John Boehner asks for responses to a survey that's already filled out

i'm on the newsmax email list... i find it interesting to see what conservative wingnuts are up to... this morning, i received this...

Dear Fellow Conservative,

The latest unemployment figures are out – and while any job creation is welcome news, too many Americans are still looking for work.

It’s been more than two-and-a-half years since President Obama forced his massive “stimulus” into law with a promise that it would keep unemployment below eight percent. Sadly, that promise remains unfulfilled.

To bring about true economic recovery, I need your help to build support for common-sense solutions to help create jobs. Here’s what you can do today:

>> Take my survey on jobs and the economy. Which part of the GOP’s Plan for America’s Job Creators do you most want enacted today? Should President Obama reverse his decision to delay the Keystone Pipeline project and sacrifice more than 20,000 American jobs? These are just a few of the questions I have for you.

>> Make an immediate contribution of $25, $50, $100 or more to assist me in the fight to help create new jobs by preventing tax hikes, eliminating excessive government red tape, tapping into America’s vast energy resources, repealing ObamaCare, and more.

Your participation in this important survey – and your immediate contribution of $25, $50, $100, $250 or more – is critical to my efforts to advance the GOP’s jobs agenda of lower taxes, less spending and greater freedom in Democrat-controlled Washington.

Thank you in advance for your support. Together, we can help small businesses create jobs and restore the American dream for future generations.

Sincerely,

John Boehner
Speaker

P.S. I can’t overstate how important it is that I have your input. Please fill out my survey on jobs and the economy and follow-up with an immediate online contribution of $25, $50, $100, $250 or more to help me continue to lead the fight to cut government spending and remove barriers to private-sector job creation in America. Thanks again!

Paid for by TFP-FOJB Committee, a joint fundraising committee authorized by and composed of Friends of John Boehner and The Freedom Project. 320 First Street SE, Washington, DC 20003

i thought, what the heck, let's see what the survey is all about... maybe i'd even respond... here's what opened up when i clicked the link... (since i had to reduce it to fit the blog format, for easier reading, you can click here for a larger version...)



now, i don't know about you, but i have serious doubts about the professionalism of any survey that comes already filled in... not only that, but virtually all choices for all questions with the exception of the last four offer no option but to regurgitate republican talking points... i know democrats are no saints in the spin, slant and bullshit department and i'm sure if i went looking, i could find similar examples for them but, really folks, the "team boehner" survey isn't a survey... at best it's a pep rally and at worst it's an outright insult to anyone with two brain cells to rub together...

[Cross-posted at Firedoglake]

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Glenn doesn't claim that Biden was told to change his tune but I'm going to

before...

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

after...

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

glenn...

In one day, Biden went from giddily declaring that "I don't think there's any damage" to gravely warning that "it has done damage." I have no idea whether Biden was told that his Thursday no-damage admission would severely harm the Government's efforts to prosecute Assange, but what is clear is that he was perfectly willing to march into Meet the Press the following day and say things that he knew were false in order to depict the WikiLeaks diplomatic cable disclosures as harming U.S. national security.

and why in the world would biden so quickly change his tune...? maybe he got out there in front of the press before he'd been briefed on the correct talking points...? just sayin'...

more glenn...

It's really not an overstatement to say that WikiLeaks and Julian Assange are the new Iraqi WMDs because the government and establishment media are jointly manufacturing and disseminating an endless stream of fear-mongering falsehoods designed to depict them as scary villains threatening the security of The American People and who must therefore be stopped at any cost.

i'm still grappling with the fact that, with all the fuss generated by the hackers who went after companies that dropped wikileaks, there's been virtually nothing whatsoever in the media about going after those who perpetrated the ddos attacks on wikileaks... oh, well... i guess it doesn't make any sense to "grapple" with what i already know to be the flat-out hypocrisy of our handlers...

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The truth about the "success" of the Baghdad "surge," the truth you won't see on U.S. news

we seem to have forgotten that the term "surge" was a political talking point designed to minimize what was, in fact, an escalation... now, even the liberals and progressives seem content to call it a "surge" and, worse yet, are passively accepting the bush administration characterization of it as a "success"...

Baghdad, 5 years on (part 1): City of walls



Baghdad, 5 years on (part 2): killing fields



Baghdad 5 years on (part 3): Iraq's lost generation



(thanks to panicbean at daily kos...)

