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The war in Afghanistan was lost because it became a kindergarten with guns; Addendum: Romney abandons The Bush Doctrine

by Mojambo ( 140 Comments › )
Filed under Afghanistan, Jihad, Leftist-Islamic Alliance, Mitt Romney, Taliban, Terrorism at October 16th, 2012 - 12:00 pm

The Knish rightly puts the blame for the failure in Afghanistan where it belongs, on the morons who thought that they could civilize the savages (whom President bush ridiculously referred to as “Afghanis” lol) and the antiquated politically correct Rules of Engagement.  For this both George W. Bush and Barack H. Obama are responsible.  As long as the Taliban could regroup in Pakistan, their ultimate return was inevitable.

by Daniel Greenfield

Regardless of who wins this election in a few years the final planes carrying the last soldiers will shake off Afghanistan’s dust and take to the sky. They will leave behind a limited number of advisers, ex-military civilian contractors and a whole bunch of diplomats running out the clock in Kabul. A few years later when Islamist mobs are roaming the streets and rocket attacks on the US embassy have become routine, the helicopters on the roof will be back and the surviving diplomats will be on their way to new assignments in more peaceful parts of the world like Baghdad and Cairo.

The war in Afghanistan is lost and that loss is mostly unspoken. Had Obama never been elected then the left, in coordination with their Democratic big brothers, might have elevated the defeat to the level of another Vietnam. But that dream, nurtured in the early years of the Bush Administration, is a done deal after the Son of Jimmy Carter who ran on a platform of beating the Taliban. Instead of another Vietnam, the long war will be an unremarked defeat.

Neither side wants to talk about it and the American people just want to leave. The ending is written the cemeteries are full and all that’s left is to shake off the dust and go home.

Defeats however have to be learned from and no one intends to learn the lessons of Afghanistan. The people responsible for 1,500 deaths in implementing a directive to beat the Taliban without breaking a single fingernail on an Afghan civilian, even if he’s a Taliban gunman hiding behind a Burqa, will not pay the price for this. They will go on to lucrative gigs as lobbyists or leadership trainers, herding corporate executives around golf courses and trading on anecdotes about the time they almost came under fire.

They will not be held accountable, because when they sacrificed 1,500 American soldiers they were just following orders and the orders came from generals and the generals were following orders from Valerie Jarrett and Susan Rice and Hillary Clinton and the entire diploarchy on a desperate quest to win the war and end the occupation by getting the Taliban to the negotiating table and getting Obama to the Mission Accomplished jet in time for the election.

There’s no General Westmoreland to hang here. The closest thing to him is General McChrystal, a man who badly wanted to be the hip cool general, the Obama of Afghanistan, and cost far more lives than General Custer did in the process. McChrystal was just following the new trend that said that wars aren’t won by violence, but by winning hearts and minds changing social conditions. The new warrior was no longer a soldier, but a social worker, a diplomat and a comparative religions scholar. And if 1,500 social workers had to die so that the Afghans would come to love us… then so be it.

The war in Afghanistan was lost because it became a kindergarten with guns, a social welfare agency with heavy artillery

The war in Afghanistan was lost because it became a kindergarten with guns, a social welfare agency with heavy artillery that couldn’t be used in the proximity of civilians. And it was run by the same type of people who turned domestic urban centers into hellholes by pandering to criminals while making it impossible for law enforcement to do their job.

Don’t think of Afghanistan as a distant country. Think of it as New York in the 80s. Think of it as Detroit or Chicago. Think of all the social workers constantly shouting about justice and demanding an end to police brutality. Think of the lawyers helping grinning thugs out of prison. Think of the slimy pols pressing the flesh with neighborhood gang leaders and paying homage to them. That’s what happened in Afghanistan.

[……….]

We didn’t lose the war in Afghanistan. When we went in the Taliban were crushed, driven out and broken down. It took them years to recover, but they were always bound to recover so long as there were neighboring Muslim countries like Pakistan and Iran who were invested in their recovery. The futility of fighting a proxy war against an insurgency in a country with a high population and a low income was known before Vietnam. It was certainly known before we tried to secure Afghanistan.

