris don’t know that.” The egghead-hack coalition believes that the entertainment-based conservatives create an atmosphere that enables flawed down-ballot candidates, creates a cartoonish presidential primary and blocks needed policy reforms, and generally leave an odor on the party that turns off swing voters. It even fosters an atmosphere in which there’s a disconnect with the ostensible party leaders. Consider: In the fall of the past two presidential campaigns, those in the conservative cocoon were talking about, respectively, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright and Obama as a black radical, and the seemingly impeachment-worthy scandal surrounding the deaths of U.S. officials in Libya. Meanwhile, on the actual campaign trail, John McCain and Mitt Romney showed little interest in even mentioning either topic. And the entertainers’ power isn’t just with gullible grass-roots activists who are likely to believe whatever nefarious rumor about Obama is forwarded to them in an e-mail chain — it’s with donors, too. Outside of Washington, New York and state capitals, the big conservative givers are as likely to have read Ed Klein’s Obama book and seen Dinesh D’Souza’s documentary “2016,” and generally parrot whatever they just heard on Fox News as the old lady stuffing envelopes at county GOP headquarters. “One of the reasons the entertainment complex has the influence they do is because the people who are supposed to be responsible figures in the party, those who fund the campaigns, have bought into this apocalyptic world view,” said Douthat. More than a few Republicans said it was such donors whom Romney was trying to impress when he infamously riffed about the “47 percent,” a variation of the makers-versus-takers world view that has become popular in the conservative cocoon (Rush Limbaugh has called Obama “Santa Claus” since Election Day). The tension between entertainers and operatives-thinkers may have come into sharpest relief in the prolonged, and for many Republicans, painful 2012 GOP primary. The thinkers and the operatives cringed at the umpteen debates and carnival-like procession of candidates with little chance of landing in the Oval Office. “Look at Newt Inc., [Herman] Cain and [Michele] Bachmann,” sighed Haynes. “What’s the purpose of entering a presidential primary anymore?” Suggesting the incentives for getting in the race now owe as much to fame as to winning the job, Haynes added: “If that market didn’t exist, what would our primary look like?” The sexual harassment scandal around Cain offered a vivid example of the different goals of the two groups. To the entertainment-based right, it was a great opportunity to rally the faithful against a purportedly liberal media targeting a black conservative. It touched almost every erogenous zone for the likes of Rush Limbaugh. But for the operatives and thinkers, the story threatened to tarnish the GOP with a sex scandal and make a martyr out of a marginal figure they were already cringing over before POLITICO reported the harassment charges. Long after the primary ended, the entertainment-based right was still promoting figures that many in the GOP believe are harmful to the party’s brand. Take Donald Trump, who made regular appearances on “Fox & Friends” all year and delighted in pushing the discredited idea that Obama wasn’t born in America. Why energize black voters and turn off moderates broadly by elevating a buffoonish figure questioning the president’s legitimacy? Because it’s good box office. (To be sure, other nonpartisan outlets, including POLITICO, not to mention Romney himself, did their share of enabling Trump). “It’s like a weird version of identity politics for people who like trash culture and reality TV,” said Douthat of Trump. This same financial-political tension also arose two years ago in one of the most high-profile GOP Senate primaries in the country between Grayson and Rand Paul. Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell, worried that his hand-picked candidate wasn’t getting equal time on Fox to make his case, called Fox President Roger Ailes to ask that Grayson get similar treatment as the oft-interviewed Paul, according to a source familiar with the call. Ailes, who consulted on McConnell’s first Senate race, had tough news for his old friend: Paul was just a better draw. Some younger conservatives worry that the effects of cocoonism are just as evident after the race as before — and not only in the disbelief that Obama won. The knee-jerk reaction by some on the right to Romney’s poor performance with Hispanics has been to simply say that all will be well with the party if they pass an immigration bill and elevate Cuban-American Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.). But to many next-generation Republicans, this smacks of tokenism and is more than a tad patronizing. “They just want to put a sombrero on the Republican elephant,” said one Latino GOP operative, who didn’t want to be identified discussing such a sensitive topic. Similarly, Haynes fretted that “the mistake Republicans are going to make is thinking this is a demographic and political problem and not a social and cultural problem. You can’t fix this with Orca (the Romney campaign’s ill-fated GOTV software) or iPad apps or to some extent even running Hispanic candidates.” To young Republican strategists and writers, a fundamental shift of how the party communicates is required. That doesn’t mean delegitimizing hugely popular and powerful outlets on the right, but rather transcending them. “Communicating to the country’s changing demographics and outside of the Fox News echo chamber is a strategic imperative,” said GOP operative Phil Musser, 40. “The rise of conservative media has been one of the best things to ever happen to the conservative movement. It has helped us reach new voters, has helped with voter persuasion and even motivation,” said GOP strategist Todd Harris, 41. “But with all the positives, there is this fact: If all you did was watch and read the conservative media, you were probably pretty shocked at what happened Tuesday. There’s a huge and