This ties into the diary I wrote a couple of days ago, entitled
"Coulter/Malkin -- The Pawns of War" and the art of the coordinated distraction.
In that diary I described what I termed the Malcolts, people who's job it is to draw fire away from the real criminals and scam artists of the republican party. The more time we spend directly attacking Coulter and her vile ilk, the more time Duke Cunningham and Scooter Libby look like moderates and/or are ignored. It is important to understand the coordination at work among these vile people and how they use coded terms to charge the debate.
Today's diary is another angle on the same issue. The "fake outrage" story, or, with a nod to Kubrick, "How I learned to Stop Worrying and Obsess about Dan Rather".
When the Dan Rather "story" first broke it was in the context of a much larger debate. The issue of George W. Bush's war record that has gone missing and remains missing. Rather, in a rush to "scoop" the story, trumpeted the discovery of what he thought was an original document proving Bush went AWOL but was either a copy of the original document or a fake document (and it's unknown).
But for the wingnut noise machine, such errors are cause for celebration. For they become the "out visual". The escape valve of debate if you will. Usually peripherally related to the larger issue, the wingnuttia masses are able to zero in on this tiny tangential element of the larger story and rework the debate through endless echo chamber repetition until it's lost all context and meaning and the tangent becomes the story.
This is a key component of self-censorship and footsoldier mind control. Since the average republican believes controlling their own logical construction is how they can "play their part" in the war effort, these types of escape valves become invaluable psychological tools of the trade.
Republican minds balk at complex thought. They don't like it. They see it as anti-American. They see it as confused and morally ambiguous. To erase troubling complexities, or as Al Gore aptly puts it, inconvenient truths, one must have a simplified iconic "moment" to grasp hold of like an intellectual life-raft when confronting the larger ocean of truth. Only by climbing into that raft and putting their head down into the boat can they claim, quite seriously (since they can't see it), that there is no ocean.
The Dan Rather story becomes a prime example. Nothing Rather claimed in his story has been fundamentally challenged. But Rather was embarrassed and forced to admit he used a document that wasn't an original and therefore should not have been included. No matter to wingnuts that Niger claims in the State of the Union and a six year track record of editing science reports and paying off journalists have shown the white house to be willfully and intentionally uninterested in fact checking and vetting of sources. Pointing this out is like spitting in the wind. It is quite literally besides the point.
The point is the "out." The "out" is the "mock." Visceral personal hatred. Think Political American Idol. In a popularity contest of images, who can be laughed at first.
Dan Rather got to be laughed at.
This allows their mind two options when approaching anything media related (like, say, charges of overt bias and lying at Fox News):
1. Consider the real world variety of news sources, put them into context, consider real journalism versus propaganda, and consider how much partisan propaganda is floated and in what varieties does it appear.
2. Laugh at Dan Rather's face.
I've written previous diaries about how the wingnut mind can only exist in an irrational state of visceral trigger moments and emotional frenzy. When things calm down, the mindset literally can't sustain itself. Like a crack high, they've become addicted to emotional visceral charge.
And what brings emotional charge? Personality hatred. Mocking. Teasing. Ridicule. All the tools of the schoolyard.
Dan Rather thus becomes a tool of the schoolyard because he's a face to be mocked. And so long as the emotional trigger can fire at someone (see the Dean "scream" or Al Gore's "internet" fictional quote for other examples), then all complexity is once again reduced to simplified binary schoolyard us/them ridicule.
This is why, 18 months after the "incident" (and to wingnuts, this was as profound a moment as any in the past six years, as much as anything in the Iraq War itself), the recent retirement of Rather was treated as a serious discussion point on talk radio and the Fox News echo chamber.
In another sense it's pathetic that one of the few "valves" they've found as they've been mercilessly beaten down logically across the board through factual discussion, real world results and cause and effect is a 74 year old news anchor. Even more pathetic that Rather was one of the ones in 2000 who had no problem calling what was clearly a "too close to call" state of Florida for George W. Bush.
But for a political movement that is akin more to a middle ages crypto-cult religious fervor (talking in tongues, self flaggelation) than anything approaching lucid and intellectual thought, this is par for the course.
Because every great "religion" needs its Judases. Needs its Goldsteins to appear on the screen and cause the masses to go into insta-rage (see Orwell's 1984).
In short, a political movement built on fear and rage, on trigger responses and the need to sustain emotional frenzy, there must be those "enemies" to whip that frenzy up when it begins to die down (and logic sets in).
For those of us in the fact-based world, we'd think Osama Bin Laden would do that. But Osama Bin Laden doesn't even exist for these people in the same way that Dan Rather does. Dan Rather becomes the "enemy at home", the hidden liberal with his covert agenda to destroy the country from within. Basically the canard used against Jewish people for centuries. And why not? For governments to keep the people from revolting, creating these villians has worked for a thousand years.
This is what the Malcolts attempt to do with the word "liberal", creating it into a coded trigger word with deep subconscious emotional effect. They then must pin this label on specific villians they cast in the political spectrum to achieve their result of keeping the masses inflamed (and preventing them from enough logical thought to question).
Understanding how the Malcolts use their terminology helps to connect to the need for them to find their Dan Rathers to pin that terminology on. And, to borrow an ancient expression, if they didn't have Dan Rather, they'd have to make him up. Which they essentially have.
In future diaries I will discuss at length how we can counter this visceral emotional trigger coding, as it must be done through similar techniques and not the argument of facts and logic that we naturally are inclined towards using (being based, as we are, in a fact and science based world). You can only destroy real propaganda with the very propaganda techniques being used. It is how we can fight the Malcolts and how we can lift the confusion, even temporarily (in what alcoholics call "moments of clarity") from even the truest of true believers.
We can crack their false constructs. We just have to swing the truth with the same force that their coded propaganda comes to them on a daily basis. And this is not done by appealing to reason or showing graphs.