Ten years ago we didn’t beat the Taliban by patrolling roads and having tea with the local elders

Ten years ago we didn’t beat the Taliban by patrolling roads and having tea with the local elders. We did it by finding people who wanted to beat the Taliban and providing them with supply lines and air support. We didn’t do it by winning hearts and minds, we did it by dropping bombs and more bombs. We won by winning.

The idea of winning by winning has become antiquated. The post-everything sensibility is to win by losing. To win by making so many concessions and bending over so far backward that the enemy either comes to love us or is completely discredited. This never works, but it’s the properly liberal war to approach any conflict with people who aren’t rich white men.

Winning by winning, a deep thinker will tell us, is futile. Trying to win by winning is the road to defeat. You may kill one terrorist, but a thousand will take his place. You may win a battle but by going to war you have already lost the war.

Don’t laugh. Such deep thoughts are the intellectual DNA of the diplomats and the generals, the experts in regional studies who sneer at the idea of winning wars instead of lining up all the stakeholders in a conflict and convincing them to build a working society, instead of blowing themselves up outside police stations.

So we didn’t try to win by winning. We tried to win by convincing that it was in everyone’s interest to let us help them win by living in peace. This has worked out about as well as expected in a society where winning is a zero sum game and cooperation is a temporary truce in which each party waits to stab the other in the back. Instead of winning by winning, we lost by losing. It’s the Post-American way.

[……..]

Before these pernicious doctrines took hold, we had already adopted a nation building model that relied on restoring stability through occupation, rather than shattering the enemy’s main strength and moving on.

We didn’t lose the war in Afghanistan. We lost the nation building

We didn’t lose the war in Afghanistan. We lost the nation building. We lost the hopeless effort to cobble together coalitions of the corrupt and to patrol the resulting territories while pretending that a democratic election in a country with no concept of legal equality or civil rights meant that we were making progress because the savage lands were now turning out to be just like us.

American soldiers became Karzai’s security guards. American soldiers became Afghanistan’s army. American soldiers were tasked with trying to keep the peace in a society where peace is alien and life is cheap. We lost that war to stabilize and democratic the land, but there isn’t anyone who could have won it. Even the Russians proved not to have the stomach for the kind of massive bloodshed that it would have taken to stabilize Afghanistan under their kind of government. We certainly don’t.

Our mistake was resetting our victory condition from inflicting massive damage on the Taliban and Al Qaeda

Our mistake was resetting our victory condition from inflicting massive damage on the Taliban and Al Qaeda, while empowering their enemies, to turning Afghanistan into a stable and healthy society. We had drunk the stability snake oil and come to believe that Afghanistan was just like Germany and Japan, that if we could teach the natives to build healthy democratic institutions, stability would follow. We were wrong.

[………] We lost the war because we could no longer justify a war to ourselves in the interests of our own defense, only in the interests of saving another people and another society from themselves. We lost Afghanistan because we still knew how to fight, but we no longer remember why we fought.

Read the rest – Why we lost Afghanistan

Rodan Addendum:

In realated news, aides close to Mitt Romney claims he will abandon the failed Bush Doctrine. This concept of imposing Democracy at the point of a gun doe not work in the Islamic world. The Bush foreign policy destroyed the credibility Republicans had in this arena. Romney realizes this and has thankfully ditched it.

WASHINGTON — As he seeks to appeal more to moderates, Mitt Romney is putting new distance between his campaign and some prominent Republican allies who are pressing him to adopt the rousing but politically risky foreign policy principles of former President George W. Bush.

The battle to set Romney’s foreign policy has raged all year inside his presidential campaign, but has intensified in recent weeks as Republicans have sensed a political opportunity in the Obama administration’s shifting characterizations of the terrorist attack that killed four Americans at the U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya.

