Another, more insidious variety of pinhead has come to my attention. These are not conventional know-nothing, brain-dead automatons, hypnotized by the siren song of neo-con claptrap. They are the disingenuous, fascist propagandists who are fully aware that they are lying. What's even worse is that they are not even real people. A pox on them.
I've been seeing more and more posts on forums that are identical, word for word, to something posted elsewhere. Sometimes, these things come to me via e-mail, having been scrupulously forwarded may times through a chain of assorted Republican sore-heads and misanthropic cranks. I'm at the end of the chain, and I never forward them, because I recognize what they are, intentional misinformation written by professional publicists and advertising copy writers. This stuff is slick, and dangerous. They attempt to make a seemingly reasonable point and argue convincingly for something horribly odious and mean-spirited. These diatribes are the expertly contrived, distilled essence of hate.
Why are these attack pieces so good, and so harmful? It's because the fictitious person and the fabricated thesis lull the reader into thinking that an outraged citizen's open letter represents the considered thinking of a real, rational person. Being manufactured from whole cloth, the essay can be, and generally is, totally devoid of conscience.
In a competitive debate, the adversaries use all the rhetorical skill they can muster to argue whatever position, pro or con, is assigned to them. Fake open letters are constructed in the same manner, but with the unfair advantage that the reader is not informed that the piece is purely disingenuous rhetoric. And, they are cleverly done.
They artfully construct arguments based on a precarious structure of totally fallacious premises. They reveal their sinister motives by bullying their audience and trivializing any realistic, rational discourse that contradicts their odious pronouncements. They want to browbeat the compliant masses they mockingly deride as "sheeple" into supporting the perpetuation of despotic rule. It's propaganda authored by hacks paid by the word by would-be fascist overlords, not free speech by someone who honestly cares about the issue and has any sense of morality.
As you may have gathered if you have read more than one of my posts, these essays are cathartic, a form of therapy for me. They allow me to vent and then calm down, having had my say. They allow me to justify setting aside anger and resentment. I thought I was done railing against pinheads, ranting fools who foam at the mouth and blather, but they have gotten to me once again. The consummate evil of this bit of pinheadedness has reignited by righteous indignation. We cannot let this kind of thing pass without being contested. It is incumbent upon all thinking people to fight back! People who say this type of thing must be exposed as the jerks they are.
The focus of my ire is a bit of post-election carping by a purported dentist. The tooth driller would punish those who supported President-elect Obama in the campaign by firing them from their jobs. Yes, that's right. He thinks it's a good idea to deprive people of their livelihood if they vote differently than he wants them to.
My friend, a gun-toting fascist, forwarded me an e-mail message sent to him as a chain of forwarded messages, supposedly originating with the dentist. Here is the verbatim text.
An Executive Decision
Dear Customers and Suppliers:
As the CFO of a business that employees 140 people, I have resigned myself to the fact that Barrack[sic] Obama will be our next President, and that our taxes and government fees will increase in a BIG way.
To compensate for these increases, I figure that our customers will have to see an increase in our prices of about 8%. However, since we cannot increase prices right now due to the dismal state of our economy, we will have to lay off six of our employees instead. This has really been eating at me for a while, as we believe we are family here and I didn't know how to choose who will have to go.
So, this is what I did. I walked thru our parking lot and found 6 Obama bumper stickers on our employees' cars and have decided these folks will be the first to be laid off. I can't think of a more fair way to approach this problem. These folks wanted change; I gave it to them.
If you have a better idea, let me know.
Sincerely,
Brian Seachrist, DDS
I didn't believe this was a real letter from a real dentist for a moment. It was too pat and too cute. I Googled the signature line and found what I suspected. This same piece of drivel is being distributed by internet-savvy pinheads on several Republican forums, like Colorado Moms and Michelle Malkin. I only ran down these two, but there were several more search hits to support the idea that it's a concerted campaign intended to scare the faint of heart and make the smarmy sycophants of the defeated Republicans feel a little better by pissing into the punch bowl.
If this Seachrist guy were a real person, and he actually had written such a letter to any real business customer or supplier, then I wouldn't as upset. He would be just another jackass and an unconscionable sociopath headed quickly for oblivion. If he were a real person, but not quite everything he claims to be, then he would be another Sam, the unlicensed plumber's helper (a.k.a. Joe the plumber), and we could have a good laugh and ignore him.
But I don't think the guy even exists. This is probably another phony "outraged citizen" rant. In all the search hits, the only instances of the title "DDS" being associated with someone named "Brian Seachrist" were other instances of the same letter. There were a few people with that name, or maybe just one, and they all seemed to live in Binghamptom, New York, or Framingham, Massachusetts. That Brian Seachrist appears to be a guitar player in someone else's band. A couple of the search hits had the word "engineer" in them, so maybe Brian has something to do with the technical side, such as sound engineering. Maybe he has training in some field of engineering, but works as a musician. If he is the same guy who wrote the letter, he's not a dentist, and he doesn't seem to be the guy who hires and fires anyone, let alone being in charge of that function for a firm with 141 employees. He's more likely a sound man and guitar player for a crappy lounge band playing in the Northeast. I don't think he wrote the letter, either.
