Shame on me for reading young Conor in the first place, but this is beyond stupid:
I’d suggest that folks who use this silly knife and bazooka analogy reflect on the politicians who are elected in the United States. Check out our presidents and senators. You won’t find a lot of people who take the bazooka approach to public discourse. Angry, self-righteous bile spewing isn’t actually effective.
What would you call the Willie Horton ads, what would you call the Swiftboat ads, what would you call the “Daisy” ads? I get that in each case, the presidential candidate didn’t get tough with anybody, Mr. Gittes, his ad men did, but that’s a meaningless distinction, especially since young Conor is arguing against the political value of Keith Olbermann here.
To suggest that invective is completely ineffective in American public discourse is idiocy. As operative after operative commented about after the Tucson shooting, politicians use over-the-top rhetoric because it works.
Update. Also too, Richard Nixon, e.g.
A telling anecdote recounted by Pat Buchanan to New Yorker writer George Packer last year captures the dark spirit that still hovers around the GOP. In 1966 Buchanan and Richard Nixon were at the Wade Hampton Hotel in Columbia, S.C., where Nixon worked a crowd into a frenzy: “Buchanan recalls that the room was full of sweat, cigar smoke, and rage; the rhetoric, which was about patriotism and law and order, ‘burned the paint off the walls.’ As they left the hotel, Nixon said, ‘This is the future of this Party, right here in the South.’ ”
Mattminus
What you don”t understand is that republicans are , by definition, incapable of angry, self-righteous bile spewing.
arguingwithsignposts
Wow.
Nothing about “pallin’ around with terrorists, either.” I guess if you say “the gentleperson from (state)” before you lambast someone, it doesn’t matter.
Of course, this is the guy who said he had always admired Jonah Goldberg’s intellect or some such.
Sapristi
10 for the Chinatown reference.
Dave
Hell…McCarthy rode venomous political rhetoric into the national spotlight. What history does Conor read?
Athenae
Also fucking NIXON, but hey, who can remember all that stuff anyway?
Not to mention how many people our politics kill every year through denial of services and vicious and deliberate ignorance of poverty. But hey, that’s done with nice words at cocktail parties so it can’t be uncivil.
A.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@Dave:
Ignorance is bliss.
elvis nixon (formerly Judas Escargot)
From young Conor’s text:
Um… FOX News’ entire fecking business model has hinged on the “politics as war” framing for at least 10 years. Has this kid not been paying attention?
I have an instinctive mistrust of anyone who implies that liberals should not “fight back”: It makes me wonder what their hidden motives just might be.
matoko_chan
meh.
more spoof, DougJ.
the right rode the racebaiting anti-intellectualism tiger for 50 years of victory.
now they cant get a bridle on it, and the demographic timer and Salam-Douthat stratification on cognitive ability are going to doom the TP/GOP to perpetual defeat.
all they have left is spin.
EDK and Conor are both glibertarian intellectual whores.
the bankstahs and the socons bought and paid for them.
BGinCHI
Find the girl. Just find the girl, Mr. Gittes.
Ash Can
It’s not “angry, self-righteous bile spewing” if you agree with it. The other side spews bile; your side simply presents facts (and maybe gets a little emotional in the process, because, goshdarn it, who doesn’t love their country and hate seeing what’s happening to it?).
Chris
I am not a fan of continuous bile-spewing in general. Still I have to agree with this. And last I looked, Olbermann’s bile was sending his ratings up, not down, which should confirm that.
MikeJ
Nixon wasn’t all talk though. He really wanted to have journalists who disagreed with him killed.
stuckinred
Where’d ya get the midget?
rob!
I read Sully every day–or check in, at the very least–but I know to abstain when he’s away because I find Conor’s opinions completely absurd.
eemom
OT, but we can haz post about nice controversial topic that will generate lots of flame wars plz? I haz a bored. kthxbai.
ps: here’s a little something to get you started
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/26/opinion/26goldberg.html?ref=opinion
cleek
god i hate when Sully’s away. Friedersdorf is so bad.
no, killing people isn’t the object. in a war, the object is to get your opponents to accept your demands by using violence and destruction as leverage. killing people is a means to the goal, not the goal itself.
we didn’t fight WWII because we wanted to kill Japanese and German people; we killed Japanese and German people because we wanted to force Japan and Germany to change their behavior.
