Hot Coffee

Watched a documentary last night called "Hot Coffee." Remember the famous McDonald's lawsuit? Yeah, it's about that (and more). You think you know what happened. But watch the documentary--because, well, you don't.

So it's about tort reform -- more accurately, tort deform -- how corporate advertising tilts the political climate to the far Right, against the people's own best interests. In this case, the myth of overzealous lawsuits and exhorbitant jury damages awards is used successfully to remove yet another constitutional protection: the right to a jury's determination of proper compensatory damages when doctors, corporations, and others screw or injure us. In this case, the truth of the McDonald's suit was buried in a blizzard of misinformation, and used to persuade us to undo our own constitutional rights. Seems we'll believe any crap we're told if it makes someone appear to be "getting over" at our expense. Like we believe the McDonald's suit was frivolous--until we learn the truth of it.

That's not all. It's also about court packing, the second way Karl Rove and George W. Bush moved America closer to fascism, intentionally, deliberately, and dishonestly. With the help of that parliament of whores called the US Chamber of Commerce (the largest corporate lobbyist in the USA), corporate America wages war on honest federal judges to replace them with bought boys and girls who'll rule against the people in cases of criminal or even tort suits. This they do by side-stepping limits on direct campaign contributions to judges' re-election campaigns and using both donations aggregated by the "independent" Chamber, and (when that fails) specious criminal investigations of any judges who survive their election shenanigans. See Oliver Diaz for a case in point.

There's more. See "Hot Coffee" on HBO "on demand." It's worth your freedom.

We're Beyond Lies. This is PsyOps: Pre-Emptive War on American Voters.

Finding the cure depends on making the right diagnosis.

Maybe in the 1970s, we could still reasonably think of political campaigns as equal mixtures of truth, lies, and video tape. Maybe in the 1970s, both parties did it in approximately the same measure.

Not now. We're way past mere business-as-usual lying.

The reality is that, in addition to "a blizzard of lies," the GOP is using bona fide psychological operations---psyops---to manipulate US elections.

Time to call this what it is. No matter how subtle it may be, this is a massive orchestrated war on our constitutional democracy.

Follow me here. I'm angry but there's good reason to be.

When, month after month, facts bounce off voters like raindrops on car tops, sensible people see that something else is going down.

When even felt, experienced disasters--Katrina, Saddams's WMD, home foreclosures, tanked retirement savings, astronomical unemployment rates, unbridled domestic espionage, homeland concentration camps, and the culture of corruption--when even these count for nothing in voters' reappraisal game, a sane observer must consider that something worse than mere lying is at work.

Everybody knows that in a normal, healthy environment--whether at work, at home, in the old-fashioned police or medical investigation--lies simply don't prevail. In normal, healthy conditions, lies always crumble, and liars almost always lose serious market share. Nixon was forced to resign. Bill Clinton was almost impeached.

On the other hand, when fact after fact fails to make even a dent--when no quantity of lies is enough to shame the mainstream media into investigating and reporting reality--then it's pretty clear that we're no longer playing in the weedy pastures of politics as usual.

I began to tip to this a day or two ago, in a post titled "The Lord of the Flies: Karl Rove, John McCain, and Sarah Palin." If you haven't read it, check it out.

Digging deeper, I looked up "psy-ops." Here's what I found:

"Psychological operations (PSYOP, PSYOPS) are techniques used by military and police forces to influence a target audience's value systems, belief systems, emotions, motives, reasoning, and behavior. Target audiences can be governments, organizations, groups, and individuals, and are used in order to induce confessions, or reinforce attitudes and behaviors favorable to the originator's objectives. These are sometimes combined with black operations or false flag tactics.

This concept has been used by military institutions throughout history, but it is only since the twentieth century that it has been accorded the organizational and professional status it enjoys now.

The word is commonly used by governments, such as the government of the United States, who do not wish to use the term propaganda or brainwashing to refer to their own work. The word propaganda has very negative connotations, and by calling it psychological operations instead, more sophisticated methods of psychological manipulation are accurately incorporated by the terminology. This euphemism for mind control is ironically an example of psychological operations--i.e., using psychological techniques to persuade [manipulate] a large number of people to support something that they wouldn't normally support." [Emphases added. See original for additional links.]

It's been solidly established that the GOP uses messaging that targets deep-seated fears to reach down far beneath the rational level to the reptilian cortex, the most primitive part of our brain. Add to that intentionally deploying made-up stuff up--the word is propaganda--to reinforce those fears (he's a closet Muslim) and to appeal to our primitive, most infantile longings for Good Daddy and Good Mommy. Soon it's plain that, thanks to Karl and John, the American public is deliberately being "manipulated to support something we wouldn't normally [rationally] support."