A senior Republican strategist close to the campaign said Romney was groping for a “version 2.0” of the foreign policy of the Bush era, but one that would more resemble President Reagan’s in the Cold War. It would seek to assert American leadership and values with a powerful military and bold rhetoric, but “with a more cautious view of where and when we use force.”

The imperative is to avoid “the mistakes and miscalculations of the last decade,” said the strategist, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to speak about internal deliberations. “The Bush foreign policy is a terrible brand.”

The Bush Doctrine was not a conservative concept.  It was based on Jacobin and Trotskyite ideas of exporting revolution to other nations.  Mitt Romney will embrace the traditional Republican foreign policy of cautious involvement in world affairs. At a time of a $16 trillion debt, this nation cannot afford some delusional Progressive nation building as our nation and military deserve better. I salute Romney for abandoning this failed policy which  is not now or ever  was conservative!

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Posted in Afghanistan, Jihad, Leftist-Islamic Alliance, Mitt Romney, Taliban, Terrorism | 140 Comments »

The strange duo of Barack and Joe – two petty egotistical men, thin skin, fake smiles, common narcissism

by Mojambo ( 140 Comments › )
Filed under Barack Obama, Democratic Party, Elections 2012, Joe Biden, Mitt Romney, Politics at October 15th, 2012 - 12:00 pm

The Knish aptly sums up the revolting qualities of the two Democratic candidates. Smirking, laughing, belittling, interrupting – all come naturally to elitists.

“Obama is the new face of the Democratic Party, the perfect public face of its coalition between the government upper class and their minority voters, while Biden is the face of the old Democratic Party, the one that played on the working class Irish, Italian and Jewish vote in urban centers on behalf of the social planners of the New Deal and the New Frontier.”

by Daniel Greenfield

The presidential and vice-presidential debates provided us with two snapshots of two different and yet very similar men.

The Obama who showed up to debate Mitt Romney and the Biden who showed up to debate Paul Ryan were outwardly different types. One white and one black, one elderly and one middle-aged, one a veteran of the Senate and the other a political tyro rushed through the ranks on the promise of his electability.

But Obama and Biden showed once again at the debates that they have more in common than anyone would give them credit for. Obama was surly while Biden was belligerent, but both men behaved the way they did out of an innate sense of entitlement. With their every word and gesture they made it clear that they were too good to be here.

While Romney and Ryan have often been accused of elitism, both as a personal accusation and as a class accusation, they behaved with dignity and discretion. Obama and Biden on the other hand treated their opponents with contempt beginning with their lack of preparation for the debates and their lack of grace in the debate.

Obama believed that he had won the debate after he lost it and Biden believed that he won the debate before it even began. Biden’s braggadocio and Obama’s disdain both came out of their own exaggerated senses of self-worth that made them feel that they were too good for the forum and too good for their opponents.

Biden and Obama may not have race, religion or age in common, but they both share a common narcissism that leads them to believe that their innate specialness transcends competence and that their rhetorical gifts can overcome their laziness and lack of preparation. Neither man bothered to hide their belief that their opponents are inferior to them in every possible way.

[……..]

Their thin skins and fake smiles go together, along with their contempt for each other and the whole world. They are men who live oblivious to other men, who occupy a current of their own imagining, who are always certain that life has not rewarded them sufficiently for all that they have done, even though they have done nothing. They are men of ambition, but not talent. Their only gift is one of imagining themselves in greater and greater positions and the accompanying talent of convincing others that their imaginary abilities should be rewarded with real positions.

They are glib, but not smart men

They are glib, but not smart men. They have a facility for speaking off-the-cuff, but that facility betrays them as often as it rewards them. Like actors, they love the sounds of their own voices so much that they never notice when their own song becomes a siren call dooming them to the crash of their own stupidity.

They can tell stories, but they are always the stars of their own stories, the “I’s” of the legends that they build around themselves, the gods who stride from their own temples, the heroes who come to their own rescue and then marry themselves and cheer themselves on.

[……..]