ever-growing segment of the vote that Republicans just aren’t talking to and in some cases didn’t even know existed.” The good news, say the young Republicans, is that there’s hope for them to appeal more widely. They look no further than to 2004, when liberals were in disbelief that America had reelected George W. Bush. “Jesusland” was the name of the famous map of the country showing where Bush had won. But instead of inveighing against the purported theocracy the country had become, Obama and his aides began to plot how they could appeal to a broad coalition of voters. Younger Republicans are confident that they, too, will take over the party and reorient it to accommodate a more tolerant country. “I expect that in the years to come, a class of young and up-and-coming Republican practitioners will exert a greater degree of influence on how the party’s outreach to key groups is handled and ensure that the tone and tenor of our message is reflective of today’s society,” said Jon Downs, 35, a Republican media consultant. But these Republicans know a degree of self-examination is required. “In some communities, like with African-Americans, it’s simply unacceptable to be a Republican. This is a cultural phenomenon,” said Haynes. “Who do you go to church with, who do you send your kids to school with? Are enough Republicans socially and culturally engaged with folks who don’t look like themselves?” Or, as Domenech put it: “Conservatives may be content to stay in a bubble and yell about Benghazi, but it doesn’t help the cause in the long term.” What’s needed, he said, is to develop new institutions that will engage conservatives on the issues that the broader country is focused on. He cited the much-buzzed-about piece in The Atlantic earlier this year about whether women can have successful careers and devote ample attention to child-rearing as a conversation conservatives should have gotten in on. “We need to play the long game on how people engage in culture and society,” Domenech said. “Conservatives and the right generally have a lot to say, but it’s going to require more than a place to discuss the latest campaign or the New Black Panthers.” © 2012 POLITICO LLC |
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dmaestro 12-Nov-12, 14:20 |
You righties complained on and on about "lamestream media". Fact is you live in a bubble of illusion .and you were fleeced, lied to and conned by your right wing spin doctors who raked in the cash off your gullibility The "lamestream media" was correct. ========================================================= Joe Scarborough: GOP Donors 'Lied To By 'Conservative Media' (VIDEO) Posted: 11/12/2012 It's becoming a running theme of post-election analysis: the GOP has been living in a bubble. Ever since Mitt Romney lost to President Obama -- a loss that reportedly shocked him -- pundits and analysts have pinpointed the conservative media as one of the problems facing the GOP. On Monday, Politico led with a story about the GOP's "media cocoon," which it said prevented it from seeing a true picture of the election. Or, as writer David Frum put it, "Republicans have been fleeced and exploited and lied to by a conservative entertainment complex." On Monday's "Morning Joe," Joe Scarborough added to the growing list of takedowns. Speaking about the donors who poured hundreds of millions of dollars into conservative Super PACs, he said they should be mad that they were "lied to" by conservative media: "If I were a donor, my biggest problem would be that I was lied to. I was lied to by the, as David Frum said, the conservative entertainment establishment. I mean, the conservative media establishment. They lied to the donors, they lied to the base, they lied to everybody about how Romney was ahead and things were looking good in the Senate. The pollsters lied. Everybody lied! And so guys keep writing checks and find out the reason they went to Minnesota and Pennsylvania is because all of these people that were saying Romney was going to win Ohio, they knew he was not going to win Ohio. They knew all along!" |
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dm ... |
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dmaestro 12-Nov-12, 15:30 |
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dmaestro 12-Nov-12, 16:02 |
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Chest all puffed up, talking tough behind that blank screen, making demands. Pretending now that he is the boss, in charge, ready to take command. Telling everybody what will be acceptable and what will not. He is even telling everybody that their God is dead... just like he knows something. I certainly am impressed alright... this beacon of illumination and leadership. (And, intimidated too) |
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changeling 12-Nov-12, 17:35 |
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anomalocaris 12-Nov-12, 20:10 |
Change |
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changeling 12-Nov-12, 20:37 |
stinkyJust one snippet, ok: "...The first step needed is for them to realize right wing media is neither fair or balanced..." I guess the left have never been accused of that by quite a few in here? Both sides fight without reason at times. |
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Stinky |
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anomalocaris 12-Nov-12, 20:47 |
Change |
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changeling 12-Nov-12, 21:06 |
softy, pack it in, the rhetoric accusing anyone of not seeing things as you do as wacked out far left is becoming monotonous. You are so far to the right you are up against a wall. Just about every comment you make on politics is rabid hatred of anything liberal, even when the 'left' policies are continually proven to be what people vote for. On the other hand anyone who is even slightly 'pro' liberal is painted as a fool by you. Carry on! |
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changeling 12-Nov-12, 21:06 |
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thumper 12-Nov-12, 21:20 |
Deleted by thumper on 12-Nov-12, 21:23.