4jkb4ia
DougJ!! Taegan Goddard has posted (by a subtle hyperlink) that Newt Gingrich is actually the author of “Winning The Future”. Amazon page and everything.
stuckinred
BREAKING BIRTHER NEWS!!!!
sukabi
@eemom: the byline to that piece reads like a bad joke… a warmongering jew and a warmongering arab walk into a bar….
Steve
It’s not a meaningless distinction at all. It’s standard practice to attack your opponent through surrogates while the candidate personally remains above the fray. Bush’s dad did not personally narrate the Willie Horton ad. This was also the goal of the “I support this message” rule – to make candidates stand behind their negative ads.
It’s rare to see successful politicians who go around ranting like Glenn Beck, and the ones that do are virtually all Congresspeople who represent safe districts. Sarah Palin exemplifies the negative style but you might have noticed that she didn’t actually win and her negatives are sky-high. Historically, Nixon/Agnew was one of the few exceptions and their example doesn’t necessarily prove that anyone else can follow in their footsteps.
The example DougJ is looking for is Newt Gingrich’s GOPAC memo, the one where he told Republicans to describe their opponents with words like “corrupt” and “traitor.” There’s no question that Republicans took the advice to heart and that they’ve enjoyed much success with this sort of rhetorical style, but it’s important to analyze what exactly works about this approach and not merely to conclude that you can always win by calling your opponent a traitor. As you can see at the link, an equally important component of Newt’s advice was using positive, nonthreatening language to describe oneself.
Finally, I think Alan Grayson’s example is at least a little instructive.
Villago Delenda Est
Conor is one of those lunkheads that, if you beat him repeatedly with a clue-by-four, he still wouldn’t get it.
4jkb4ia
Friedersdorf is ignoring the main point. KO is beloved because he has strong liberal beliefs, not necessarily because of his tone, and because he brought them to television for the people who relied on TV news. Remember that John wrote all of his relatives thought KO thought he was Edward R. Murrow. You can’t get Murrow-like stature with angry rants.
Villago Delenda Est
@cleek:
It’s not like these keyboard commando types know anything, at all, about warfare, after all. Hell, they break into cold sweats within a block or two of a recruiting station.
morzer
Conor Friedersdorf… an idiot without a savant.
jrg
My favorite Conor post today started like this:
Gee, thanks sport!
DougJ DougJson
@4jkb4ia:
Where?
sukabi
@Villago Delenda Est: they’re keeping their favorite pilonidal cyst irritated, just in case there’s an emergency draft instituted…
matoko_chan
@Villago Delenda Est: they believe all is fair, as long as they get “divided gubmint”.
EQUAL representation for their side, no matter how vile, stupid, or counterfactual their ideas are.
DougJ DougJson
@Steve:
It’s a meaningless distinction when his point is that invective doesn’t work.
BGinCHI
Most of your posts lack Chinatown references. Really disappointing.
Now get to work and let’s hear some snark about right wing idiots AND jokes with reference to “doing it like a Chinaman.”
4jkb4ia
The knife/gunfight metaphor is so old that the gunfight doesn’t just refer to angry rants. The gunfight is being intent on destroying you. The president and the Senate minority have powers like the filibuster and the entire executive branch to thwart/destroy their political opponents. This is why politicizing the civil service is such a big deal.
stuckinred
@BGinCHI: Aren’t you glad no one told you?
4jkb4ia
@DougJ DougJson:
Amazon–“Winning the Future: A 21st Century Contract with America” by Newt Gingrich On Political Wire yesterday.
Stillwater
@Ash Can: Exactly. Saying that Second amendment remedies would cure our country of the commiegaymuslimfascisticbrown-people cancer infecting our country is just an accurate description of things. It’s the other side that gets all self-righteous and biley when they deny the truth and accuracy of that description.
