…linguist and cognitive scientist George Lakoff. Lakoff, a professor at the University of California –Berkeley and a founder of the Rockridge Institute, has emerged as the left’s message guru, the go-to guy for anyone interested in understanding why conservatives are winning the language wars and how liberals can retool their message. Sure, Kerry won a debate or two, but as Lakoff reminds his fellow liberals, “We have to get ourselves together.”

According to Lakoff, the red state-blue state split is deeper than most Americans realize. He described its dimensions in his earlier book Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think, which combined postmodern discourse theory with what might be called the “Who’s Your Daddy?” theory of American politics. The essence of Lakoff’s analysis is this: liberals and conservatives inhabit two opposing moral universes defined by competing visions of the ideal family. Conservatives subscribe to a “strict father” model that emphasizes discipline, self-interest, and competition. This is what makes George W. Bush tick. (That’s Bush the politician, not Bush the dad. Lakoff is careful to point out that these are political models, not descriptions of how people actually run their families). On the other side, liberals believe in a “nurturant parent” model with an emphasis on empathy, community, and fairness. No wonder we see ourselves as a nation of chest-thumping bullies and tax-and-spend girlie men.

Liberals shouldn’t even bother trying to win over hardcore conservatives, says Lakoff. But he thinks they have a shot at the middle-of-the-road swing voters who share parts of both worldviews. To do this, Lakoff says liberals must reframe every issue from tax cuts to the war on terror. The Rockridge Institute, Lakoff’s Berkeley-based think thank, has started on this project. Yet, so far, some of the specifics are vague or off-target. For instance, Lakoff has recommended replacing the loaded phrase “trial lawyer” with “public protection lawyer,” a clunky construction that might make John Edwards blush.

But the left is listening to Lakoff. The blogger Kos gushed that Don’t Think of an Elephant “put things in perspective in a way I was previously unable to do.” Howard Dean, who made his staff read Moral Politics, called him “one of the most influential thinkers of the progressive movement.” And, at times, John Kerry has sounded a lot like Lakoff, challenging Bush’s claims on qualities such as strength, security, and integrity.

During the primary season, many of us saw Romney as a scheming, plastic candidate, and were turned off by that ineffable something in him that made him seem to be a total fake. A man of absolutely zero principles.

If the above story is true, and despite the use of unnamed sources it certainly appears true, then it is total confirmation of all of the negative and disqualifying impressions of Romney.

If this is true, Romney has lost any hope of my consideration for 2012. Ronald Reagan famously said, “One does not speak ill of a fellow conservative.” We now have the rather absurd corrolary: “One does not assassinate a fellow conservative.” Especially when they are on the same team, in the middle of a mission, and the assassination does great harm to the mission. That is known in the military as treason, and has quite the severe penalty.
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From this link:
http://spectator.org/archives/2008/10/27/post-defeat-planners

ROMNEY ANTI-PALIN

Former Mitt Romney presidential campaign staffers, some of whom are currently working for Sen. John McCain and Gov. Sarah Palin’s bid for the White House, have been involved in spreading anti-Palin spin to reporters, seeking to diminish her standing after the election. “Sarah Palin is a lightweight, she won’t be the first, not even the third, person people will think of when it comes to 2012,” says one former Romney aide, now working for McCain-Palin. “The only serious candidate ready to challenge to lead the Republican Party is Mitt Romney. He’s in charge on November 5th.”

Romney has kept a low profile nationally since being denied the vice presidential nomination. He is currently traveling for the National Republican Congressional Committee in support of some House members, and has attended events for a handful of other House members who have sought his support, but he has traveled little for the McCain-Palin ticket. “He said the only time he’d travel for us is if we assured him that national cameras would be there,” says a McCain campaign communications aide. “He’s traveled to Nevada and a couple other states for us. That’s about it.”

Should McCain-Palin not win next week, Romney is expected to mount another presidential run, though it isn’t clear that he has handled himself particularly well since losing the nomination. He failed to support or espouse conservative positions on the economic bailout bill in an effective or meaningful way, and he has turned down opportunities to endorse and work for conservative candidates in House or Senate seats unless they were assured of winning.

