P.M. CarpenterEven though the mind-melding, word-spinning Frank Luntz has been quoted by GOP insiders as saying that a House Republican majority in 2011 is "a done deal," Karl Rove and former RNC chairman Ed Gillespie, who remembers what an effective RNC looked like, are taking no chances.
They've teamed in the development of a sprawling campaign apparatus independent of the GOP's national committees, organizing a string of "American"-this and "American"-that assassins of whatever American political decency is left -- from "American Crossroads," which will act as an institutional bag man; to the "American Action Network," which will act as a propaganda arm; to the "American Action Forum," which will try to act like it's a think tank; to the oddly "American"-deprived "Resurgent Republic," which, as Politico described it, will act as "a message-testing laboratory." You got it. A lie factory.
None of this is particularly surprising, of course, especially since every Republican's best friend, the Supreme Court, okayed corporate cash to flow like Gulf oil into GOP campaign coffers. What is striking, however, is the almost laughable siege mentality of underdog status that exists among the organizers.
All of these woe-are-us sentiments were presumably uttered in the absence of snickering, and doubtless each contained a certain strategic overture to the vulnerably monied and hopelessly gullible: the poor GOP, kicked around lo these many years by the outrageously affluent, viciously organized and malign left. Won't you help it out?
The right has been spewing this nonsense for so long -- the left is gonna get ya, the liberals are everywhere, the Liberal Elite and the Liberal Establishment are on an inexorable Euro-socialistic march of domination -- at least since the McCarthy Era, that even its leading luminaries of lunacy are by now inclined to believe their own propaganda.
Just listen to ultraconservative panelists so frequently spotted on C-Span, holding forth from, say, the Heritage Foundation or the American Enterprise Institute. To hear them tell it -- tell each other, and with stunning sincerity -- American conservatism is at best stumbling along, battered as always by the all-powerful Left, which has permeated and diseased, perhaps irreversibly, the American System.
More than that, however, is the value of knowing the enemy's mind -- the first and indispensible stage of any successful political warfare -- and by that I mean the right's clinical paranoia. In that, there are needling opportunities for the left, assuming it itself can avoid mistaking paranoids for supermen.
The paranoid delusional part is that the Repug Masters of the Universe just
know as if from God that they are the ones who must rule and it is ample evidence of the "plot" by the "Amoral Supermen of the Left" that the reins of Congressional power were jerked away from them and the White House was stolen back from them at that pesky ballot box by more votes than they could nullify and suppress.
Not being much given to admit mistakes, much less their conspiracy of deception and evil, it has probably never crossed the Repugs' mind that the Great Unwashed finally caught on and threw the bastards out. The key to regaining power must be to lie harder and faster.
God's laughin' Her ass off.