It's also well known that the GOP uses the "false flag" strategy, as well. Here, the Party itself can deny responsibility when third parties launch scurrilous psyops attacks on Democratic candidates. We call this "swiftboating." (Interesting, all this military jargon, isn't it? It, too, points directly to a warfare model.)

None of the fundamentals I've described is news. What's missing is the correct diagnosis.

This is deviance at depths unprecedented in the USA. This isn't campaigning. This isn't Chris Matthews' happy little battle of ideas. This GOP campaign strategy is authentic military psy-ops, and guess what? We're all IT.

Republicans, Democrats, independents, all of us are on the verge of losing our democracy. Psyops isn't the conduct of free elections in any sense of the word. There is no such thing as a free election when the public is being systematically, relentlessly manipulated with certifiable, powerful psychological weapons, backed up with rigged boxes, suppressed ballots, caged voters, 8-hour voting lines, no more ballots, and voter ID laws targeting minorities and Democrats.

This isn't an election. This is warfare. This isn't merely a direct hit on American democracy.

It's a treasonous, pre-emptive nuclear strike. It's the Bush Doctrine turned on Americans ourselves. WE are the enemy in its sights, the reasoning, reasonable American public capable of tossing Republicans out of power and entitled to do so. Unless we are stopped.

The GOP's psyop campaign has been deployed with the full support of the mainstream media (radio, tv, and print). That's evident from simple deduction and from contrasting the likes of Wolf Blitzer and Sean Hannity with Walter Cronkite and Edwin R. Murrow. The Constitution empowers a free, vigorous, investigative media. History teaches that our radio, TV, and print outlets can ably defend democracy when they choose. The question now is, why aren't they?

What do we do now? We--and I mean you, too, moderate and decent Rightwing Republicans (if there are any)--have the power to stop it. Together, we can file lawsuits, boycott advertisers, expose the psyops for what it is, demand issues coverage, not lipstick BS, and continue to flag the lies.

If we don't, if we lose this one, I don't think we'll have another opportunity, if only because advertising, marketing, and the military have compelling interests in refining psyops ad infinitum, and the beneficiaries of Bush's still unfathomed corruption have a compelling interest in ensuring that nobody else get close to their pile of booty. Four more years to refine illegal domestic espionage, four more years to wreck the economy and trash the federal government (see The Wrecking Crew), four more years of for-profit prisons needing ever more prisoners, four more years of homeland concentration camps, four more years defining political protest as terrorism, four more years of war, and war, and more war, four new years of arch-Christianist Sarah Palin near or at the launch button?

I'm just not seeing how we survive that. I'm not seeing why the vast majority of Americans of any stripe would want to, short of mass psychological manipulation.

Strategies, anyone?

The Lord of the Flies: Karl Rove, John McCain, and Election 2008

Amazed, astonished, appalled it's a virtual dead heat? Here's the reason.

We're watching different picture shows.

Images have always been a key part of political campaigns, but when Kennedy beat Nixon, Republicans learned that feelings trump thoughts every time.

Republicans unveiled Willie Horton, not even a little concerned about the long-term consequences for America's race relations. They knew the Horton script played on deep-seated race fears and would escalate our collective national guilt into a paranoid projection that many would be powerless to resist.

Ronald Reagan: Image personified. W: That uniquely American cowboy icon packaged as the Marlboro Man. McCain: War hero, maverick. "The Right Stuff." These are Good Daddy archetypes that bypass our brains and go directly to our oldest, most irrational fears, and trigger a panic about the state of our security.

The Strong, Good Daddy image is meant to play directly to our inner child. Contrast Republican messages about Hillary and Sarah and you'll see its female counterpart. Hockey mom Palin is pretty, fearless, maternal, upfront: Good Mommy, aka Pitbull in Lipstick, Mother, womb. Hillary is the other half of the Good/Bad duality. Bossy (pants suit), shrill, controlling, bitchy, inscrutable: Mean Mommy, aka emasculating: vagina dentata, latent dyke.

The GOP strategy works two ways. It isn't only that fear-based archetypes bypass our brains and render rational argument irrelevant. It's also that archetypal imagery like this, that speaks to the inner child, calls out the inner child, not the thinking, rational adult.

Show me a dictator who doesn't get this.