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In the Bush administration, what are ya gonna do when somebody tells the truth...? Swiftboat 'em, of course...!

from tpmtv's veracifier...

Scott McClellan's surprisingly critical memoir of his time as White House Press Secretary put the White House in full-on damage control mode. McClellan's book may have been off-message, but the White House and its surrogates were conspicuously "on" in their response.

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The NYT offers up op-ed space to another advocate of on-going U.S. militarization

shit... no sooner had i finished my modo rant (see previous post) and gone back to my nyt headline email, than i saw this, the very next op-ed on the list...

We Still Need the Big Guns
By CHARLES J. DUNLAP Jr.

Looking ahead, America needs a military centered not on occupying another country but on denying potential adversaries the ability to attack our interests.

this one got me curious enough to click on to the full piece, only to find that it was as sabre-rattling as the teaser suggests...

Many analysts understandably attribute the success [in Iraq] to our troops’ following the dictums of the Army’s lauded new counterinsurgency manual. While the manual is a vast improvement over its predecessors, it would be a huge mistake to take it as proof — as some in the press, academia and independent policy organizations have — that victory over insurgents is achievable by anything other than traditional military force.

Unfortunately, starry-eyed enthusiasts have misread the manual to say that defeating an insurgency is all about winning hearts and minds with teams of anthropologists, propagandists and civil-affairs officers armed with democracy-in-a-box kits and volleyball nets. They dismiss as passé killing or capturing insurgents.

let's just take a few choice items and look at them for a moment...

• "our interests" - i always love that one... i hear it all the time, and each time it never fails to strike me as code for "whatever the u.s. corporate, government, and military elites want, wherever in the world it may be, they will get, irrespective of anybody else's 'interests'..."

• iraq "success" - this neocon, bush administration, david petraeus-spawned talking point not only glosses over the reality of what's happening in iraq, but also serves to distract us from the fact that even administration HINTS that there MIGHT BE in some INDETERMINATE FUTURE the REMOTE POSSIBILITY of TROOP REDUCTION or even, god forbid, TROOP WITHDRAWAL are now OFFICIALLY DEAD...

• "proof ... that victory over insurgents is achievable by anything other than traditional military force" - zero acknowledgement here that the insurgents just may be fighting to get their country back, and that we are there, fighting to keep that from happening...

• "starry-eyed enthusiasts ... say that defeating an insurgency is all about winning hearts and minds [and] dismiss as passé killing or capturing insurgents" - need i comment here...? i can only assume that it will be a dark day indeed for the united states when "killing or capturing" is no longer the order of the day...

but, wait...! there's more...

Looking ahead, America needs a military centered not on occupying another country but on denying potential adversaries the ability to attack our interests. This is not a task for counterinsurgents, but rather for an unapologetically high-tech military that substitutes machines for the bodies of young Americans.

revolted yet...? and just so's ya know the source of the revulsion...

Charles J. Dunlap Jr. is an Air Force major general and the author of “Shortchanging the Joint Fight?,” an assessment of the Army’s counterinsurgency manual.

could it be his own "interests" he's advocating for here...? nah... silly me... of COURSE not...

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I don't want to hear about branding, I want to hear about authenticity

susang over at daily kos has a review of the following book...

The Political Brain
The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation
By Drew Westen
Public Affairs
New York, 2007

here's one of the excerpts she quotes...

... the left has no brand, no counterbrand, no master narrative, no counternarrative. It has no shared terms or "talking points" for its leaders to repeat until they are part of our political lexicon. Instead, every Democrat who runs for office, every Democrat who offers commentaries on television or radio, every Democrat who even talks with friends at the water cooler, has to reinvent what it means to be a Democrat, using his or her own words and concepts, as if the party had no history.

If this is how Coke marketed itself, we would all be drinking Pepsi.

and, while i agree with her analysis and also with a good chunk of westin's thesis...

Westin is fierce in his criticism of past Democratic presidential campaigns and cites many examples of the kind of dead, vague, safe language and symbolism so beloved of establishment strategists and party leaders. Overreliance on focus groups and polls have turned our candidates into cardboard caricatures who appear pandering and lifeless to any voter who manages to tune in.

i have to confess, when i hear about meta-messages, counterbrands, master narratives, counternarratives, shared terms, talking points, and coke vs. pepsi, i want to run screaming in the opposite direction... if indeed progressives and liberals, long under the thumb of a risk-averse democratic leadership, have been "pandering and lifeless" (an observation with which i completely agree by the way), i also have no desire to try to turn the tables, a tactic which westin, thankfully, does not advocate...

