Clue for Luntz: The sooner America loses its sense of "American Exceptionalism" the sooner America will be ready to address its problems.

If anything, Our Great Party is nimble, flexible, and open minded. We will Evolve, and you freedom hating, rigid naysayers will be left in the dust. Of course our Great Party will find its way back, and soon, it is our very strength.

The TEA is Brewing, so dark, so sweet and tasty. We shall rain it upon you, so get out your wimpy liberal umbrellas.

If we had just come off of two terms of President gore most likely that 57% wouldn't have such a dim view of the future. Eight years of Bush/Cheney sent this nation over the cliff. It's going to take longer than two Obama terms to straighten things out. Lutz is completely cluesless.

And I wish the media would acknowledge the small numbers that turn out for these tea bag events and that most of them are bussed in. It absolutely is not where the country is. I think most Americans are embarassed by it.

To Freedom Lover of Liberty and All Things Absurdly Meaningless and Jingoistic--

Kudos to you if you're a parody troll.

However, if you are sincere, you should get some professional mental help ASAP, as you are suffering from very grand delusions and a brain addled by too much GOP propaganda.

Re: 57%

This is a good sign. The next generation won't have as much "stuff" as their parents. This is as it should be. The 20th century used up all the "stuff" (read: oil) so there won't be enough left for their descendents. The next step for the 57% is to accept this fact, to not be afraid.

Quintessence of irrelevance. Does anybody still care what happens on the Sunday morning talk shows?

Luntz is clearly all about language and media manipulation. He seems to have almost no clue about governance and its relationship to how society works.

Cokie seems to have cottoned onto that fact, at least to some extent. And she is a charter member of the inside-the-beltway crowd. She is nearly as authoritative on D.C. villagism as David Broder is.

The above troll message by free-cubed is interesting, too. It's exactly the kind of over-the-top rhetorical effort a losing sports team tries to demonstrate to pump itself up for the second half of a game that went very bad for them in the first half. It's only connection to reality is what it displays about the morale of the losing team when they don't want to face reality.

It's exactly the kind of over-the-top rhetorical effort a losing sports team tries to demonstrate to pump itself up for the second half of a game that went very bad for them in the first half.

Actually the tone reminded me more of the Onion's issue parodying Chinese propaganda, which is why I'm pretty sure it too is parody. But in these days one never knows.

Freedom Lover's post does two interesting things. First, it talks about the pending recovery of "our Great Party" - up and beyond the nation, or overcoming the current recession and financial scandals. Second, his post directly equates the GOP's interests with those of the Teabaggers - and neatly collapses their interests together into a single revenge-driven drive to regain political power.

So, thanks, Freedom Lover, for dispelling the carefully constructed (and false) claim that the Teabaggers are a nonpartisan populist uprising. Plainly, that is not what they are ... and you've done us all a favor by illustrating what this whole thing is really about. The 'baggers are a corporate-funded astroturf front for the Republican Party. Who apparently will spit corrosive acidic tea all over liberal umbrellas or something.

Tea is from China, so they are commie lovers. "open-minded"? Really? How many minorities have you voted in? "We will evolve". A teabagger who believes in evolution? A confused individual if not parody.

Frank Putz is still in denial.

Great news for Dems.

I fear that Cokie and her ilk are in the process of discovering that the creature they spawned has grown up and out of their, or any, control. She and her Beltway melieu may have understood that all that Luntzian rhetoric and extremist manuvering was all window-dressing on their Gentleman's Game of power, but no one told the rubes.

What do you know, a bunch of them actually believe in that nonsense, and are getting pretty angry about the way they've been used since Ronnie promised them they could all be rich, happy and screw all the people they didn't like. None of that's come true, and someone's gonna have to pay.

Sorry, Cokie, the time for the Beltway gang to be cringing was way before Sarah Palin became a household name, maybe back when Rupert got Fox, or you all clucked about a blue dress. The mob is loose now, and you're beginning to reap the whirlwind.

God save us all.

Freedom Lover is an established parody troll. S/he is quite good at capturing the insanity of the wingers.