What's going on here, consciously and deliberately orchestrated by Karl Rove and the GOP, isn't a contest about what's best for the country. It's not about issues. It's really just a re-enactment of Lord of the Flies. Unfortunately for us and for the planet, the rational, problem-solving kid cannot withstand the fear of the beast. Reason, order, calm, the collective good, and the disciplined evolution of solutions isn't anywhere near as gratifying as fun, war, red meat, and individual survival.

McCain, Palin and the Right are to Jack and his tribe what Obama, Biden, and the Left are to Ralph and his tribe. That is why, for example, the inner Rightwing child isn't at all offended by McCain's adolescent, vulgar "bomb bomb bomb, bomb-bomb Iran" jibe. Their inner kid is thrilled. What could be more fun! (At this point, it's not really about reality, of course. Though he will learn to his horror, their inner kid doesn't yet know the part about torsos spilling entrails, or blown-off legs. All he knows is camping out in the back yard where Daddy and Mommy are close by if the need arises.) "Maverick's" just a big word for coloring outside the lines. What could be more natural? What could be better?

Captured by primitive terrors prodded daily into life by W's war on--guess what? Terror!--the inner Righwing child just cannot hear--much less be moved by--appeals to reason, experience, sanity. He is regressed.

Sometimes reality is its own parody. Through Sarah, future son-in-law Levi Johnston has become McCain's virile, promiscuous, bellicose young avatar, and he speaks for and he calls out all the other Levis out there:

"The boyfriend of Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin's pregnant daughter describes himself on his MySpace site: 'I'm a fuckin' redneck who likes to snowboard and ride dirt bikes. But I live to play hockey. I like to go camping and hang out with the boys, do some fishing, shoot some shit and just fuckin' chillin' I guess. Ya fuck with me I'll kick ass.'"

Elsewhere, Johnston admits to having a girlfriend (Sarah's daughter, Bristol), but in the section of the MySpace page where it asks about children, he wrote, "I don't want kids." Of course he doesn't! He is a kid.

Like his older brother who will be driving for senior officers in Iraq--they don't leave the Green Zone--Levi doesn't have to worry about reality, and if he ever should, Mommy and Daddy will make sure it's all all right: No wedding? Knocked up? Whatever. Iraq? Whatever. It's all good. It's the Lord's work.

This is not so different from the legions of Rightwingers who cheer when Bush says "Bring it on," but don't actually volunteer to fight. McCain has done that for them vicariously. This isn't about reality. It's all unfolding at mythic levels where a man is a hunter/killer and a woman is a pretty hockey mom.

Here's the deal: Feelings trump thoughts every time. The GOP gets it; we don't.

As the Washington Post reported recently:

Rick Davis, campaign manager for John McCain's presidential bid, insisted that the presidential race will be decided more over personalities than issues during an interview with Post editors this morning.

"This election is not about issues," said Davis. "This election is about a composite view of what people take away from these candidates."

This not only explains the power of GOP marketing. It also explains why the GOP can lie, and lie, and lie, and lie without ever paying a price at the polls.. The facts that contradict its messaging may be regularly blipped across our screens, but the party and the message are impervious because our kid isn't capable of using facts to manage his fears. That's not where he's at. Our kid responds only to myths. Archetypes.

Apparently this is almost incomprehensible to Democratic campaigns. Time and again, we shout out the myriad catastrophes wrought by the Bush administration, time and again we point to McCain's enthusiastic collaboration (he voted with Bush 90%-95% of the time). Time and again, we ask voters if they're better off now than they were when Bush took office. But for all our efforts, at best, the margin between Obama and McCain fluctuates a point or two.

The facts are well known, but the facts are irrelevant, just as they were irrelevant in 2004. By all logic, Bush would have been defeated. But it wasn't about logic.

Today's voters know the record--at least the parts of it that comes home, such as gas prices and home foreclosures and Bush's idle fiddling while New Orleans drowned. But that was then. This is now, and there's an uncertain future ahead.

The most profound emotion is fear. If told often enough that Obama will raise your taxes, Obama is a closet Muslim radical, McCain is a maverick, Palin cuts waste, Palin is ready now, don't let reporters be mean to Good Mommy, the voters--in a spasm of deliberately induced regression--will let their feelings trump their thinking.

Two other points, quickly.

(1) The GOP shores up this induced mass regression by vote caging, black box tinkering, and erecting hurdles, confusion, and fear for all Democratic voters. Expect that again BIG TIME this year.

(2) Obama will have a hard time playing his own fear card, which is the one thing he must do if he hope to win. He has denounced the tactic, pledged a higher level of campaign, seems sincerely committed to campaigning on the issues, and seems dispositionally uncomfortable with hitting below the belt.