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DM apparently wants to spam the club with his brand of far left dogma. I believe that's the only reason why he asked to come back here. No interest in discussion, no interest in common ground. Just a lame attempt to flood this club with 'talk at you' liberal propaganda. Most all middle to center right people have long since left his main liberal hangout at GK; tired of being screamed at. I guess he has some need of an 'enemy' to scream at so he follows them here. Pretty sad really. Understand, he's just trying to provoke anger and be an irritant because that's all he's got. Go ahead and shred him and his lame ideology. There's plenty of soft underbelly material to work with if you feel like it, but stay away from the direct personal insult. |
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anomalocaris 12-Nov-12, 21:35 |
Chaz |
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dmaestro 12-Nov-12, 21:44 |
================================================================ ANALYSIS: Mitt Romney's Loss Re-Examined ANALYSIS By MICHAEL FALCONE (@michaelpfalcone) and AMY WALTER (@amyewalter) Nov. 9, 2012 After every election, the losing side usually engages in a combination of introspection and rationalization. Currently, the Republican Party is both acknowledging that it has a demography problem, while also continuing to insist that this election was a demographic fluke. Republicans were shocked by the high percentage of African-Americans and Hispanics at the polls, but gave as much of the credit to Obama's superior turn-out operation as blame to their own inability to expand their base. Sean Trende of Real Clear Politics suggests that an unexplained seven million person drop in the white vote may be responsible for Obama's big win. His argument: "Had the same number of white voters cast ballots in 2012 as did in 2008, the 2012 electorate would have been about 74 percent white, 12 percent black, and 9 percent Latino (the same result occurs if you build in expectations for population growth among all these groups). In other words, the reason this electorate looked so different from the 2008 electorate is almost entirely attributable to white voters staying home. The other groups increased their vote, but by less than we would have expected simply from population growth. Put another way: The increased share of the minority vote as a percent of the total vote is not the result of a large increase in minorities in the numerator, it is a function of many fewer whites in the denominator." "I'm not a trained demographer," Walter notes, "but I can say with certainty that: 1) This country is not getting any whiter and 2) older people die." If winning an election depends on appealing to and then turning out a base of old, white people you are going to lose every presidential election from here on out. That model may still be enough to help Republicans win midterm elections -- older and white voters turn out at higher level than minorities and young people in off-year elections. More important, demography alone wasn't the only trend working in Obama's favor: --VOTERS WERE FEELING BETTER ABOUT THE DIRECTION OF THE COUNTRY: Last November, just 19 percent of Americans thought the country was "on the right track." Exit polls from Tuesday's election showed that number had climbed to 46 percent by Election Day. --VOTERS WERE FEELING BETTER ABOUT THE ECONOMY: [W]while a majority of Americans still disapproved of the job the president was doing on the economy, they gave him higher marks today than they did just a year ago. --ROMNEY NEVER OPENED A GAP IN 'TRUST TO HANDLE THE ECONOMY': Buoyed by a solid performance in the first debate, Romney opened up an eight point lead over Obama on October 24. But, just five days later, that lead shrunk to 2 points. Exit polls showed Romney ended the campaign with a measly one point advantage over the president on this question. --OBAMA'S JOB APPROVAL CONTINUED TO CLIMB: [H]is job approval steadily climbed to the high-40-s. And, by October, he was regularly polling at 50 percent. The final ABC/Washington Post tracking poll put Obama's approval rating at 51 percent. |
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anomalocaris 12-Nov-12, 21:49 |
Chaz |
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anomalocaris 12-Nov-12, 21:56 |
Chaz |
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dmaestro 12-Nov-12, 21:59 |
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DM |
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chaz5 12-Nov-12, 14:23 dm ... how many ultra right extremists will read your words? Will anyone be persuaded by the arguments presented? Perhaps we need to try harder to find some common ground. What say? Man what a lashing!!!! You sure set him straight. |
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anomalocaris 12-Nov-12, 22:06 |
DMYou notice I addressed your last post because you spoke. YOU being the key word. |
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Thumper ...And, here I thought you all were interested in respectful dialogue. |
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anomalocaris 12-Nov-12, 22:08 |
Chaz |
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