I'd guess that Cokie Roberts puts a high value on the good order of the House, & guardians of the institution like her - who may be utterly cynical about what Republicans do off the House floor to get elected - will have been genuinely appalled by the spectacle Saturday of Republicans shouting down Democrats in the well of the House. And she'd be right to be. This kind of thing, which is an almost inevitable expression of the atmosphere on the right, really is intolerable.

Click the link in the post for "cringemaking" and read the comments on the ABC site. "Free Lover ..." is pretty understated compared to about half of the commenters there.

Poe's law in action...

I'm not generally impressed with Cokie Roberts' analysis

Oh, man. Now THERE'S some serious understatement.

I've never ever ever anytime in my entire life, EVER learned anything new or surprising from that woman opening her bland, lazy, ill-informed mouth except what the conventional wisdom was.

Yesterday.

The sooner America loses its sense of "American Exceptionalism" the sooner America will be ready to address its problems.

I don't think it's necessary for us to lose the Exceptionalism to solve problems. Previous generations managed.

Hmmm. I wonder if Jon Voight's totally wacky right-winginess has anything to do with why his own daughter (Angelina Jolie) has completely cut him out of her life? Voight started off as a Dem/liberal, somewhere along the way turned into a cranky right-winger who talks about the dangers of "marxism" all the time.

Seems readers on this thread are more aware than our Beltway Establishment about the genuine threat posed by the Palin-led populist movement -- or perhaps with just fewer Village interests to protect. Krugman got it today in the Times, but the realization is coming slowly that the GOP as they understand it no longer exists. The largely leaderless Palinite political movement has consumed the political party and not the other way around, like it is supposed to happen in a two-party system like ours. No established Republican leader who tries to stand up to this movement can survive politically.

Luntz is also a man to watch very closely. His baby-faced demeanor betrays the fact that he is a master manipulator of reality, which is always dangerous in a system like ours based on popular soverignty and the hope that there exists an educated voter out there to stabalize the system. Luntz creates the "frames" -- the slogans and other verbal manipulations -- by which the GOP can sell corporate pollution as "Clean Skies Initiatives" or "Health Forest" programs. But worse, as he did on This Week yesterday, he reports as "reality" the product of his own propaganda. 57% of Americans he said think the country is going to hell in a handbasket. Gee, where do you think they got that idea? From watching FOX perhaps? Or Luntz-inspired hysterical Republicans who equate a health care debate with Lexington and Concord with calls of Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death?

One year into the Obama administration and it is clear that the hook which Frank Luntz and the Conservative Movement think they can hang their hat on is: Government spending. Everything revolves around that.

For the issue to have traction between now and the 2010 elections, it is critical for conservatives to define that issue very narrowly. They must portray the flood of red ink the government is spilling as something Obama has done as a matter of arbitrary whim, not necessity. So, they disconnect government spending in the public's mind from any connection it has with the economic crisis we inherited from a Bush administration that doubled the national debt in just eight short years.

Government spending as an issue gives Republicans a two-fer: by severing this connection Republicans escape any blame for today's crisis. But it also is critical toward painting Obama as a radical -- and that is the critical engine that is powering these tea-party rallies.

In its own way, the government spending issue also allows secret or avowed racists, and others who may be religiously or culturally offended by the fact that we have a "secular, progressive, cosmopolitan, Harvard educated, liberal, elite" in the White House to express that class or cultural animosity (or hatred) in a politically acceptable way.

Conservatives know they have a winning issue in "government spending" -- even if it was the problems created on their watch has has created a need for so much of it -- because it can so easily be tied with a fear of higher taxes and job loss. And voters cannot be expected to understand the intricacies of the Keynsian argument for using government demand spending revive a stalled economy when even top economists differ on its results.

So, to the greatest extent possible, Democrats and liberals need to work at neutralizing the "radical socialist" charge by cementing in the public mind the connection between the deficits the government is running today and the economic emergency Obama inherited from the very people who are now so upset that he is trying to clean up their mess.

Republicans do love their connections to the Hollywood elite

They had Jon Voight, the periodontist, and Cliff Claven show up at the rally last week.

I think you're stretching the definition of "elite" here, Steve.

I stopped watching "this week" a while back. The discussions are almost totally without intellectual content.