That rings true to me. I always wonder how come people don't see the flat out contradictions thrown at them. A friend recently told me that studies show that people are oblivious to logical errors when they are made by the team they support --yeh, oblivious, as in they do not see them! They catch easily these same errors when they are made by the opposite team. What does that tell us? Well, emotions distort our ability to use logic. Is it then a mystery why every other argument is an emotional appeal, i.e., a fallacy? And why not, it succeeds in keeping the followers faithful. After all, who wants to persuade those on the other side? They are the enemy.

Wait, hold on. Are you saying that evil clown in my basement is actually ZOMBIE RICHARD NIXON?

I've heard that if you destroy the brain, the zombie dies. Is this true? According to your theorem, zombies should be unkillable. What do I do? Help!

Don't worry, Jon. Sammy is still alive in your mind!. Don't be so literal.

I read somewhere that a significant proportion of pioneers in advertising and PR were sons of preachers--they learnt their craft of spinning tropes designed to appeal to deep insecurities and emotions from those who'd been researching this topic for centuries. The struggle against these seemingly evergreen 'Ur-myths' will also take a long time...

You're right, Jon.How old *is* Kissinger anyway?

Knowing who the author of Shawshank Redemption was, I suspect you're right and Sammy actually _was_ evil. Oh, just thinking of the terror he could have inflicted upon a small, unsuspecting New England town had he not been confined to a bowl and somewhat lacking in the opposable thumb department.....

Oh, I remember reading that one. Sammy was eventually caught by a bunch of high school buddies, reunited 20 years later.

I'm thinking Jon is trying very hard not to think about those disturbing dreams he's been having ever since he had so much fun making fun of "Politics from beyond the Stars" a few days ago.

BWAH HAH Ha ha ha haaaaa.....

Yes the tactics have changed little. I took an anthropology class on North American Indians several years ago which gives one a very different view of American history. I read columns from news papers in the 1800's and they were using the same line of malarkey that we hear today. People in congress made speeches about how the poor blighted Indians could not sell their land like other people and how unfair it was. Of course what they did not say was that in those days Indians had no concept of owning the land and when this was deregulated companies that were looking to rape the natural resources found on Indian reservations would go there with a bottle of whisky and get an Indian or two drunk and then make their mark on the contract giving away their land. The effect was to keep moving Indian reservations to worse and worse locations and today many tribes still live in poverty. This is our future as well because that is essentially what Bush and the Bushies are doing to us. In fact you could take a column from the 1800's change some of the names and places and it would do quite nicely in just about any modern day paper. It is always what they don't tell you that gets you.

"Awww! Why do the good die young?!"
- Smithers when he (falsely) thinks Burns is dead

People all die, but effective ideas are recycled. The hammer you buy at the hardware store isn't the same cudgel used by a caveman 20,000 years ago. Same idea, though, spiffed up and improved upon.

Go back and read Wilhelm Reich's MASS PSYCHOLOGY OF FASCISM. You see that the same bullshit, the same strings and levers, the same tactics that the Nazis used for the Fatherland are the same things used by Bush's Homeland. The whole fundamentalist religious experience we are now going through were foisted on Germans back in the 30s.

"I'm always taken aback by the way our contemporary conservative attack machine is willing to tell five or six contradictory stories about a subject at the same time. They just throw the crap against the wall to see what sticks. Then they choose the stickiest crap and go with that."

They create cognitive dissonance. Many people shut down and grow dependent when their minds are abused like that. I don't know if it's still online anyplace but try Googling +"A Nation of Victims" +"Renata Brooks".

No Horrible Thing Ever Dies

are you quoting lovecraft again?

Not "louder and slicker", but louder and sicker.

That's why I'm having trouble enjoying Bush's poll-numbers-with-concrete-shoes troubles, especially when some poll recently showed around 60% having a favorable impression of Condi. WTF? Who is so stupid to think that she's different in any significant way from her imaginary husband? Can people connect two dots without a detailed map in their hand?

Reading that special ops have supposedly been taking place in Iran recently made me think: Nixon had his unconstitutional power grab, along with secretly expanding a war he was supposedly going to end.

Ronnie had Iran-Contra for his extra-Constitutional maneuvers and Central America for his secret war.

Now we have Shrub trying to top them both. I think three Republican presidents in three decades doing the same basic shit repeatedly is enough to make clear: this isn't a bug, it's a feature. This is what your modern Republican party does. President McCain, President Condi, or President Jeb wouldn't be any different. Why can't people get that?

"That's why I'm having trouble enjoying Bush's poll-numbers-with-concrete-shoes troubles, especially when some poll recently showed around 60% having a favorable impression of Condi. WTF? Who is so stupid to think that she's different in any significant way from her imaginary husband? Can people connect two dots without a detailed map in their hand?"

No. She's polished. She smiles nicely. She mouths the pieties about American exceptionalism and "FREEDOM", plus, they can feel good about "liking" a black woman. Why think any further?