Biden and Obama both excel at the rhetoric of grievance. They summon up displays of fake anger to disguise their own corruption and incompetence, striving to convince slices of the electorate that they are fighting for them, because they know that they have no hope of convincing them that they are competent managers.

Obama is the new face of the Democratic Party, the perfect public face of its coalition between the government upper class and their minority voters, while Biden is the face of the old Democratic Party, the one that played on the working class Irish, Italian and Jewish vote in urban centers on behalf of the social planners of the New Deal and the New Frontier.

The Democratic Party is losing its grip on the Reagan Democrats, the loss of manufacturing jobs and the growing conservatism of small business is leaving less and less room for the kind of barstool campaigns that Joseph Robinette Biden was once good for.

The 2012 election is the last hurrah of the Biden class, those grinning senseless storytellers and glib millionaires with hard-luck tales and rolled up sleeves pretending to be working class, shaking hands with union steelworkers, mill workers, factory workers, telling them, “Oh boy that’s tough, but lemme tell you about the time my wife almost caught me with Cindy. Don’t worry the Democrats have your back. Stick with us and we’ll take care of you.”

Those voters are vanishing, falling through the cracks of EPA fascism and globalized outsourcing. If Obama wins another term, there may still be room for a few thousand of them to put together solar panels and windmills from China, but even those jobs will go to the new face of America. To Somali refugees and Mexican immigrants, and those workers will not need Biden to stand outside their bar and shake their hands. Some of them won’t have bars and most of them won’t care about anything but the benefits package they get through their local cultural center.

That’s the new face of America that Obama represents. It’s the same old story of the urban political machine which caters to the revolving door of new immigrants, stocking up front men who speak their language and know all their customs, only to give those front men the boot when the demographics of the alleys of Slumville and Immigrant’s Row change.

Joe Biden with his fake working class mannerisms and outdated jokes

Tammany Hall’s leadership went from English to Irish to Italian, Jewish and Black in some 170 years. The process has since accelerated and Joe Biden with his fake working class mannerisms and outdated jokes doing his best to be everyone’s fun crazy uncle is almost done.

Biden’s currency, like Obama’s currency, was his identity. Not a real identity, but an artificial identity. Crazy Uncle Joe is as authentically working class as Barry Hussein is an African-American. Neither of them was chosen for anything but their ability to mimic the identities of others in order to project a lower class sensibility that they have no part of.

Debating Ryan was Biden’s last hurrah, it was the thunder of a dinosaur crashing through the trees, snapping his teeth and roaring at the sky, without understanding that the big fire above is a meteor coming down on top of him. The world in which Biden might have aimed at the top job is long gone. Biden’s function today is to snap his teeth, to roar and remind the youngsters that old time political crooks didn’t need to call themselves community organizers or bolster their credentials with fake teaching gigs. All they needed was a barstool and a great deal of nerve.

[………]

The only thing really separating Obama from Biden is a generational shift and the shift is driven by the political agenda of the left. It is not too difficult, although quite horrifying, to imagine an America in the year 2037 where Barack Hussein is as much of an anachronism as Crazy Joe. The Democratic Party has reinvented itself numerous times and the stresses that it imposes on the country come out of the left’s program.

The smirking fake working class pol was not the endpoint of the Democratic Party, though in his own time the creature seemed every bit as radical as a man with Muslim roots in the White House. There is no reason to think that Barack with his Third Culture image and his fake veneer of culture is going to be the endpoint either. If the left has taught us anything, it is that its narrative of cultural destruction is always able to conceive of more and more horrifying worlds than anything we might behold today.

[………]

Had that not happened, it’s quite possible that Obama’s exotic bio would have meant nothing and he would be sitting in the Illinois Senate watching Cory Booker making his acceptance speech in the race to unseat President McCain. And conversely, had the Democratic Party not swung so far to the left and stayed focused on the American working class instead of an artificially imported diversity overseen by a college educated upper class. Had it embraced tariffs and protected American manufacturing, then the country might be a very different place and President Joe Biden might be inveighing against Republican elitism while boasting of showing Chinese products the door.

