Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon. Conservatives have a tendency to try to win every debate with logic and recitations of facts which, all too often, fail to get the job done because emotions and mockery are often just as effective as reason. The good news is that liberals almost never have logic on their side; so they're incapable of rationally making the case for their policies while conservatives can become considerably more effective debaters by simply adding some emotion-based arguments and sheer scorn to their discourse. This has certainly worked on Twitter, where conservatives keep making the Obama campaign look like buffoons by taking over its hashtags.
The bolded sentence above is #5 of Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals. The rest of the text is from John Hawthorne's 12 Ways to Use Saul Alinky's Rules for Radicals Against Liberals. I agree entirely with Hawthorne's advice. I have come to see that calm and careful argumentation, the marshalling of facts, and all the rest of what constitutes rational persuasion are simply not enough. While necessary, they are not sufficient. Not sufficient, because most people are emotion-driven, not reason-driven. This is especially true of the young. It is the cool, not the cogent, that persuades them.
The Left knows how to fight and the Right had better learn. If you doubt that politics is war conducted by other means, then consider the following from a recent Dennis Prager column:
The head of the Louisiana Democratic Party, State Senator Karen Carter Peterson, D-New Orleans, stood before her colleagues in the state Senate and announced the reason people oppose Obamacare."You ready?" she asked three times.
It is President Obama's color.
"It isn't about the administration, and it should not be about the administration of the state nor federal level when it comes to Obamacare," she said. "But in fact it is. And why is that? I have talked to so many members in the House and Senate and you know what it comes down to? Are you ready for this? It is not about how many federal dollars we can receive. You ready? You want to know what it's about? It's about race. Now nobody wants to talk about that. It's about the race of this African-American president. ... It comes down to the race of the president of the U.S. which causes people to disconnect and step away from the substance of the bill."
What the senator said is of course egregiously false, and she must know it. But then why does she and so many other liberals say things like this? Because it is a useful lie. It is useful to the forwarding of the leftist agenda. Liberals lie and distort and smear because it works. The end justifies the means.
There are examples aplenty of this. For the Left, politics is a form of warfare. The above example, which is entirely characteristic, proves it.
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