But just to show they’re above the fray, the Conors will reluctantly concede, for the sake of moving the discussion to a higher plane, that both sides do it.
Steve
@DougJ DougJson: His point is that invective doesn’t work in any other way than motivating the base. Do you disagree? Do you think Keith Olbermann and Rush Limbaugh win over a lot of political moderates? I sorta doubt Nixon and Buchanan were in that sweaty room with a nonpartisan crowd, too.
We’re talking about a lot of different things here. I wouldn’t call the Willie Horton ad “invective” in the same sense as Limbaugh or Olbermann. The ad likely would have been counterproductive if the narrator had come out and said, “The Democrats want to set black criminals loose to kill you while you sleep.” The point of keeping the message below the radar was to tap into people’s primal instincts while avoiding the backlash that would result from running a blatantly racist ad. Take the Grayson/Olbermann approach if you like, but you have to be able to deal with the backlash.
Do you really think the Willie Horton ad worked because of “invective”? Is it “invective” to talk about young bucks? You might also look at the Obama/McCain election as a data point on the invective issue.
Culture of Truth
George HW Bush said Dukakis was trying to bring down America.
DougJ DougJson
@Steve:
Yes, Buchanan-Nixon built a whole new political coalition on political invective.
EDIT: None of my examples were ads aimed at motivating the base, not Daisy, not Horton, not Swiftboat.
It’s not just about motivating the base, no.
El Cid
@cleek:
Maybe the case at the policymaking level. A lot of Americans were happy with that, and even more so conservative populists.
Steve
@DougJ DougJson: Swiftboat, I think, was very much aimed at the base, and it’s also a classic case of the candidate keeping his hands clean while someone else does the dirty work. Do you think it would have worked for Bush to say “John Kerry shot himself to get a medal” in every stump speech?
No one has built anything like the Buchanan-Nixon coalition on the left, and I’m not sure they ever will. It remains a mystery to me why the independent voters have no problem breaking bread with the angry paranoid R base but they’re turned off by the angry paranoid D base; however, that seems to be the way things are. Also, there’s simply more anger and paranoia on the right, and thus a bigger base. Did you see the PPP poll the other day: 28 percent of voters want a presidential candidate more conservative than the Republican party (who would that even be?) while only 14 percent want a candidate more liberal than the Democrats. Republicans will fight hard to keep that 28% inside their tent even if they scare a few independents by doing so; Democrats are less motivated to fight for the 14% at the expense of the middle.
handy
I wonder if Conor and the other “thoughtful” cons like Douthat have stated for the record their thoughts on the Faux heads and Limbaugh. I get Steve’s point about motivating the base, but the problem is this stuff has the aroma of hypocrisy. Now that Olbermann is fired/quit/whatever, it’s cool now to talk about how his style was so abrasive and this was his undoing. Honestly, I’m not even a KO fan but the whole basis of this article is suspect to me.
Rick Taylor
Speaking of which, I got my copy of Nixonland in the mail yesterday. What was our first reading assignment and when is it due?
Stillwater
@jrg: Good catch. That’s the most important tool of the political propagandist: when he’s criticizing his opponents for reflexively interpreting everything through an ideological filter but wants to prevent himself from being subject to the same judgment, he literally goes meta: he’s non-ideological, just calling balls and strikes, so you, dear reader, can trust him.
ETA: That’s not to say Conor was doing that in cited post, just a general observation.
Southern Beale
This just cracked me up! Arkansas super market uses “family shield” to cover current US Magazine because it features Elton John, his partner & their new baby.
MikeJ
@El Cid:
The conservatives mostly didn’t want to fight Mr. Rosenfelt’s war at all. The republicans picked their side in the war on fascism, and it wasn’t ours.
BTD
Don’t tell that to Sully:
Sentient Puddle
@Rick Taylor: I think through the end of the first chapter by Super Bowl Sunday. I think.
Could we get a reminder on that?
