For degree of difficulty, I’ll give them a ten, but Republicans are far too incompetent to have risked the political Jujitsu required by their recent exercise.<\/p>\n
Saul Alinsky<\/a> was an activist and author who has been called the founder of modern community organizing. He is said to have been an early influence on Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. His book, Rules For Radicals<\/a>, outlined a program for effecting social change by building organizations that restored the balance of power from the elite to the people.<\/p>\n Early in last year’s presidential campaign, Republicans sought to exploit Clinton and Obama’s connection to Alinsky, implying that there was something frightful about his advocacy of empowering the poor and middle classes. More recently, his name has begun to reappear in a new, seemingly coordinated assault on the President, the press, and any stray progressive activist that might saunter along. The problem is that these conservatives swing so wide of the mark that they only succeed in making asses of themselves. Their approach is so pedestrian that not only do they fail to make their point, the point they make is often antithetical to what they intended. For example…<\/p>\n Jim Geraghty wrote an article for the National Review, The Alinsky Administration<\/a>, that seeks to associate Obama with the first of Alinsky’s rules: Power is not only what you have, but what an opponent thinks you have.<\/em> But Geraghty’s limited comprehension distills the concept down to nothing more than the allegation that Obama is a politician who seeks to attain power. Shocking, isn’t it?<\/p>\n Geraghty: “As conservatives size up their new foe, they ought to remember: It’s not about liberalism. It’s about power. Obama will jettison anything that costs him power, and do anything that enhances it.”<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n In addition to missing Alinsky’s point entirely, Geraghty also contradicts the vast conservative confederation that has been hammering away at Obama precisely because of his intransigent liberalism. So while everyone else on the right is trying to convince us that Obama is taking us down the road to Socialism, Geraghty contends that the ideology is expendable in the pursuit of power.<\/p>\n Then Geraghty turns up on the Hannity show<\/a> and invokes his version of Alinsky’s fifth rule: Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon.<\/em> But in making his case, Geraghty has uncovered a heretofore unknown conspiracy that is under the direction of Obama:<\/p>\n Geraghty: “[H]e’s got everything from ‘The Daily Show’ to ‘The Colbert Report’ to, you know, liberal bloggers, entertainers, Bill Maher. He kind of outsources that aspect of the Alinsky operation.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n It may come as a surprise to Jon Stewart et al, to learn that they are mere puppets of the White House Overlord. The administration’s army of comedians must keep a lot of Republicans up at night. And, Heaven knows, the President himself loves to laugh<\/a>. Bill O’Reilly also picked up the ridicule angle<\/a> and added NBC as an instrument of Obama’s plot:<\/p>\n O’Reilly: “Enter far-left philosopher Saul Alinsky […] Before he died, Alinsky wrote a book called ‘Rules for Radicals,’ and here is where the politics of ridicule was defined. According to Alinsky, in order to change America into a far-left bastion, traditional Americans must be marginalized.”<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n Of course, O’Reilly made up virtually all of that. Alinsky not only did not advocate for marginalizing “traditional Americans,”<\/em> he was their biggest advocate. Then again, O’Reilly’s definition of a traditional American is a wealthy, white, Christian, corporatist, social Darwinian, who gets off on torture and loofahs. But my favorite part, personally, is where O’Reilly says, “Before he died, Alinsky wrote a book…”<\/em> As opposed to the books he wrote after he died? Thanks for making that distinction, Bill.<\/p>\n If the Republicans are sensitive to being ridiculed, it is only because they make it so easy. However, their disingenuous sniveling is hard to take seriously when they are just as guilty of the practice as the left. O’Reilly has a daily feature on his show wherein he calls people pinheads. The RNC repeatedly cranked out campaign videos mocking Obama as a celebrity, a media darling, or “The One”<\/em>. Glenn Beck has a recurring series on the “March to Socialism”<\/em>. Rush Limbaugh devotes most of his daily three hour rant to nothing but ridiculing one Democrat or another. The Internet is awash with images of Obama as everything from a terrorist to a Messiah to Hitler.<\/p>\n