Saturday, February 23, 2013

RIGHT-WING MESSAGING: BLAME OBAMA WHEN THE PERFECTLY HARMLESS SEQUESTER WREAKS UNTOLD DEVASTATION

Really, that's the conservative message right now: The sequester's impact will be trivial, but you should blame the horrors that ensue from that trivial impact on the White House. Karl Rove's Crossroads GPS squeezes that message into a fifty-second ad:





In the blogosphere, right-wingers are flogging Bob Woodward's Washington Post story ascribing the sequester's paternity to the White House (while glossing over the economic hostage crisis that led to the proposal), but the wingers are also flogging ABC and Forbes pieces that say the sequester's negative impact will be insignificant at worst.

I'd call this incoherent and self-contradictory, but it probably works at the reptile-brain level, at least as far as the base is concerned. Recall that the day-to-day right-wing message is that Obama is both an incompetent affirmative-action hire who does nothing but golf all the time and can't talk without a Teleprompter ... and, simultaneously, an all-powerful totalitarian who, one day soon, will have everyone's guns confiscated, in a brutally efficient overnight coast-to-coast house-to-house sweep, after which he'll impose sharia law and ban Christianity and capitalism. I don't know why the brain processes messages like this as complementary rather than contradictory, but it seems to, or at least the right-wing brain does. Maybe our side felt the same way about Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, but I'm not sure we could feel it both ways in less than a minute.

4 comments:

Victor said...

GOP POV:
The "Sequester is nothing much to worry about when it happens.
A mere deck-chair off a luxury liner.

But Obama's handling of the economy towards this "sequester" that was his idea, is like the Captain of the Titanic, steering
us straight towards an iceberg!

So, it's both a pony with a thorn in its hoof, AND ARMAGEDDON!!!

sblefty said...

Rightwing morons are all masters of compartmentalisation, and cognitive dissonance, which gives them the ability to hold, and believe, two directly opposite thougts in their heads at the same time.

Like they believe "I am extremely pro-life, and think all life is GOD's creation and precious, and blablabla", while at the same time believing "I am strongly for capital punishment, and we need more wars in the middle east, and all parasitic welfare moochers should be exterminated, etc."

Jim Parrett said...

I wonder if Woodward is being blackmailed by someon on the right. His ethics seem to have flown out the window.

Ten Bears said...

Having for lack of a better term "read" Woodward since Nixon... I don't he ever had any. The consumate insider. Sold out (drank the kool-aid?) long ago.