Soon to come from the GOP - why Saul Alinsky is evil.
Contessa Brewer of MSNBC is getting some kudos for spending her four minute interview with Swiftboater #1 Jerome Corsi essentially attacking his truthiness.
In the middle of his slimespeak, Corsi dropped this little tidbit:
He was a Saul Alinsky organizer in Chicago. That's a very radical methodology that Barack Obama actually taught, and it involves redistribution of wealth, getting power to redistribute wealth.
The essence of Swiftboating is attacking your opponent's strength. In 2004, Corsi attacked John Kerry on the single most unassailable portion of his biography -- his military service. It may have been fair game to attack him on his post-service record -- arguable, but reasonable -- but Corsi attacked him on his actual service, which was unquestionably honorable. Eventually they made a laughing stock of Kerry's purple hearts -- remember the purple heart band-aids at the GOP convention? This was not possible without the erosion of the public opinion of Kerry's service at the hands of Corsi and his slime machine.
Now he is taking aim at the most unassailable portion of Obama's bio -- his community organizing. It was an act of great personal sacrifice and devotion to service that made Barack Obama leave the lucrative offers he had before him in the law field to take a poorly paying job on the South Side of Chicago to start organizing the community. He started programs and pounded the pavement, appealed to civic officials to get small but meaningful improvements implemented in his community, the poorest part of one of the toughest urban jungles in America.
Mark my words -- they are going to make him sound like Che Guevara-in-training.
A couple months ago, I recounted in this diary how Al Giordano's popular election blog, The Field, left the website that originally hosted him. The proprietress of that site balked at Al's listing of Saul Alinsky's "Rules for Radicals." Essentially, it is a short lesson in trench warfare politics, of the kind that have been mastered, not by the Radical Left, but the hardball right-wing political masterminds, Lee Atwater and Karl Rove and their loathsome ilk. But the mere mention of Saul Alinsky scared this woman to death and threatened to pull Al's site until he promised to stop running what she thought were dangerous left-wing sentiments. Al thought she was insane and simply took his blog to his own well-established website.
The strategy will be to run some kind of advertising making Saul Alinsky look like Stalin, and connect him to Obama, not to mention Hillary Clinton, who wrote her senior thesis on Alinsky, as well as our own Dear Leader, whose brand new book, available for pre-order now at Amazon.com, uses the Alinsky model to promote a new kind of grassroots Internet organizing.
They are going to use Alinsky to tarnish Obama, Clinton and Kos in one fell swoop.
The problem is, very few people outside of community organizing circles know who Saul Alinsky is. That will give the GOP an opportunity to define him to the rest of America. They have already started to demonize him, use him as shorthand for left-wing evil and link him to Communism. This is the entire Corsi quote that I began above:
He was a Saul Alinsky organizer in Chicago. That's a very radical methodology that Barack Obama actually taught, and it involves redistribution of wealth, getting power to redistribute wealth. And that continues to be one of Barack Obama's main themes. Look, he wants to take the energy companies, have windfall profits go to thousand-dollar checks to the poor. What company is Barack Obama going to target next for their profits to distribute to the poor?
See what he did there? He began talking about Obama's community organizing, but instead of talking about what he ACTUALLY DID, he links him to Saul Alinsky, and then cites Obama's plan for the windfall profits tax and his $1,000 tax reduction plan, framing it as economic redistribution, which had NOTHING TO DO WITH OBAMA'S COMMUNITY ORGANIZING HISTORY! Bim-bam-boom -- Obama is a Commie.
The Netroots must immediately define Saul Alinsky to the public, make them understand who he was, where he came from and what he accomplished, before the GOP does.