The most glaring oversight was Romney’s refusal to do a phone recording for Massachusetts Republican Jeff Beatty, who is challenging Sen. John Kerry. “Mitt supposedly cares about Massachusetts, but won’t even return phone calls asking for help,” says a conservative working for Beatty in Boston. “It’s a tough race, but the least he could do is help. He’s showing his true colors.”

Some former Romney aides were behind the recent leaks to media, including CNN, that Governor Sarah Palin was a “diva” and was going off message intentionally. The former and current Romney supporters further are pushing Romney supporters for key Republican jobs, including head of the Republican National Committee.

These people are actually some of the easiest to manipulate. For example, their mental defenses are very strong but only in one direction. Meaning it is not omnidirection or what I would call “flexible” and adaptive. His defenses, your Democrat brother-in-law, are designed only to be fixed implacements directed towards only one type of threat. The trick to bypassing his fixed mental defenses is to utilize his unconscious and conscious assumptions and biases. If he knows you are a threat (Republican or conservative) he will act one way but if you bypass his defenses and conduct an infiltration by assuming the identity of a comrade in arms and loyal ideologue, then the situation changes.

This is actually how people like Stain, Khomeini, and Castro worked out their revolutions. THey pretended to fight for the same causes, liberty and fraternity, that the fake liberal professors and student activists wanted but in the end they were really only using the useful idiots on a limited and temporary time scale.

That is because true believers that are also useful idiots are extremely dangerous if they ever got the full deal. Most other people are either cynics (they don’t believe in anything except themselves) or nihilists (they don’t care what people believe cause they think it is all pointless). You also have your true believers that aren’t dupes but those are rare.

Beverly has a great Awakening story to tell you of herself

Read it and you will see just how powerful the loyalties of a turned useful idiot true believer for human dignity and liberty can be. They are very much an existential danger to the revolution: one reason why Ayers was worried about getting rid of the counter-revolution more than he was worried about feeding people once he got rid of the status quo power.

The average America lacks the knowledge of history, warfare, propaganda, deception, tradecraft, psychological conditioning, interrogation, and psychological warfare that is needed to detect organized con artists and eliminate them. People with common sense can spot con artists if they see them in action but organized cons are a different thing entirely. As different as crime from org crime.

Think back on why the Sunnis of Al ANbar chose to fight us and ally with AQ and then chose to fight AQ and ally with us. It wasn’t solely a matter of ignorance but ignorance did play an extremely large part in their decisions at first.

The American people, because they just don’t know this stuff, are vulnerable to stuff they have no idea even exists.

We allow a roomful of criminal clowns like Barney Frank and Chris Dodd and the Congressional Black (Democrat) Caucus to bully financial institutions into ignoring the rules and making asinine loans to people everybody knew out front couldn’t pay them back, and we’re all shocked and dismayed when – my goodness! – they can’t in fact pay them back, and the whole house of cards comes crashing down. Except for Frank and Dodd, and their pals and allies who flourish and grow, just like a tumor; and blame it – with apparent success – on three other guys; why, they weren’t even in the room; how could you think…?

I’ve already told people, like Laer, that my final solution to corrupt bureaucrats is execution, public or private. Can’t get any more final than that in my opinion.

It’s up to the PResident and his advisers to find a way to get that done. Or if they can’t or won’t get that done it is their duty to find an acceptable substitute for the President exists to employ the powers and tools of the Executive Branch to protect the US Constitution from foreign and domestic enemies.

I don’t know, Mike. I would love for the average American voter to be something other than an idiot

I think you’re buying too much into the Democrat Leftist belief in intelligence as an end in itself. Intelligence doesn’t provide you much of anything for certain.

A person can be intelligent and know all the things I have listed and call himself Obama or a person can be intelligent and know all the things I have listed and call himself Petraeus. There’s a huge difference between the two that has nothing to do with their knowledge or level of intelligence.