EDIT: This Sunday, and through chapter two.
freelancer
Some “Primal Scent”-bait from Conor:
Dude, break up with your gf, or tell your parents to split. This is one of the worst metaphors and paragraphs about politics EVER.
retr2327
Conor is pretty tedious, but Steve at 34 is right: Conor was specifically discussing whether KO’s style was effective at converting non-believers. And within that limited framework, I’d have to say Conor was making a valid point: I doubt that anyone who didn’t already agree with KO would end up changing positions after one of his special comments/rants, especially the more recent ones. Truth is, I don’t think success agreed with him all that well.
Hell, I agreed with him on most things and still found him hard to take. Both Rachel and O’Donnell are much more effective, in my view, unless you’re just looking for your daily dose of echo-chamber. And listening to Ed Schultz reminds me of nothing so much as that anti-immigration business loon they used to have on CNN; what was his name again? Spare me.
Flame on . . . .
stuckinred
@Southern Beale: Confucius say bird who fly upside down have crack-up!
The Grand Panjandrum
Here is the first paragraph of Conor’s latest post at Sully’s place:
Jesus Babbling Christ, somebody tape a C-note to that boy’s forehead so he can get some pussy the next time he leaves the house. He’s entering Bobo territory with that drivel.
handy
@Steve:
Most definitely but it’s effect went beyond “the base.” Mainstream news media discussed it as a legitimate issue. It was a successful gambit against all the questioning about W’s Vietnam record (see both sides do it).
Willy Horton played into the fear created in part by the daily 11 o’clock news cycle of the threat of violent criminals. That tough on crime stuff works. Insinuating your opponent is weak works.
Steve
@handy: I think Conor’s point is “I prefer milder rhetoric myself, so it must be the case that milder rhetoric is more effective politically.” (Conversely, plenty of folks who prefer bomb-throwing are still convinced Alan Grayson had the right approach to victory notwithstanding the evidence to the contrary.)
I still think Reagan was the master. He managed to appear reasonable and nonthreatening, but he didn’t do it by going on and on about how Democrats have good ideas too and bipartisanship is the highest goal. He managed to convey to voters, without sounding like Rush Limbaugh or Pat Buchanan, that Democrats have horrible ideas and that voting for them would be a disaster for the country. That’s a tricky political formula but he did it.
The Grand Panjandrum
@handy: No. Insinuating that Dukakis wouldn’t protect white women from being raped by black men worked.
Craig
@freelancer: My jaw dropped when I read that. It may not be true that all conservatives have weirdly passive-aggressive attitudes about sex but…a lot of them seem to.
Steve
@handy: My point remains that the Willie Horton ad was not “invective,” or anything close to it. “Invective” means using rhetoric like a talk radio ranter. It is not synonymous with dirty politics in general.
Villago Delenda Est
@MikeJ:
Pat Buchanan has said as much in the past. That we fought on the wrong side (the communist side) during WWII.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
….and on that night, Pat and Shelley’s marriage was consummated at last.
I found my copy of Nixonland yesterday, I was also wondering about the schedule.
@freelancer: You made it farther than I did. I think someone got a little too much praise from a high school English teacher.
handy
@Steve:
So he’s a concern troll. And from my understanding of the dynamics of his race, Grayson didn’t lose just because he was some mean lefty who said impolite things about his opponents.
DougJ DougJson
@BTD:
Thanks, I made “The decadent Left in its enclaves on the coasts” a new category for all links to Daily Dish.
Villago Delenda Est
@BTD:
Ready for war, but not in the sense of they, themselves, signing up to fight in it, but for someone else to do it, and they, of course, don’t want to pay for it, so we’ll borrow money from the Chinese and put the entire magilla “off budget” so we won’t have to think about how our grandkids will be paying for it.
cleek
@Villago Delenda Est:
…until the Dems get control of the White House – then we’ll be unrelenting in our drive to make sure everyone knows how much money is owed.
The Moar You Know
“If the President does it, it is not illegal.”
How much longer are we, as a nation, going to have to collectively pay for the sins of this now long-dead mad dog? He fucked up EVERYTHING, from our discourse to the actual rule of law.