[……..]

Obama and Biden front men for a massive scam

Obama and Biden see themselves as men of destiny, when they’re actually front men for a massive scam that has been going on long before their grandparents got out of diapers. The scam has evolved and become more sophisticated, and that growing sophistication is why Biden is only useful to the scam as a scarecrow shouting at Ryan about anything and everything, while Obama is useful as the healer who will reassure the country of its new moral stature.

But though they play different roles, that does not make them different men. It is the accidents and plans of the machine that made them fit only for these different roles, that left Biden no choice but to play the loud buffoon, while Barack got the star part of the new JFK.

Barry and Joe are the same man because the machine they serve is the same machine and though they imagine that they rule the machine, it is the machine that chose them, it is the machine that uses them and it is the machine that will throw them away when it is done.

Read the rest – The Odd Couple of Barack and Joe

 

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Posted in Barack Obama, Democratic Party, Elections 2012, Joe Biden, Mitt Romney, Politics | 140 Comments »

What George Orwell would think about the liberal appeasement of Islam

by Mojambo ( 71 Comments › )
Filed under Cold War, Free Speech, Leftist-Islamic Alliance, Liberal Fascism, Marxism, Political Correctness, Progressives, Russia at October 2nd, 2012 - 8:00 am

Appeasement of a murderous totalitarian ideology did not begin with Islam. As the Knish points out, the  roots go back to the early 1920’s and 30’s and America’s relations with Stalin’s U.S.S.R.

by Daniel Greenfield

Suppose there were a worldwide movement which openly proclaimed its goal of taking over in your country and every country with the purpose of imposing its system on every human being on earth. Also suppose that this movement had carried out murders and terrorist attacks in your own country, that members of this group promoted violence while gaining political influence. Suppose also that is was highly unfashionable and politically incorrect to speak out against them.

I am not speaking of Islam here, but of Communism. The current wave of censorship and denial toward Islam is not a new development. It is rather a very old one. Islamophobia, like Red-Baiting, is a political term that serves the function of cutting off any discussion of the subject. It precludes any listing of the facts or debates on the issue, by declaring it to be off-limits. To raise the issue is to expose yourself as a bad person whose ideas are unacceptable for public distribution.

When George Orwell was struggling to find a publisher for Animal Farm, he was repeatedly turned down on the grounds that the book would offend the Soviet Union. One publisher wrote to Orwell that he had been dissuaded from publishing the book by an important official in the Ministry of Information (an agency that would become the Ministry of Truth in his novel, 1984) who had told him that publishing such a book would be ill-advised at this time. That official was, incidentally, a Soviet spy.

The publisher went on to say that the book might be acceptable if it applied generally to dictators, but not specifically to the USSR.  [……….]

Change around a few names and this is exactly the rejection letters that courageous books critical of Islam have received. It’s fine to make general criticisms of religious fanaticism, so long as those criticisms are universally applied, and do not offend those touchy people who religious fanaticism occasionally expresses itself in dangerous ways.

In a generally deleted preface to Animal Farm, Orwell wrote, “The sinister fact about literary censorship in England is that it is largely voluntary. Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban. Anyone who has lived long in a foreign country will know of instances of sensational items of news — being kept right out of the British press, not because the Government intervened but because of a general tacit agreement that ‘it wouldn’t do’ to mention that particular fact.”

[………]

“At this moment what is demanded by the prevailing orthodoxy is an uncritical admiration of Soviet Russia. Everyone knows this, nearly everyone acts on it. Any serious criticism of the Soviet régime, any disclosure of facts which the Soviet government would prefer to keep hidden, is next door to unprintable,” Orwell wrote in his Animal Farm preface titled, Freedom of the Press.

“Hardly anyone will print an attack on Stalin, but it is quite safe to attack Churchill…  throughout five years of war, during two or three of which we were fighting for national survival, countless books, pamphlets and articles advocating a compromise peace have been published without interference… So long as the prestige of the USSR is not involved, the principle of free speech has been reasonably well upheld.”