My goal in this book is not to advocate that Democrats emulate the ethics of Karl Rove.

my single most important take-away from susan's post is this westin excerpt...

[T]he reality is that the best way to elicit enthusiasm in the marketplace of emotions is to tell the truth. There is nothing more compelling in politics than a candidate who is genuine. And the issues that most tempt politicians to spin and parse are precisely the ones on which they should tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

now, THAT i can get behind...

the one thing i stress above all else in my seminars on leadership is that nothing - NOTHING - substitutes for authenticity, what westin calls "genuine..." in my presentations, i often say that i categorize people i meet for the first time into two types, opaque and transparent... an opaque person is one who has an imago that doesn't allow you to see the person inside... what you see instead is only that imago, and you're left to wonder what's behind it... there is no leaping to a conclusion that what's behind it is either bad or good, just that what you see is not the full and complete, genuine person, and that, for me at least, means i should be wary...

with a transparent person, on the other hand, basically what you see is what you get... you can see the real person inside because there is no carefully constructed image blocking the view... you may like or you may dislike what you see, but that's not the point... at least you have some confidence that you're seeing at least a part of a person's truth, which, for me, is a prerequisite to granting any level of trust...

we all know and work with opaque people, and some of them we find engaging, sociable, and responsible friends and colleagues... sometimes, as the relationship builds, the opacity drops away and we are given the opportunity to really know the person inside... for some, however, the imago is never dropped, and, while those may be people with whom i am required to work, they will never be my friends...

imago
Pronunciation: i-'mä-(")gO, -'mA-
Function: noun
Inflected Form(s): plural imagoes or ima·gi·nes /-'mA-g&-"nEz, -'mä-; -'mA-j&-, -'ma-/
Etymology: New Latin, from Latin, image
1 : an insect in its final, adult, sexually mature, and typically winged state
2 : an idealized mental image of another person or the self

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Don't penalize the Iraqi government for moving backwards

in her back-to-back talk show appearances yesterday, condi introduced the new talking point du jour...

President Bush will not sign any war spending bill that penalizes Iraq’s government for failing to make progress, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Sunday, a fresh warning to Congress about challenging him.

[...]

“To begin now to tie our own hands - and to say ‘We must do this if they don’t do that’ - doesn’t allow us the flexibility and creativity that we need to move this forward,” Rice said.

[...]

Rice said Iraqi leaders know U.S. patience is worn. Still, she said deadlines for progress could undermine the work of Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. military commander in Iraq, and Ryan Crocker, the new U.S. ambassador to Iraq.

oh, no, perish the thought that we should penalize the iraqi government if they don't make progress... however, should we penalize them if, instead of "making progress," they go backwards...?

A department of the Iraqi prime minister's office is playing a leading role in the arrest and removal of senior Iraqi army and national police officers, some of whom had apparently worked too aggressively to combat violent Shiite militias, according to U.S. military officials in Baghdad.

[...]

Although some of the officers appear to have been fired for legitimate reasons, such as poor performance or corruption, several were considered to be among the better Iraqi officers in the field. The dismissals have angered U.S. and Iraqi leaders who say the Shiite-led government is sabotaging the military to achieve sectarian goals.

"Their only crimes or offenses were they were successful" against the Mahdi Army, a powerful Shiite militia, said Brig. Gen. Dana J.H. Pittard, commanding general of the Iraq Assistance Group, which works with Iraqi security forces. "I'm tired of seeing good Iraqi officers having to look over their shoulders when they're trying to do the right thing."

and, please, pray tell, what is this "flexibility and creativity" bullshit...? the only creativity i've seen is how to keep the slaughter going against the wishes of the american people, how to continue to occupy a country against the wishes of the iraqi people, how to magically make billions and billions of dollars disappear, how to wage an illegal war on the basis of lies, how to create a sectarian civil war in a country where those same sects were living tolerantly side-by-side, and how to claim progress is being made when it clearly isn't... and as for "flexibility...?" 'fraid i haven't seen any...

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