MANIPULATIONS

Politicians, if they are not so already, must become masters at reading and manipulating people. The failure for some is that they do not adequately gauge the intelligence of their listeners and end up insulting them. All campaigns are manipulations of some sort but during the past eight years we have been subjected to a Rovian kind of dirty campaign. Thus, it surprised even me, to learn that Karl Rove did not approve of the way the Republicans are running McCain’s campaign right now.
When the pig leaves you in the mud, indicating it is too dirty to play there, it has to be seen as a serious signal.

Alternet recently wrote an article titled: The 12 New Stomach-Turning Revelations About Sarah Palin. The first is whether Sarah Palin is trying to incite violence against Obama. Palin is referred to as a demagogue in a skirt. It seems that many people think that the McCain campaign is stirring up enough hatred, hoping there will be violence against Obama. Whether the wish is there in her open mind and empty head, how can anyone conscience her actions when she must know she is not speaking truth and is just fighting the dirtiest of Republican politics. Her lying about the money invested by her state in Darfur, her high regard for Dick Cheney, are all signals that too many people are ignorant of the truths, though the Internet seethes with criticism about her as a person, as a governor, as a taxpayer, and now as a candidate. Her performance has left little to be admired by anyone who takes the time to study her adult and political performance. if, in fact, some are correct in saying that she really doesn't care whether McCain loses (as the polls indicate is inevitable), she is trying to position herself for a Presidential run in 2012. Continuing on as Governor of Alaska might well not buy her a nomination. She is as likely to get it as Kerry has been in 2008.

One of the tricks of manipulating is Triangling. It uses the principal that 'in numbers there is strength'. It is when you claim the support of another, or several others, to support your position as more powerful than that of the person whom you are addressing. (eg, Mom (talking to kids), "I do not give my consent and your father and grandparents agree with me." Powerhouse to the kids!) The media pundits do it all the time with little shame or realization of the immaturity of the ploy.

Try maintaining your own position in a stand-off with someone without wishing you could say, "And, XXX feels exactly as I do and told me so." Whereupon the person with whom you have spoken will feel compelled to ask XXX who will then be caught in the middle. They will either be uncomfortable having to defend what they said to you and not to them in the first place, or they will chicken out and have to deny it, leaving you looking pretty untrustworthy. If your objection or position is compelling, you should argue only on your own information and convictions, never drawing in another who is not present, or by quoting (or often misquoting) that person.

Slight distortion of facts can change the tenor of a situation from acceptable to totally non-acceptable. Palin is trying to do that and is probably succeeding with many who believe her 'honesty' and 'sincerity', rather than seeing what she is doing as the worst kind of dirty politics possible. We must ask the question, "Is this the real Sarah Palin?" If so, her admiration for Cheney and lack of understanding and adherence to the Constitution and other societal rules, like income tax, make her a frightening thought to in any way be an example for young, impressionable women or having ability to lead our country.

THE USA WORLD EMPIRE

How Lethally Stupid Can One Country Be? This is a must read article by David Michael Green. There is one fallacy in the delivery. The writer asks how a country with the capacity to choose can have allowed this to happen. We, as a nation of individuals, lost our capacity to choose under the brainwashing we have experienced in the past few years. We need to look no further to understand how this works than to the FDLS (Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints, a controversial Mormon fundamentalist polygamous sect.) For anyone who wishes a powerful autobiographical account of being raised in the sect and finally getting out of it, I suggest that you read Carolyn Jessups' book, Escape. There are many more examples to be found onthe destruction of human individuals and free thinkers due to brain washing. The saddest part is that people having their brains washed rarely ever know it is happening to them because they are kept clean of any inputs which might change the message. Our government has forbidden truths to be known. They have brainwashed through two techniques: Keeping people in line with fear; keeping people ignorant of the truth. That is the basic structure to brainwashing.

We the People of the United States were being brain washed by Bush, Sr and Jr though that is the only thing Junior ever did better than Senior ( probably because he had more sociopathic helpers). If you are able to read the first article, then try a second, which has less anger in the writing and adds more history to the narrative, which you can even hear should you prefer it to reading. Actually, our country and history books have been brainwashing us for more than a century. The slow erosion of our democracy is not new, but just as the world has speeded up everything, technology, global warming, so has the destruction of our democracy been speeded up.

All empires eventually fall: "Akkad, Sumeria, Babylonia, Ninevah, Assyria, Persia, Macedonia, Greece, Carthage, Rome, Mali, Songhai, Mongonl, Tokugawaw, Gupta, Khmer, Hapbsburg, Inca, Aztec, Spanish, Dutch, Ottoman, Austrian, French, British, Soviet, you name them, they all fell, and most within a few hundred years. The reasons are not really complex. An empire is a kind of state system that inevitably makes the same mistakes simply by the nature of its imperial structure and inevitably fails because of its size, complexity, territorial reach, stratification, heterogeneity, domination, hierarchy, and inequalities." (from the linked article by Kirkpatrick Sale).

The formula for failure is set but we would be able to prevent it being stirred into completion if people would listen and believe it will happen. We must not 'stay the course', not only as Bush tells us to do in Iraq, but also here on home turf. We would be on the slide downhill to our own destruction as a country. We need to attend to all the priorities at home that have been discussed by all three candidates, weigh them as to outcome, and start planning to bring America back to its former state of integrity, ethics, separation of Church and state, investment in better education for all children, work on updating the infrastructure of the country, and we must go back to valuing our best resource....our legal citizens and making plans to take care of them first! We need to stop pretending we can be altruistic and charitable with our tax money. Our own people need it more than many of the countries to whom we are sending it. We need to stop the politics of self-service to politicians, pork projects to keep them in office, no-bid contracts and business as usual by the lobbyists who have big corporations to serve, not the country as a whole..

In conclusion, we need to stop listening to the least knowledgeable, least patient, least capable of empirical-thinking citizens and start running the country differently. We need to bring the Constitution into the 21st Century just as the Bible needs to be brought to date by those who choose to live by it.