Pretty clearly, Conservatives have been Left Behind.

It is very difficult, (virtually impossible), to defend lawlessness in a nation of laws. The Republicans are pounding the table because they got nothing - both the law and truth of the matter are not on their side! The only way the Republican party can gain back any semblance of relevancy and credibility is to call for full scale Congressional and DoJ investigations into who initiated and executed a torture policy in the name of our nation! -Kevo

It is a propaganda war. I am sure that there are some leaders on the right who realize that they are perpetuating lies. But they continue to lie because they know their bloodthirsty base wants to be fed these lies in order to justify their hatred of anything liberal. Its a con game. The con man, the Republican politician, knows he is selling snake oil, but he knows that his customers, the Republican voters, are gullible enough to buy his "product." And so it continues . . .

Actually this isn't about brainlessness or political angling or anything like that at all.

What it's about is who they are. For social conservatives abusiveness is the central fact of society and all of life.

The idea of torture committed with societal sanction gives them a woody like nothing else.

It's who they are.

You've identified the wrong causal mechanism. It's true that, ideally, the side pitching ideas that are foolish and reprehensible would stop doing so once they were forcefully challenged. But what's different here, as it often is, is that Democrats keep validating Republican ridiculousness.

Begala's George Mitchell quote sums it up nicely: "The only people that give any credence to Republican Senators' rhetoric is Democratic Senators." It's clear that many Democrats are running scared on national security, despite the evidence that the Republicans are loosing their advantage even in this area.

Obama's national security speech was good rhetoric (delivered too late) but adopts much of the Cheney perspective. Torture is bad, sure, but not bad enough that we need to know more about it or god forbid do anything about it - just move along. The MSM at best presents this as two sides to torture (who will win?) and at worst adopts a pro-torture perspective.

If Democrats went on offensive on this issue, we would move on. They continue to act as if Cheney isn't extremely unpopular and discredited, they continue to send the signal that they are not entirely sure of where they stand. That's why this debate can't move forward - they are enabling this Republican behavior.

Policy debates aren't supposed to work this way.

That's because this isn't a policy debate. I was going to call it a PR offensive, but Sheridan @ 9:42 offered a better description. It's a propaganda war and an attempt to discredit our nation's traditional, liberal, democratic values by those that would be happy to establish a conservative authoritarian regime. Scary shit.

I know people that love their pets. This despite putting up with fur and dander everywhere, the occasional urine or fece in the very wrong place, the barking and digging, the ruining of furniture. There are odors and medical bills and other, seeming endless costs and inconveniences. Often the damned animals aren't even performing a function such as companionship or protection. They're just, well, there. But the owners have had them around forever and it doesn't seem fair or humane to the animals to just have them put to sleep for no other reason than everyone is agreed they're basically a useless, noisy pain in the ass. Republicans are this nation's unruly dogs. You'd love to pay someone to have them all picked up and euthanized but explaining to the neighbors what you'd done is just too embarrasing. You know, you'd get those "looks", that uncomfortable silence as they pondered what kind of person you REALLY were. So you hope the damned things will soon die of old age, maybe get loose and run away or get hit by a car. Of course, I'm not even sure a '68 Buick Le Sabre could finish off Cheney........

This has become a media driven "event". So, many keep intoning "This is Really Really Important". Therefore, credit card bill flawed? Nah, let's lead with "Torture" - Obama waffles on DADT? Nah, let's lead with "Torture" - Pakistan becoming increasingly unstable? Nah, you guessed it, rachet up ye olde torture routine. Lovelock's Gaia worries increasing? Nope, torture leads the way. I wouldn't be surprised to see torture included in ESPN's Top 10 Plays of the Day.

History problem

Someone needs to dig up names and details of those Japanese who were tried and found guilty of torturing/waterboarding Americans in WW2.

Might some still be alive?
Someone needs to ask Cheney and friends:

Since waterboarding is not torture do you favor a pardon for these Japanese?

But these arguments are not debunked on Fox News and other propaganda outlets. They are speaking to their base, not to independents or moderates.

They know they are right, because their side is always right no matter what. Facts have a well-known liberal bias.

Can someone tell me the last time there was a serious policy debate about anything in this country?

The media present everything as a game - who's winning, who's losing - and simply don't bother to get the facts straight. Not to mention the corporate bias in favor of Republicans, even when the Republican record on governing continues to be truly abysmal, both fiscally and in every other sense.

So, the party that makes the most vociferous argument is frequently judged to be the winner.

