Ah, the mendacity!
It’s fascinating, in a depressing sort of way, to see the speed, depth, and breadth of the “Republicans lie!” meme spread through the MSM and left side of the blogosphere, and then be parroted back by simpatico commenters.
There is no question it is coordinated and Orwellian, and perhaps effective. I have no idea whether it convinces the not-yet-quite-convinced, but it certainly has been good at rallying the foot-soldiers in the Cause. Just as it became clear within days (or perhaps hours) of her nomination that Palin Is a Stupidhead, now it has been proven that Ryan Is a Lying Liar (as we already knew about Romney the Liar), and that All Republicans Are Uncaring Lying Bastards.
It’s a waste of time for me to laboriously describe and analyze the details of the lies perpetrated by the left about Republicans lying. The truth will never reach those who need to see it, and besides many people (including me) have done it already (here’s a previous post of mine that contains some handy links to others who have more patience and fortitude on the subject than I, and here’s a piece in which I liken the current lies on the left to the Big Lie technique; here’s my dissection of an earlier case of lying about lies).
Suffice to say that the left’s practice of lying about lying has spun out of control (here’s a piece on that subject), which means that on some level the Democrats must have been quite frightened by the spectacle presented at the Republican Convention, because their big defense seems to be to say it’s all an illusion based on mendacity.
Maureen Dowd’s latest column reaches an absolute frenzy in this regard, a Two Minutes Hate worthy of the best propagandists of yore. And to judge from the comments section (at least the first few that I read) to her article, her readers are happy to agree with her.
Even the title of Dowd’s screed is a masterpiece of the genre: “Cruel Conservatives Throw a Masquerade Ball.”
The Republican Convention according to Dowd:
A preview of the Democratic one:
So, did Romney get a bounce?
Maybe a small one; your guess is as good as this guy’s.
But if the bounce was just minimal, you can be sure that the MSM is high-fiving itself. And they would certainly deserve a lot of credit.
Polls are especially suspect this year, IMHO, and not just for the usual reasons. This year predicting party turnout is especially difficult, and so much hinges on that. I can’t help but think Republicans will be somewhat more motivated to go to the polls than Democrats, but then again most of the Democrats I know hate the Republican Party so much that they are always strongly motivated to vote in order to make sure those evil people don’t come to power again.
Jonathan Haidt, changer
Jonathan Haidt is a writer and social psychologist who started out as a liberal. But along the way something unexpected happened: he actually read a book that featured the writings of leading conservative thinkers.
Until then, Haidt:
…had thought of conservatism as a “Frankenstein monster,” he says ”” an ugly mishmash of Christian fundamentalism, racism and authoritarianism.
Let that sink in for a moment. Here was a man whose life’s work had been to study the social psychology of moral development across cultures, and who was entering the field of political psychology, and yet until that moment he had swallowed whole the caricatured stereotypes of what a conservative is, without having the intellectual curiosity to find out for himself (I have a bit of sympathy for him; it took me decades to actually get around to reading the work of conservatives, too—although I’d never demonized them in quite the same way as Haidt had, nor was I a political psychologist).
Just to show you how partisan Haidt was prior to reading that book, he says that after John Kerry’s 2004 defeat, he “entered the field of political psychology in order to ‘help liberals win.'” And yet his mind remained open enough that, when he began reading the anthology Conservatism, only three pages into it he was “floored” with the thought that conservatives might actually “have a better formula for how to create a healthy, happy society.”
I can imagine what that moment was like.
The answer he finally came to put him in the centrist camp, neither wholly conservative nor wholly liberal. But that was a far cry from where he started out.
Haidt has quite a bit to say about the influence of liberals in academia and especially psychology:
Mr. Haidt has repeatedly criticized his field, psychology, for including too few conservatives in its ranks. When the topic of academic discrimination against conservatives comes up, he pulls from his filing cabinet a new study by Yoel Inbar and Joris Lammers which finds that: “In decisions ranging from paper reviews to hiring, many social and personality psychologists admit that they would discriminate against openly conservative colleagues. The more liberal respondents are, the more willing they are to discriminate.”