There were other things wrong with that letter. Did you spot them? The firm is never named, nor is its location. It's never revealed what type of business they engage in. He's a dentist, but he identifies himself as the CFO, and he's in charge of personnel, now usually referred to as human resources. Well, which is it? Is he the chief financial officer (accountant, head "bean counter") or is he in charge of HR? Does he do both jobs? OK, then, why not CEO as well? And, why isn't he using his training as a dentist, anyway? There's something wrong here, but I don't think it matters. It's fake, you know.
What else is fake about the idea of the dentist-CFO firing people on the basis of their political stances? Where shall we start? Since this open letter is supposedly from a real dentist named Seachrist, then we would expect all the real people in that real company to know about Brian's plans for restructuring. They would all be buzzing about who was going to get the axe. Even in a fairly small company of only 141 people, the probability that a substantial portion of the staff are Democrats is fairly high. If Brian is not the sole owner, there is probably at least one person at a high level in the firm who would say, "Brian, you just can't do that. It's unethical." Any CEO worth his salt would say that, even if he were a staunch Republican. If Brian were all-powerful in the company, such a capricious firing of Democrats might easily prompt a revolt of the entire work force. Does he think that all the Democrats not fired would let this go by without comment? How many would threaten to quit in protest if their fellow workers and friends were not dealt with more fairly? How many decent, fair-minded Republicans would join in this protest? How long would Brian keep his job after a bonehead stunt like this?
If anyone can prove that a real Brian Seachrist wrote this letter, and he is all that he says he is, I will apologize for doubting his pedigree. Then, I would excoriate him for being a monumental asshole. I'm not too worried about having to eat crow, though.
Let's just go through this thing anyway. Even though it's not a real letter, and I know that, it got to me. What a crank! Any way you slice, it's a load of crap and a new low in sour grapes, even for Republicans. The question, as with all pinhead pronouncements, is not to refute their assertions, which are patently absurd, but to understand why they are saying these stupid things. I think some people repeat these calumnies because they think they are cute, and a way for the powerless to feel a little better, but what about the people who make this stuff up? Where does it come from? How do they think they are going to fool people with this silliness?
It's a page out of the playbook of Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's master propagandist. Start with a bunch of small lies as an infrastructure to support a huge, egregiously fantastic lie to use as the justification for crimes against humanity. I know I'm digressing into refuting the lies, but this is a setup for a proposed solution.
Lie 1: The Democrats, reduced now to President Obama, who has no say in setting federal taxes, will bring on massive tax increases that will harm working people by impoverishing their beneficent employers. Where does this come from? It was the Republicans' incessant mime in the campaign that the Democrats would raise the taxes of ordinary people. That lie was exposed and most people eventually understood that if they make less than $250,000 a year, they would get a tax cut, not an increase. Now that the tax hike line has been discredited, they are saying, "Well, even if only high-income people will get taxed more, they are the business owners, and if they have less money, then business will fall off and you working class people won't get any advantage from your tax cut because you will lose your job!" This lie is the basis for the second lie, which is blithely included as the justification for the first lie.
Lie 2: Transferring wealth to rich people money helps the economy and transferring wealth to poor people harms the economy. Anyone can easily figure out that the idea that taxing rich people a little more kills business is ridiculous. If lower income people get money, they spend it, which helps business. This is why raising the minimum wage boosts business rather than causing it to diminish. (It's a documented fact!) What exactly is it that the Republicans think will cause the economy to contract if a low income worker gets a little more money in his pocket as a transfer payment from a higher income person? The answer is that they know it's not true; they are lying. They are just hoping that people will be stupid enough to believe it. They are right. Working class Republicans exist in great numbers.
The logic should be obvious. When rich people get more money, they don't spend it all. They might buy that new Mercedes Benz a little sooner, or get a bigger sailboat, but a lot of the money is ratholed. This is usually touted as "investment", but it's not as much an immediate stimulus as if it were spent right away on consumer goods. One can understand this intuitively, that they might save it because they already have most of the stuff they want, or that they just have so much that they don't know what to do with the extra money, but there is a technical explanation that Republicans never talk about because it doesn't support their mime. It's called the "marginal propensity to save or consume". This is the portion of the next dollar one acquires that one will, on average save or spend. Guess what? This marginal propensity varies monotonically with income! That is, the more one makes, the more likely a person is to save.