And the average citizen, having been educated over a long period to ignore most of what government says and does, has practically no factual basis for coming to an informed conclusion.

The consequences of this noxious combination for matters that cut to the heart of who we are as a society are truly damning.

If the claim is debunked, the first side moves onto new claims. The right refuses to play by these rules -- they make bogus arguments, they fail, and then they repeat the exact same arguments again.

the right does this because they can. They can because the MSM supports it. Big Media is the propaganda arm of the cult of republicanism. They continue to prop them up in all manner of republican/conservative inanity, this and the Pelosi should resign sidebar just the latest cases.

Truth-based, reality-based political discourse in the US, and legitimate information flow to the American people will NEVER happen in the US until Big Media is brokenup. That Americans get more than 90% of their information through 4 or 5 mega-corporations controlled by a handful of republicans in corporate board rooms will forever doom the US to the republican/conservative death spiral if Americans do not find another source of information.

Policy debates aren't supposed to work this way.

Apologetics do. Movement conservatism is best considered a species of revealed religion.

"Cheney Actively Seeking Book Deal On Bush Years"

So that's why we're now seeing and hearing so much from a man who seemed to have lived under a rock for eight years, emerging occasionally to guide the President in a disastrous direction.

Or maybe he lived under a bridge. Jon Stewart tellingly called Cheney a troll. Just today, Gail Collins wisely advised us to pay no attention to the former Vice President until he undergoes therapy.

I must say that his speech scared me with his 27 references to 9-11 and warnings of the clear and present dangers that he sees.

homer www.altara.blogspot.com

These people are the proud inheritors of a long American tradition of "sore loserdom."

They have lost decisively, but the "Right will rise again!"

As long as democrats, like Obama yesterday, and therefore the entire media stick with Cheney's euphamisms (enhanced enterrogation, harsh methods, etc) they lose this debate.

This is why repubs are so disconnected from reality. Lie, lie big, and repeat it until it becomes accepted as fact. It worked well for them through the 90s. Big lies would be distributed across their propaganda network so that the same lie would appear to come from multiple sources - right wing radio, the NRA, Right wing church bulletins, etc. Thus, the big lies would be confirmed and verified.

The problem now is the residual effect of so many lies. They have constructed what amounts to an alternate universe. And the noise machine keeps churning along, expanding their universe with new lies every day. The true believers live in that artificial reality. To many moderates and independents, repubs have strayed so far from reality, that they literally appear insane.

> Policy debates aren't supposed to work this way.

> Apologetics do. Movement conservatism is best considered a species of revealed religion.

Exactamundo. Faith is belief in something, despite facts to the contrary.

Like Davis@10:33 and blueshifter@11:05, count me among those who see a striking correlation between neocons and evangelicals. The leader interests are wealth and power. The groupies embrace the ideology thru an apocalyptic prism that makes them impervious to rational thought. Posing rational arguments is NEVER going to work. Trying this over and over and over and over is the height of stupidity. Steve@10:02, I found your euthanize suggestion to be abhorrent.

But is it or is it not true that a great number of Americans who tune into Rush and company are not idiots ? What other audience do these folks have ? And as for the technique of continually lying through the american media, is anyone disputing the efficiacy of that technique ? It appears to me that it's worked quite well over the years, especially when a significant portion of the information pipeline is composed of the MSM.

"Movement conservatism is best considered a species of revealed religion."

"Exactamundo. Faith is belief in something, despite facts to the contrary."

These statements suggest that most of you here understand little about conservatism OR religious faith. Movement conservatism is much more intellectually diverse than what I see of movement progressivism. Conservatives actually disagree with each other on any number of issues, and debate is ongoing. I don't see that here. You all agree on every point, and assume that anyone who strays is "disconnected from reality." And you seem to have set up a straw man "Christian" who neither thinks for himself nor believes in science. In reality, religious faith is not contrary to science... it's just another way of understanding reality and man's place in it. I think of religion as poetry to the prose that is science. Many of us crave both. This does not make us stupid, nor should it cause you to mount your high horses. If you weren't so full of pride � if you could muster a little humility � you might be willing to consider that there are more things on heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy. The world is a much richer, more wondrous place when you open your hearts and minds to other points of view.

"What it's about is who they are. For social conservatives abusiveness is the central fact of society and all of life. The idea of torture committed with societal sanction gives them a woody like nothing else. It's who they are."

