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Sarah Palin will pry your Klondike bar from your cold dead fingers.

calendar   Thursday - July 17, 2008

I think I’ve been out-cyniced!

I read lots of other blogs. I read a lot of comments too.

Over at Pajamas media, I read Rick Moran’s piece Obama Tries To Rewerite History, wherein he explores having BO applying Harry Turtledove-like alternate histories as an explanation for the flip-flops and the constant “down the memory hole” rewriting of the Big O website. The basic unstated premise is that the voters are brain dead zombies with no short term memory, and that the fawning media is only too eager to forget to mention all BO’s old positions and statements; they just lap up whatever drivel he spews today, and report on that in glowing terms. Barry could do a 180 tomorrow and another one the day after, and the media would hardly notice it, shifting their viewpoints effortlessly to match his. But some of us notice it, and some of us can remember more than a week or two into the past, and some of have keyboards ...

I would like to point out a few uncomfortable facts for Mr. Obama. As he speaks of “success” and even “victory” in Iraq, his own party has already given in to defeat as both the speaker of the House and Senate majority leader pronounced the war “lost” months ago. The overwhelming majority of Democrats see this war as lost and a failure. Obama himself saw the war as “a complete failure” last summer at the exact same time he was calling the surge a “failure” and agitating for an “immediate withdrawal” from Iraq. He made no mention of consulting with our generals, or the Iraqi government, or anyone else:

“Let me be clear: There is no military solution in Iraq and there never was,” Obama said in excerpts of the speech provided to the Associated Press.

“The best way to protect our security and to pressure Iraq’s leaders to resolve their civil war is to immediately begin to remove our combat troops. Not in six months or one year — now,” the Illinois senator says.

Sounds pretty clear to me. But then, I guess I don’t quite have the knack of this counterfactual stuff because this is what he said on Tuesday: ...

Ok, Moran’s piece is decent, and it offers some explanation for the dynamic propaganda rewrites his website gets almost daily. But then I read the comments. From reader Mouse:

Truth is narrative. The truth about Iraq –what happened, Obama’s positions, the reality on the ground, the future– all this will be definitively written in the next few days during Barack’s over-seas trip. Barack will state it, the press will report it, and that will be History and that will be Truth.

With ten megatons of exposure everyone in America will then have the facts and that little six watt candle of a blog you’ve got won’t even be noticed, –and even if it is everyone will know you’re just making things up.

This anyway is what I think is the intent of Obama’s Chicago handlers: simply create reality through a lot of press, a reality favorable to Obama, and the only one most politically indifferent Americans will ever know.

Wow. He’s absolutely right. But to get there he may have to be an even greater cynic than I, with such lowered expectations that the hurdles that need jumping are in deep narrow slots in the ground. Damn. Reality is what TV tells us it is. Welcome to 1984, 24 years later. There is no content or thought. Today’s impression is all that matters. We are less than sheep.

Mr. Mouse also runs the Wannagetaburger blog where he expands on that theme a little, as he ties it into that New Yorker Magazine cover story from a couple days ago:

Working with a new concept. How about: Obama’s handlers aren’t political geniuses, but just very disciplined, well financed fellows with a script? By this idea, as long as the script is “correct”, in terms of responding to the given political dynamisms, they do all right. But when the dynamism changes, and they have to adapt, they stumble.

The illustration on point would be Iraq. It was supposed to be a quagmire, nobody foresaw the turn-around coming (nobody on the left). Barack would run as the antiwar candidate of superior judgment. But there has been a turn-around and his judgment stinks, and his attempt to reposition himself has been immensely clumsy, such that now nobody knows for sure just what his position is but neither the right nor the left trust him.
...
ertainly it was expected that if he won the primaries he would then tack toward the center. But there was no thought that he would have to tack to the center on Iraq, which would remain a disaster. Now that it’s not a disaster, but his repositioning is, he’s going to Iraq. But this is a seat-or-the-pants move, it wasn’t in the script, and I doubt that the puppet masters have any idea how it’s going to turn out.

I do though, expect that they know exactly what they’re going to attempt: It’s not that Barack is going to adjust his views to the reality on the ground, it’s that with all the publicity, reality is going to be made to adjust to his views.

His Iraq speech of a few days ago will be his position --still a 16 month time table. His speech after he comes back will affirm that the reality he saw on the ground supports the prescient judgment made in that speech before he left. Never mind whether it does or not, the press will define what Barack says as what is real. After all, reality is narrative, and the massive media coverage will confirm that what he saw is true and that what he suggests is wise.

I presume this is their intent, to use the fawning massive media to define a reality that will work until November.

But, there’s HOPE that some CHANGE will come about ... his reason that Obama will lose, and that the media will knock a couple holes in his stuffed shirt etc is that New York isn’t about to let Chicago steal the Spin Machine. Which also explains the magazine cover pretty well, as his earlier post shows. Today’s comment and post are a reiteration and extension of an earlier post that tries to suggest that Richard Daley is the King Maker here. But back to today’s alternate reality: allowing their Dem guy to lose is a fair price for NY to pay to keep their keys to the machine.

Damn. I have been out-cynic-ed!




read a little more in the NY Sun:

The reality is that without Mr. Daley’s backing, Mr. Obama would be running a very different kind of campaign. Part of the tactical genius for Mr. Obama’s campaign has been provided by his campaign consultant, David Axelrod, who also is a longtime operative in Mr. Daley’s operation.

A columnist with the Chicago Tribune, John Kass, explained the arrangement in an interview with CNN: “Richard M. Daley is the boss of [the] Chicago Machine. His spokesman was David Axelrod. Their candidate is Barack Obama. Who speaks for Barack Obama? David Axelrod. There’s no such thing as coincidences. Chicago politics doesn’t have coincidences.”

Interesting. And not something you read in every single right wing blog every day. Or hear on the news, ever. I’ve got to think about this some, because I don’t see the Why of it yet. What’s in it for Daley? Is Obama his Manchurian Candidate? To what end?


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Posted by Drew458   United States  on 07/17/2008 at 09:45 PM   
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