Knowledge or intelligence matters not one iota in warfare except to the tactical degree in which smarter generals can simply think faster than dumber generals. This tends to end up mattering a lot because speed is essential in warfare, since time is a very rare commodity in battles. HOwever, this does not really impact the wisdom of one war over another or one strategy over another. Strategies don’t lack time to come up with. THey are long term and use up longer periods of time. It also doesn’t matter on the average individual level since most soldiers don’t need to use their brains to figure out strategy or tactics: they just follow orders.

One typical reason why this doesn’t matter to the ultimate result of a war is that people can be educated. People are like territories and it doesn’t matter what the physical traits of the territory is: you simply deal with it by conquering it or subverting it or converting it.

If the Sunnis can be considered unwise to fight against us, just like Democrats here in the US, then it means in the future their minds can be changed by events and actions on our part. Nothing is ever certain in war and the same is true of the domestic insurgency here in America. Certainly intelligence does not pre-determine anything of great import on this scale.

I know – I have some in my family. They really don’t think that any of this will affect them in their daily lives. They can just go on drinking ale and smoking pipe weed all their merry ding-dong days and “politics” just won’t matter.

I know – when I told one of my brother-in-laws (from a small town in Missouri) that he was a Hobbit, he seemed quite proud of the designation.

I had to point out that in Tolkien’s “Return of the King”, the ending was not so happy as portrayed in the movie – the defenseless, ignorant and parochial Hobbits were taken over and subjected to a police state by the wizard Saruman. They were unable to resist evil and had quietly accepted their misery until the Hobbits of the Fellowship returned.

True to form, my Democrat brother-in-law refused to believe me.

You see through Obama. I see through him. Most of us here see through him. The average American, however, evidently does not see through him. Chris Matthews, in fact, on national TV, gets so excited he loses control of his bladder and pees down his leg in his very presence. All of this makes the average American NOT dumb because…?

Upon reflection, I actually won’t completely buy your thesis. Specifically, the first leg of your triad. I am a person pretty much free of religious faith (as is Miss Book); and, you’ll note, neither of us is impressed in the least by anything messianic clinging to Obama’s aura, or his shoes, or whatever. I have to wonder if those who do buy into it are something other than dumb…

We are a nation of people who pay no attention in school – and have done so for so long that we no longer notice that we aren’t being taught anything about our traditions or history. We have paid so little attention we’ve allowed our schools to degenerate to what they have become. This allows Obama to announce grandly that he is going to give us a “purpose.” We don’t need a purpose, thanks; we have a Declaration of Independence that provides us with that – and I’ll be g——-d if I need some politician to provide one for me, or us.

We are also a nation of people who pay no attention to the rules, and go to Yellowstone and feed the bears despite what the rangers tell us. And are very disappointed and saddened when the bear tears someone’s arm off. We allow a roomful of criminal clowns like Barney Frank and Chris Dodd and the Congressional Black (Democrat) Caucus to bully financial institutions into ignoring the rules and making asinine loans to people everybody knew out front couldn’t pay them back, and we’re all shocked and dismayed when – my goodness! – they can’t in fact pay them back, and the whole house of cards comes crashing down. Except for Frank and Dodd, and their pals and allies who flourish and grow, just like a tumor; and blame it – with apparent success – on three other guys; why, they weren’t even in the room; how could you think…?

I don’t know, Mike. I would love for the average American voter to be something other than an idiot – to the extent, even, of insisting that ID be provided and at least the voting be straight – but I don’t see a hell of a lot about which to be hopeful.

Bookworm writes: …I was sitting near two women and overheard part of their conversation.  After a lengthy back and forth praising Oprah, this gem came out:  ‘Sarah Palin is stupid but she communicates really well to Americans because most America…

Particularly true is the secular religiosity of those who have abandoned faith in a transcendent God outside of themselves and avidly seek fill that resultant God-shaped hole in their hearts by hitching their wagon to a charismatic leader who promises personal fulfillment without accountability.

The prior (and still active) object of worship for these secular religionists, of course, has been global warming, complete with high priests, including a certain failed candidate for the U.S. presidency who shall remain nameless.

The irony is such passion historically has fueled despotism.