But the facts are what the are: This election is about images, not issues. He'd better get into that picture show.

Nagging Questions About Rev. Wright? Not.

Not for anyone who's thinking.

Revelations about a 30-second outtake from one of Rev. Jeremiah Wright's sermons were not brought to us by Friends of Obama. They were brought to us by Enemies of Obama. That, in itself, gives me reason not to fall all over myself in fear and loathing. For that's exactly what we were meant to do. We were meant to keep this in the public eye, to raise "overlooked" issues with the outtake, and to blame Obama for not controlling the mind and the mouth of his former pastor.

Maybe you can, but I can't be played that easily.

Also, it occurs to me that we are dealing with one 30-second outtake from one sermon in a 30-year career. I can tell you that there are many 30-second outbursts I wish that I could take back. I'm sure you have a few, as well. Would you appreciate the whole world's forming its enduring opinion of you on that basis? No, you wouldn't. It's not fair, it's not right, and it's not kind.

Today, none other than Michael Crowley of The New Republic is raising a "nagging question" about Wright's comments about HIV-AIDS. It's kind of gullible of someone in Crowley's place to keep playing into this faux "scandal," and I wish he would shut up. However, since he hasn't, there are a couple of things I'd like to point out.

It is a fact that the Reagan Administration stalled unconscionably on dealing with the then just-emerging AIDS epidemic. Given its hideous embrace of the far-Right Christianist extremists' demonizing of gays, it's not at all improbable that the delay was intentional. At the time, the disease was thought to be a "gay" disease. Why not let it run its course and wipe out a few million gay men?

Anyone, repeat, anyone who thinks such a thing impossible knows nothing about history. No government of longer than a few years' duration has ever declined to eliminate its enemies in one way or another, including Christian monarchies. It happens.

Germ warfare happens, too. And so does experimentation on African Americans without their knowledge or consent. Horrors like the Tuskegee Syphilis Study occurred, and what's more, Tuskegee is deeply embedded in the collective memory of African Americans, and why wouldn't it be?

I am suggesting that, in a world in which smallpox was deliberately introduced into Native America to cause a genocide, in which Saddam Hussein, Mao, Stalin, Rwanda, Darfur, Joseph Mengele, Hitler, the Holocaust, Tuskegee, Reagan's stalling on dealing with HIV/AIDS, and Bush's subverting scientific study of air pollution and global warming are possible, it isn't at all paranoid to suspect that a hostile administration might perpetrate genocide on its own people.

Is it a fact? I don't know. I don't know why Wright reached that conclusion. Nobody has asked him. All I can say is that I was working as a lobbyist in Washington, DC, for a clinical laboratory association at the time. We were keenly concerned about HIV/AIDS because our constituents handle human blood, tissue, and other fluids all day every day, and my nose was buried in the Federal Register, the Congressional Record, and a myriad newsletters devoted to timely updates on the federal government's response to the new virus.

It was nothing short of boggling that the Administration took as long as it did to take action, and that it acted only because a Democratic Congress forced it to do so. So I know, personally, that the Reagan Administration delayed, and I believe the Reagan Administration did so to appease the "Christian" Right, and that it intended by stalling on HIV/AIDS epidemiological research funding, vaccine development funding, and public education funding to let the virus do as much damage as possible in the gay community. Unfortunately for us all, HIV/AIDS, like tuberculosis, smallpox, and the flu, is an pandemic that affects us all and is decimating Africa.

The point is this. When we see our own government ignore genocides like Darfur and Rwanda, and treat Black Haitian refugees differently than white Europeans, it isn't crazy for African Americans to be deeply, deeply suspicious of these things. It's crazy not to be. There is plain historical context for those suspicions. Whether they are correct is a separate question that history as yet has not answered.

Finally, Rev. Wright is his own person, responsible for his own actions. It is unreasonable, unjust, misleading, and unkind to suggest that Obama is somehow complicit in Rev. Wright's sermons.

I'm tired of the GOP's lying, distortions, and character assassinations. I don't want any part of that nastiness, and I won't allow myself to be sucked into criticizing Obama, much less fearing him, because Karl Rove wants me to.

We'd better hold ourselves to a higher standard of reason if we expect to have a better government than the one Karl Rove has provided for the last seven years. That means ignoring red herrings like a 30-second outtake from one sermon of a widely respected pastor with a 30-year career. We're being had. Again. Anyone who falls for this stuff makes an oyster look like a Rhodes Scholar.