Stefan
no, killing people isn’t the object. in a war, the object is to get your opponents to accept your demands by using violence and destruction as leverage. killing people is a means to the goal, not the goal itself. we didn’t fight WWII because we wanted to kill Japanese and German people; we killed Japanese and German people because we wanted to force Japan and Germany to change their behavior.
On the other hand, I’m fairly convinced that we fought the Iraq War pretty much because we wanted to kill Arab Muslims, not because we actually had any coherent policy demands we wanted Iraq to accept.
Mike E
@handy:
It’s a kick ’em when their down (or talk shit about ’em when they leave the room) kinda thing. KO repeatedly dared any of his critics to walk up to him and say their weak-ass shit to his face, esp. Bill’O. This is nothing but low hanging fruit for the conservative coward.
fucen tarmal
are the trained seals of the right, still clapping about how olbermann hurt their fe-fes?
they still don’t get what he did, and why he was important.
sure he could throw a punch or two, but what he did, what was important, and i have to think the people that pay these performers get this, is he connected the dots.
he took all sorts of disparate little corners of america,left side, and was a clearing house. you could google olbermann, or his guests, or whatever, and find content that the rest of the media ignored , or didn’t know existed.
he was left on tv, when left on tv wasn’t cool, but more importantly, at the exact time when the left could connect through blogs and social networks. when they could bypass much of the corporate structure and still have a voice that could reverberate enough to move up the pyramid as well as out.
i got tired of his schtick, but i didn’t get tired of the right complaining about it.
tkogrumpy
@stuckinred: That one cracked me up in the sixth grade. Cracked…. up…No?
Villago Delenda Est
@Stefan:
Well, just look at the honed under fire leadership of the war of aggression against Iraq: Bush, a guy who deserted from the National Guard, and Cheney, five time exemption draft dodger.
Mike E
@fucen tarmal: Nicely enumerated. Michael Moore makes me cringe, also, but I lurve him for the aneurysms he creates in his intended audience.
Zifnab
@The Moar You Know:
It’s not like Nixon just came and went.
He kicked down the door, and the barbarians have been rushing through ever since. Ford, Reagen, Bush Sr, Bush Jr, hell even Carter and Clinton were happy to make use of the gapping holes left in our Constitution when they felt it necessary.
All that said, I think our grandparents were somewhat pampered. The era that preceded the 1930s was controlled by an amoral plutocratic oligarchy. FDR, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, and LBJ were the exceptions, not the rule. The question is whether we’re going to keep regressing back to the days of Grover Cleveland or whether we’re going to turn ourselves back around again. Nixon wasn’t anything particularly new.
Ash Can
OT, but this story cracked me up. Anyone who says Barack Obama is a coward doesn’t understand what it takes to go to Green Bay only days after telling the nation you’re rooting for the Bears over the Packers in the NFC championship game.
Kryptik
I find it hilarious how these right-wing fuckoffs build their successes almost wholly out of lies, invective, and poisonous rhetoric, then once they have their wins, turn around and chide Democrats for believing that ‘poisonous rhetoric works in any way’.
It’s such fucking gall, and it’s such a fucking blasphemy that it works for them.
matoko_chan
@arguingwithsignposts: hes a ross douchebag fanboi.
geg6
@jrg:
Yes. This exactly. What an idiot.
To be fair, he’s not any more or less stupid than our own ombudsman. I seriously think they are the same person. I’ve seen a pic of Conor. Never seen one of EDK, let alone one of them together.
geg6
@Rick Taylor:
Intro and first two chapters, I believe. Starts on Sunday.
sixers
I’m not a fan of Olberman for the same reason Jon Stewart put him in the same catagory as O’Rielly during his rally but there was a time during the early part of the Iraq war where he was the only main stream person on TV questioning it continually. That itself deserves credit.
Also I know the economy played a big part in the GOP success in the past election but how much did angry bile whipping up the base affect turnout? I’m thinking it helped.