Is this really what today's "progressives" think? Is this nasty, small-minded and merciless stereotype really acceptable among your ranks? Because I see no one here calling you on it. This is the kind of mean-spirited, unloving invective that turned me away from your movement a few years ago. How can you possibly call social conservatives "haters" when you talk like this amongst yourselves? Isn't the cognitive dissonance deafening?

That, or they assume Americans are idiots, and repeating lies improves the likelihood we'll believe them.

Well, yes, this is what they believe. It at least kind of works.

Hmn... a Yoosta Bee.

Whether or not it will work remains to be seen, but this tactic of repeating a debunked claim as though it had never been refuted seems to be pretty standard procedure for conservative ideologues these days. The most egregious example is the "birthers," who keep rhetorically demanding why Obama won't release his birth certificate, almost a full year after he did just that, and at least eight months after the State of Hawaii officially vouched for its authenticity. Apparently this does work on addled minds, because Camille Paglia, that self-proclaimed Big Thinker, keeps repeating it as gospel.

A fine comment, Steve. One thing puzzles me: your statement that the film, Groundhog Day, was "occasionally difficult to watch." Personally, I thought that film was a rarity -- a hilarious American comedy growing out of a very serious moral viewpoint. I'm curious about your "difficulty."

You'll notice that the very same technique is being used by the creationists in their war against evolution. They make a claim, it is totally and completely refuted, but they continue to make the same claim again and again.

There has to be some sort of a mindset that works this way, a mindset that really isn't clued into reality, that doesn't recognize a fact when it hits them in the face. That the same mindset is so prominent in both groups leads one to suspect that they are at least overlapping groups if not the same group. I have no idea how to deal with this kind of thing, but obviously the victims need therapy.

I know, it's like:

?

(Sometimes it's fun to just stand still, with your mouth slightly agape, pretending you believe all of it, and everything is fine.)

It's social conservative learning disability.

It's the media who have the short-term memory problem. The Republicans keep bringing up the same discredited charges again and again because the media let them get away with it. They'll even put the same discredited charges at the top of their agenda, forcing Democrats to deal with it again, and again, and again.

In other words, the right does this crap because it works.

Karl Rove lifted these "repeat a lie often enough and it will assume a life of its own" techniques directly from the playbook of Adolph Hitler. Read about it here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Lie

Uh..this is how the GOP has won elections for the last 40 years. Simply LIE about everything. That's what they do. That's who they are. They have nothing else.

And the fact that our MSM has not long ago called them out on their profound--and now, their plain insane--dishonesty, just makes the situation that much more surreal. Having Fox News out there helping the GOP at every turn, repeating every idiotic lie, has helped turn what should have been a very short debate into a long-running nightmare.

This is, in short, a war for the reality of the American Voter. If voters buy the lies, the GOP comes back..if they don't, the GOP has had it.

But, this is all the GOP has. And I think it's important to remember that other than tapping into the racist outrage of a certain class of white male, the GOP has had to go with lies for nearly 50 years now. It's been quite a run.

I hope it ends soon, but the American voter is a strange bird. And Southern voters keep sending these complete freaks back to Congress. The GOP isn't over yet, unfortunately. And they can do a lot more damage on their way down to oblivion.

"Policy debates aren't supposed to work this way.

Apologetics do. Movement conservatism is best considered a species of revealed religion."

Posted by: Davis X. Machina on May 23, 2009 at 10:33 AM | PERMALINK

This, and pluege's earlier point about MSM bear repeating. Without the co-optation of our MSM by corporations that strive for profit above all, and with no social conscience whatever, the GOP would never have survived this long.

"The right refuses to play by these rules -- they make bogus arguments, they fail, and then they repeat the exact same arguments again."

I assume they don't play by the rules--by which you mean "learn from the evidence and adapt" like the rest of us do-- because their pig-headed refusal to learn is the source of their power. Mind you, it could be that they simply lack imagination, are profoundly incurious. In any case, the conservative movement hasn't "learned" since approximately 1900. In their ideal world, there is no social security, no income tax, and abortion and birth control are illegal. Needless to say, women can't vote. The America of the conservative mind is still a frontier waiting to be exploited by Christian, white, heavily armed men.

Eventually Americans will realize that the conservative movement is more of a personality disorder than a political philosophy. Even the media will figure out it out. They have spent 30 years pandering to Reagan conservatives so they need some time. They have to break a deeply ingrained habit.

Harry Franfurt's "On Bullshit" explains all of this very well, including why repeated counter-arguments are ineffective. Unfortunately, he doesn't have an answer for what would be an effective way to counter BS.