This makes sense, doesn't it? If you're broke and hungry, and you get a dollar, you immediately purchase a dollar's worth of food. Of course, you might blow it on a lottery ticket or put it into the kitty for your next purchase of crack, but you will spend it very quickly. Holding onto money when one has immediate, pressing needs just isn't likely. Poor people don't save; they spend it all. Rich people save, and the more they get, the more of it they save. Saved money might be eventually used by banks to loan to someone to expand a business and create a job, but it might also be wired to a secret account in the Cayman Islands and drop completely out of the domestic economy. What evidence is there that money transferred to the rich helps everyone while money transferred to the poor is "lost"? Indeed, most evidence leads to the opposite conclusion.
Lie 3: You will lose your job because your employer is taxed a little more. That is totally without foundation, but you can't help worrying, just a little, as long as you let the false premise that economic stimulus can only be effected by having the money trickle down from the rich to the poor. Herbert Hoover lost the election in 1932 trying to argue this, and it has not become true in the ensuing 76 years. Is it enough to make you vote Republican, against your obvious self-interest? Well, not anymore. Nevertheless, they keep trying to put a new twist on it to make the case to some gullible person.
When I heard Carly Fiorina rail against the "politics of fear" a few months ago, I knew that the cornerstone of the Republican campaign would be to make people afraid of everything and somehow make the case that the Democrats were the source of the evil she feared. It's opposite land; they rail against whatever they are doing themselves. Have you noticed how all the posts on these jerky Republican forums are full of fear? They are terrified, and most of them can't articulate any coherent basis for that fear!
Lie 4: Business owners care about their employees. This one always makes me laugh, but only until it makes me cry. Did you notice how Seachrist supposedly thinks of his employees as "family"? Give me a break! He's on a witch hunt to punish his deluded, childlike employees who dared to defy his benign, parental authority and vote for a Democrat! He doesn't think twice about firing people because of his fear of a business downturn, but he expects them to loyally keep voting for Republicans so he can get even richer and keep them happily employed out of the goodness of his heart. They are, after all, "family", but he'll cut your throat in a minute if you vote incorrectly. What kind of monstrous patriarch is he, anyway?
This premise crumbles under the weight of its confused logic. If he cares so much about his employees, why is he acting like Scrooge? What form does this purported affection actually take? I don't see it. The inevitable conclusion is that he has no respect for his employees' personal beliefs and does not care about them as people at all.
The more subtle part of this lie is that "yo-yo" staffing is counter-productive and can contribute to business failure. As any business school student who has participated in a management simulation game can tell you, hiring and firing people precipitously will cause you to lose out to the other management teams who prudently staff up and hold on to their personnel as much as they can during dips in the business cycle. New people take time to ramp up and firing people decreases the level of expertise in the firm. People are not interchangeable parts. Experienced people do a better job and make the firm more profitable. Why would anyone try to argue to the contrary? They know it's a lie, because they have MBA degrees and Porsches, but they are banking that the people who they are trying to fool do not have either and won't know the difference.
Lie 5: Executives can do whatever they want. Obama can't raise taxes because that power is reserved for the Congress. He couldn't do very much as a senator because bills regarding taxation and spending must originate in the House of Representatives. He can make suggestions to House members, and tell them what kind of bills he would sign or veto, but he cannot propose legislation. There are limits on Presidential power.
There are even more stringent limits on the powers of business owners. Workers have rights as human beings, and the government does stick up for you on occasion when you are treated unfairly. Imagine a Democrat fired by Seachrist applying for unemployment compensation and the ensuing interview with the case worker.
Why were you terminated?
Because I voted for Obama and have a sticker on my car!
Do you have any proof of that?
It's all right here! (Applicant slams printout of web page down on desk.)
What is this?
Dr. Seachrist wrote this open letter and put it all over the internet! He was bragging in the office about it and how he thinks he can take my job away because I vote differently than he does!
Has he fired anyone else for the same reason?
Yes! There are six of us, just as he said in his letter! (Angry shouts of "Yeah!" from the five people behind her in the line.)
Can you imagine what might happen to "Dr. Seachrist" then? At the very least, the firm would have to pay the standard portion of the unemployment benefits. This varies from state to state, but it is generally about half. They might have to pay all of the benefits to the employee instead of just a portion because the firing was unjustified. This determination is made by the unemployment office, not the firm. In all likelihood, a fired employee could sue and collect damages for wrongful termination of employment. A small firm with only 141 employees might fold because of the expense of conducting and losing such a law suit. If Seachrist were not fired, because he owned the company, he would probably go out of business. Would you continue to work for a jerk like that, even if you were a Republican? Would you buy products from a guy who ran a company like that? I wouldn't even extend commercial credit to that firm. They sound like a bunch of crooks.
If the Republican noise machine wants to create fake people to shoot off their fake mouths, then let it be known that the Seachrist letter was a vindictive wet dream from the depths of the tortured mind of a sick, fascist crank. If this moronic missive was for real, then let me know what the name of this company is, its location, and what actually happens there in the ensuing months. I want to know.