No surprise there. But it is surprising that Haidt previously had spent close to twenty years in academia without ever noticing that sort of thing. But then again, we all know that a mind is a difficult thing to change—especially if a person never exposes him/herself to thinking or writing that challenges the point of view he/she already holds. But I commend Haidt for having the courage to finally do just that, and to follow where his new knowledge led him.
It isn’t easy.
One would think…
…that Clint Eastwood were the nominee, for all the blather about his gig at the Republican Convention the other night.
Okay, I’ll say it: I’ve never been an Eastwood fan. So sue me.
And I thought his schtick on Thursday night was a bit rambling and hard to follow. He sounded shaky, although parts of it were spot-on funny, and obviously got under Obama’s thinnish skin.
And I doubt that Eastwood—or Romney, for that matter—cares what the press thinks of Eastwood’s performance.
One of Paul Ryan’s speechwriters…
…for his convention address was Matthew Scully, the same guy who wrote Sarah Palin’s acceptance speech at the 2008 Republican National Convention.
If I ever need to make a speech, I think I just might call that guy.
Scully is a pretty complex character. He used to write speeches for Pennsylvania Governor Bob Casey, a pro-life Democrat (“Scully has a history of finding rhetorical unity for voters on the right and in the center”), and quite a few for George Bush. Unlike most of Obama’s speechwriters, he’s not a youngster; he was born in 1959 (although that makes him a youngster to me).
Scully is conservative, but he’s also an animal rights advocate, which means he must have been a rather interesting fit for Sarah Palin:
A vegetarian who is regularly critical of the NRA and much of the hunting community, he is a passionate advocate for doing away with the more brutal versions of blood-sport, including aerial hunting, which Palin supports.
It seems to be Scully’s fate to write speeches for hunters. Like Palin, Ryan is an avid hunter, this time with pistol, rifle, and bow. You might suppose the latter method to be more acceptable to Scully (more sporting?), but it’s not (“bows and pistols…only compound and prolong the victim’s suffering”).
The speechwriter’s task is a strange one, almost like a ghostwriter’s. He has to channel the thoughts of the speaker, and make that person sound like him/herself, only better. The speaker gets to approve or disapprove of every word, and sent it back for a rewrite if it’s not acceptable. The speechwriter is incredibly important in helping the politician craft a public persona, but the writer has to fade into the background the whole time; the spotlight wouldn’t do. Everybody knows that almost all politicians employ speechwriters, but at the same time the speaker wants to foster the audience’s illusion that he/she is the one who actually thought of all those clever and ringing phrases.
The “Paul Ryan, liar” meme continueth
The Paul Ryan fact-checking continues apace, with the intrepid journalists at The New Yorker on the case.
Aren’t you glad we’re getting to the bottom of all of this?
Okay, so how do we…
…make this go viral?
Note particularly this moment. It’s not as personal and heartwarming as some of the other stuff, but it’s certainly relevant to how Romney would be likely to perform as president:
Eastwood’s empty chair
Barack Obama has often been called an empty suit, but last night Clint Eastwood visualized him as an empty chair.
A lot of people (including me) thought Eastwood would be giving a more conventional speech. But instead he came up with a zany improv that left a lot of people scratching their heads:
Sort of funny, sort of strange, if you ask me.
But not unfamiliar. Anyone who’s had any experience with Gestalt therapy would probably recognize the famous empty chair technique pioneered by Fritz Perls:
When the client expresses a conflict with another person, through this technique, the client is directed to talk to that another person who is imagined to be sitting in an empty chair beside or across the client. This helps the client to experience and understand the feeling more fully. Thus, it stimulates your thinking, highlighting your emotions and attitudes. For example, the therapist may say, “Imagine your father in this chair (about 3 feet away), see him vividly, and, now, talk to him about how you felt when he was unfaithful to your mother.”…The key is a long, detailed, emotional interaction–a conversation. You should shift back and forth between chairs as you also speak for the person-trait-object in the other chair. This “conversation” clarifies your feelings and reactions to the other person and may increase your understanding of the other person.
