February 9, 2007 6:34 AM

Time to operate, Dr. Mengele

Mary Matalin: Rogue GOP Brain Surgeon

Terrifying Cheney goon Mary Matalin has grown bored with old-fashioned propaganda. These days, she’s experimenting on voters’ brains so surgeons can destroy the part that hates this administration.

One of the things that’s absolutely fascinated me over the past few years is the seeming inability of those on the far Right to understand that much of this country simply doesn’t believe what is being sold to them by this Administration. You can throw all the spin, happy talk, and positive numbers you want to at us, but the reality is that when Americans look at what impacts them on a daily basis, there’s a lot of uncertainty out there. Anyone who buys gasoline, and that would be virtually every one of us, understands the impact that volatile prices can have on our day to day lives. This is something that those on the right, like Mary Matalin, seem incapable of grasping. The fact that overall economic numbers might be good does NOTHING for the person who’s out of work and having trouble making ends meet. Great; the country’s economy is looking good, but my personal economy sucks. It’s difficult to relate to large overall trends when you’re one individual whose circumstances may be running counter to the happy talk and positive numbers.

There is a cognitive dissidence in this country relative to the robust economy and how people feel about the economy. On the one hand, overwhelming majorities of people say “my life is better, my neighbor’s lives are better, my community is better, but they still have an uncertainty about the future, which plays into their opinion about the economy today.

We may cognitively understand that things are “better” overall, however you might describe it, but there are other issues at play here. Since 9.11, Americans have come to understand that there are people out there willing to kill us simply because of who we are. The fact is that this understanding has been played and manipulated by the Right into abject fear of anything and anyone even remotely “different”. This would certainly help to partially explain why Americans aren’t uniformly sunny in disposition. 9.11 was a wake-up call for Americans, but it was also a bonanza for Republican propagandists, who were (and remain) only too willing to manipulate legitimate fear and foreboding for their, and their party’s, own political gain.

This propagandizing of American security issues has turned out to be a double-edged sword for the right. They’d apparently assumed that, once they’d laid the groundwork, Our Glorious and Benevolent Leader © would have virtual carte blanche from the American Sheeple to do whatever he deemed necessary to “protect the Homeland”. And he might have had exactly that, if he hadn’t felt it necessary to lie, manipulate and fabricate intelligence, and then question the patriotism of those with the temerity to dissent.

The “problems” that Matalin bemoans are largely the byproduct of the Republican Propaganda Machine’s efforts to convince Americans that the war in Iraq was really about WMDs and 9.11, when in fact Iraq had NOTHING to do with 9.11, nor have any WMDs ever been found.

You can ask a lot of Americans, but when we sacrifice their loved ones for what turn out to be lies, talking points, and propaganda, we get a little bit testy.

When you put people in a room and discuss politics with them and you put an M.R.I. on their brain, the functioning, rational, logical part of their brain relative to politics goes black, and their emotional mind and the emotional part of the brain lights up. Further studies have shown not only do the rational parts of the brain fire up over political dialogue, the next step that’s happening is the brain is ascribing negative motives to the opposite view.

Matalin can blame people like Lee Atwater for this one. If not for what Hillary Clinton accurately described as “the politics of personal destruction”, which is really Republican code for “winning by any means necessary (ethical or otherwise)”, politics might still be a rough-and-tumble game, albeit one played largely above board. Atwater was a pioneering of using whatever tactics- dirty, unethical, or just downright mean-spirited- that would get his candidate elected. If that meant lying, accusing the opponent of behaviors or beliefs known to be untrue, cheating…the ends justified the means. Though Atwater repented on his deathbed, his progeny learned their lessons well, and Atwater’s art continues to be practiced today. It’s what Republicans do, because deep down, they know they can’t compete on the issues that Americans truly care about.

When people like Mary Matalin begin to bemoan the state of the American electorate, they might want to stop and consider the reality that they’re largely responsible for creating it. They’ve helped to create the monster that they’re now complaining about. Republicans might call that an unreasonable and unfair assessment. I call it reaping what you sow.

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This page contains a single entry by Jack Cluth published on February 9, 2007 6:34 AM.

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