After Bush left the economy looking like Fallujah, optimists like me expected him and his conservative idées fixes to recede into bad memories and the Crawford sagebrush. That didn’t happen. Strangely, the populist anger ignited by the Bush Recession didn’t fuel Obama and the Democrats, but the Tea Party and its malignant cultural fantasies (assisted by voluptuous astro-turfing by the cunning Brothers Koch and other billionaire Enemies of the People). Democrats bear some of the blame for this, since they were cowed into avoiding populist remedies to Bush’s excesses, for fear of sounding too “partisan” (based on the dubious premise that that’s a bad thing). No doubt, the impeccably mediocre Democratic strategists noted portentously that Al Gore lost the 2000 election after “going populist” (ignoring the fact that he actually won the election but lost the lawsuit, but let that sleeping train wreck lie).
The story here, however, transcends Democratic timidity. It’s really about the diabolical efficiency of the Rightwing Noise Machine. Typically the RNM operates smoothly and unobserved, like the Krell Underground, producing monsters from the political id, without us poor Dr. Morbiuses even knowing its motor is running. But occasionally an event shocks the system, and we can observe the wheels turning. This just happened with the demise of Bin Laden, which interrupted the Tea Party narratives about Obama, the communist Muslim given to Peacenikery who wasn’t even a citizen. The RNM was forced to shift gears as noisily as a 1971 Ford Pinto, and voila, we have a case study on how it works.
The death of Bin Laden on Obama’s watch focused attention on the historic ineptitude of Bush and all his conservative works. The RNM had to immediately produce a new counternarrative. And it did, in droves. As Alex Pareene wrote in Salon, with citations, within 48 hours, the rightwing talking heads were flooding the airwaves with memes that attempted to write Obama out of the bloody defeat of al Qaeda’s CEO. To name but a few:
1. Appearances to the contrary, it was George W. Bush who got Bin Laden after all. His steadfast support, if not enjoyment, of “enhanced interrogation techniques” (i.e. torture) in the face of liberal opposition (notably from terrorist sympathizers like Obama) led inexorably to the bloody Abbottabad bedroom. You get the picture. As fictional as the Playboy Forum. This is the main RNM meme now in circulation.
2. Obama isn’t really happy about bin Laden's death, so he shouldn’t get credit. He actually hates America. David Brody, a Christian Broadcasting Network journalist [sic] noted suspiciously, Obama didn’t look happy enough when he announced Bin Laden’s death. Brody must have been using a “happy meter.” This might even suggest the whole incident was a mistake (or worse).
3. Although Obama got Bin Laden, Bill Clinton is responsible for 9/11, so it’s a wash. Nothing happening here folks.
4. Bin Laden was irrelevant. Sure he was the mastermind behind the largest terrorist attack ever against the US, and sure he was the fetid soul of a movement dedicated to exterminating us, and sure Bush invaded the graveyard of empires to get him, but that’s yesterday’s news. Bush forced him to live in a cave. Well, OK, a mansion. Point is, no big deal. Just a tall polygamist. In fact, Obama should have left him alone. Now he’s a martyr. Thanks to Obama, who unlike Bush, wasn’t skilled enough at not killing Bin Laden.
5. Obama’s refusal to release photos of Bin Laden’s bullet-ridden corpse is “pussyfooting” (Sarah Palin’s quaint characterization), and suggests a deeper mystery – maybe Obama didn’t kill Bin Laden. We shouldn’t congratulate Obama (if that really is his name) unless and until he releases the long-form death certificate of our Saudi antagonist.
And so on. There are half a dozen other storylines that suddenly appeared like popup ads at a porn cite. What’s important here is that this was no coincidence. It isn’t like Donald Rumsfeld, Sean Hannity, and some Tea Party facepainter with a “I Hait Obama” sign suddenly thought up and disseminated these weird tales in 24 hours, as if Agent Jack Bauer had to write and publish a collection of short stories to stop an atomic bomb from going off in a Manhattan subway. They were coordinated (loosely, structurally), a counterattack planned in advance to react to any success by Obama. As one writer observed on Daily Kos, “Whenever, or if ever Obama and his team would come up with a great success, no matter what it was, these boys and girls would be right out there, singing like the Vienna Boys Choir, in perfect harmony.”
These narratives, generated by rightwing thinktanks, talking heads, Team Bush, the reprehensible Kochs themselves (speaking ex cathedra), email chains, and internet forums, produce an echo effect, amplifying their volume until they get picked up by the lazy mainstream media as “issues” people are talking about. And there we have it: Monsters from the Political Id, murdering Obama’s victory over Bin Laden, or any Democratic success that might be translated into electoral politics and progressive change.
How does the Rightwing Noise Machine do it? How does it swarm so many ridiculous fictions onto the field like Yugioh Cards. I’ll discuss that later. I will say progressives have nothing like it, and until we do, we’ll continue to struggle for even the smallest electoral victories, while losing the more important conflict, the war of narratives. On that front, progressives have been retreating for forty years, and not by accident. And the ultimate point is, not to get into a factual argument with the Right, as if we were on the Vulcan Council. But rather to destroy their memes, to counter them, to strangle them, like Latrell Sprewell on a basketball coach.
http://leftwingnoisemachine.com/...