Obama doesn’t strike me as the sort of man who can take a joke—about himself. That’s why ridicule can be a most potent weapon.
Getting to know Romney the do-gooder
Of all the things I saw at the convention, the most potentially powerful was the series of presentations about Romney’s good deeds. It was both curious and moving, and unprecedented (at least in my memory) for an introduction to a presidential candidate at a convention.
Byron York describes it as leaving many viewers in tears, and I don’t doubt it. I already knew these stories about Romney—they’ve long been available to anyone interested in doing a little bit of research on the man—so they didn’t surprise me, although I was pleased to see the campaign was finally trying to get them to the attention of the American public.
I wonder, though, how many people saw it? How many people even watch the conventions, and how many were viewing that particular part? Even Fox cut away for some of it.
We’re used to sob stories about politicians, meant to tug at the heartstrings, both to laud politicians and to attack them. But usually they are about policies the politicians have promoted or blocked: Romney was responsible for the death of my wife when we lost our insurance as a result of Bain; Obamacare meant I got health insurance despite my pre-existing condition. That sort of thing is standard. But these stories about Romney’s extraordinary kindness and caring were not the usual tales about how his policies have helped people; they were personal, and specifically religious in nature, because they described hands-on (in some cases, literally) acts Romney performed in the service of his Mormon faith and his position as a Mormon lay minister.
I have never seen a politician use that sort of approach before. Perhaps it’s because few if any politicians have a record like that to point to. Perhaps it’s also because Romney may have needed to point it out more than most would have, because of his naturally cool demeanor, and because the campaign against him has relied so far almost entirely on character assassination.
Whatever the reasons, the degree to which Romney has been a practitioner of personal kindness and good works is extraordinary. Whether he wins the election or not, it’s clear that Romney is a very unusual human being, with a combination of brains, hard-nosed business sense and competitiveness, and personal kindness that goes way beyond anything most people consider necessary or even possible. For a politician, this is so unusual as to be unique.
So far, the Obama campaign’s “narrative” about Romney has been rather simple: out of touch, flip-flopping, women-despising, rapacious exploitative capitalist (pig, although they don’t say it). But the funny thing about lies is that all it takes to refute them is the truth, and there’s plenty of refutation available in the true story of Romney’s life. If people could learn those things, Obama’s Romney narrative would be blown out of the water.
But will people be allowed to learn them? If the stories had been about Obama, they already would have been hyped to the skies. But of course that’s not the way the MSM rolls for Romney.
There’s another thing about these tales. They seem almost too good to be true—very corny, very touching. In our cynical and ironic age they are almost unbelievable, like some sort of parody. What a square, goody-two-shoes—although the kind of square you might want to have around in a crisis.
Is any of this relevant to the tasks involved in being president? I’m not at all sure. But all of it is highly impressive—and most definitely relevant to the question of what sort of person Romney is, and whether he cares about people, which has become an issue in the campaign.
People keep saying about Romney, “the more I know of him the more I like him.” Not just on this blog, but in comments all over the internet. It strikes me that Obama is just the opposite—the more people know of him the more they dislike him.
ADDENDUM: Just in case you didn’t see the tributes, here they are:
ADDENDUM II: I hadn’t seen this one before, but it’s golden, and I think would be especially appealing to those liberals who might be on the fence about whom to vote for. The speaker’s sincerity shines through [Hat tip: commenter “jeanneb”):
Convention night 3
Here’s an open thread to talk about tonight’s doings. I may update from time to time.
11:49: Watched Romney’s speech, which did everything it needed to do. The proof is that afterward, when I tuned to MSNBC for the critique, they really didn’t have too much bad to say about it—at least for the 10 minutes or so I listened.
So, is it really going to be…
Talk about tough acts to follow! But as Roger Simon says:
Has Mitt Romney been upstaged on his big night?
Well, sure, but so what?
Romney seems almost an afterthought, the guy behind the scenes who helped the whole thing come together. He’s pretty good at picking ’em, though (and I’m not talking about Clint Eastwood), isn’t he? And isn’t that a major part of a president’s task?
[ADDENDUM: Clint Eastwood is 82???]