When I read Conor I picture him writing with his nose up in the air.
roshan
I think self-righteous is a reserve word for criticizing people on the left. It doesn’t matter if what Olberrmann did on his show was proper fact-checking or if he called-out the right people in the administration. He did that during the Bush administration and also during the current one. Conservatism has blatantly been on the wrong side of facts/reality for the better part of the last decade and that must hurt a lot for conservatives who tend to believe that their ideology is the sole truth. Conservatives also tend to identify themselves as working-class (ask O’Reilly, he will tell you), and hence if anyone points out that they are wrong or out-of-touch of reality and if that person is from the left or a liberal then that person can be easily labeled as self-righteous.
BTW, I’ve never heard of people on the right being called self-righteous but have heard them being called as hypocrites quite often.
rf80412
@Steve: They don’t win people over so much as try to explain to you what you really think, and thus turn you from a self-proclaimed moderate who doesn’t think too hard about how you vote and why into a partisan for one side or the other.
Trying to win over the other side’s base is an exercise in futility; the fence-sitters and ticket-splitters are the only new territory to be conquered. Republicans get this and lie like a rug about what they believe and what they plan to do, while Democrats don’t get it and are steadily drifting right as a result.
drkrick
@freelancer:
Does Conor mention whether the wife looks like a chunky Reese Witherspoon? Because I’m almost sure I read the Ivy League party version of that somewhere.
lllphd
don’t know if anyone else noticed his beyond the beyond ridiculous post on KO, claiming that keith’s kind of [insert extreme epitaphs here] rhetoric “could not be seen anywhere else on television.”
kid. you. not. he actually said that.
i suppose it’s impossible for an ostrich to actually know this, for, um, obvious reasons, but the view the rest of us get when you dig your head in the sand is, um, not so pretty.
Steve
@rf80412: That’s a good insight. I guess I’d counter that the people who are filled with rage, but don’t particularly care to identify with a political party until they hear a like-minded ranter, are a lot more likely to identify as Republicans at the end of the day. There’s something about the conservative mindset that relates to the paranoid style in American politics.
The Democratic version of the message that would appeal to unaligned, liberal-minded people is a lot less angry, I think, although not unemotional. The idea would be to show people that their values of compassion and community, values they assume every decent person shares, are actually supported by only one of the two political parties and opposed by the other one. I think there’s a lot of room to educate people on how government is a positive force in everyday life but you won’t reach many of them by yelling about how the Republicans don’t want you to have safe drinking water. Maybe I’m wrong, of course.
But even if talk radio works for the GOP, I don’t think it follows that what we need is a left-wing mirror image. It’s worth considering that maybe our audience is wired differently from theirs and needs to be approached differently.
Jay Andrew Allen
Unfortunately this thread will go unnoticed, because you didn’t bother e-mailing it to Conor. Ergo, it doesn’t exist.
jacy
@Jay Andrew Allen:
It’s funny how little Conor says he welcomes emails pointing out his blind spots. I don’t know anybody who as that amount of time to waste.
Rob
I’m the reader who wrote the letter at which young Connor took offense. I usually avoid Sully’s blog when he’s away, as to not angry up the blood. But I couldn’t let that one pass. You should read the original post to which I replied. Just. Wow.
Thnx for getting my back.
JWL
Packer got the location wrong. That speech was delivered in a Munich beer hall.
DougJ DougJson
@Rob:
For his first few days subbing, he was doing better than he used to. And then, yeah, he just went crazy about Olbermann.
Now he’s writing weird sex stuff.
geg6
@Rob:
You do good work. Keep it up. ;-)
Annelid Gustator
@DougJ DougJson: And, per usual, he continues to miss the point. He’s awfully obtuse.
grandpajohn
@Stefan: Which is probably one of the major reasons why we didn ‘t win it. That and the fact that the commander in chief was a moron
grandpajohn
@Jay Andrew Allen: Hmmm , of course they could also do what most truly open to criticism bloggers do and allow reader replies to directly respond and offer criticism , hey no e-mail involved everyone could see the response not just the blogger, but that assumes that they really want to hear criticism