[……..]

It was always safe to attack Bush, but an attack, even on Bin Laden, was considered tacky at best. And an attack on more “moderate” figures, like Tariq Ramadan, was borderline unprintable. While it was ridiculously easy to publish an essay depicting Bush as a war-crazed chimp invading Iraq for oil, Haliburton and Christian fundamentalism, the cultural elites insisted that doing so was an act of great political courage. Meanwhile publishing an essay critical of Islamic figures was next to impossible and dangerously perilous. And those same elites treated it as a despicable abuse of freedom of speech.

The poisonous vein here goes deeper. With the rise of the Bolsheviks there was a vigorous debate over whether or not to recognize the Soviet Union. Two administrations, Wilson and Hoover, chose not to do so. Their reasoning was fairly straightforward and is best expressed in the words of Bainbridge Colby, the Secretary of State under Woodrow Wilson.

Colby was a liberal who had co-founded Roosevelt’s Progressive Party and befriended Mark Twain, nevertheless he laid out a clear rationale for extending no diplomatic recognition to the Bolshevik terrorists. “We cannot recognize, hold official relations with or give friendly reception to the agents of a government which is determined and bound to conspire against our institutions, whose diplomats will be agitators of dangerous revolt, whose spokesmen say they sign agreements with no intention of keeping them.”

That policy persisted under two administrations, including that of President Hoover, who had personal experience with the Soviet Union during the Russian relief effort which bailed out the Communists at a crucial time. It was the FDR Administration which was stuffed full of Communists that abrogated it. FDR became the first American president to directly communicate with a Soviet leader and in his first year of office he invited the Soviet Foreign Minister to Washington D.C. and recognized the Soviet Union.

To achieve that recognition, the Soviet Union pledged not to promote or harbor any groups with the aim of “the overthrow or the preparation for the overthrow of, or bringing about by force of, a change in the political or social order of the whole or any part of the United States, its territories or possessions.” This agreement was never honored in any way, shape or form.

Colby went on defending his policy until his death in 1950 as the right thing to do. And the pace of events only proved him right. The USSR used diplomatic recognition to extract aid, plant saboteurs and conduct espionage. It kept agreements only for so long as they suited it.

The pro-recognition lobby backed of diplomats, businessmen and politicians exploiting argued that only engagement would reform the Soviet Union. That same argument was still being made during the Reagan Administration which was berated for its warmongering obstructionism every time it refused to give in to Soviet demands.

We are back to that same debate today between engaging our enemies or accepting their hostility as a fact. The modern diplomatic corps is full of advocates of engagement with the Muslim Brotherhood, with the Taliban and Al-Qaeda. There isn’t anyone they won’t engage with so long as they hate the United States and seek to destroy it.

Four years of Obama has shown once again that engagement does not work. Not only doesn’t it work, it actually emboldens the enemy and allows the enemy to infiltrate deep within our societies and to corrupt our institutions. That very engagement leads to censorship in the name of friendship. It leads to news articles and books that cannot be printed because they might sabotage the chances for peace.

The hope for peace is the greatest force of censorship there is. Once engagement is passed off as a fairy that you must believe in lest she will die, then censorship becomes absolutely mandatory to keep peace alive. If a book critical of Communism might offend the USSR then it is best not to print it or to water it down. If Muslims riot over cartoons of Mohammed, then it is a civic duty not to print them in the name of peace and understanding.

When we marvel at the Dhimmism in modern cultural life, at the extent to which Islamic viewpoints are presented unchallenged as the establishment devotes its fullest efforts to inveighing against any opposing views, this too has its red precedents.

“The servility with which the greater part of the English intelligentsia have swallowed and repeated Russian propaganda from 1941 onwards would be quite astounding,” Orwell wrote. “On one controversial issue after another the Russian viewpoint has been accepted without examination and then publicised with complete disregard to historical truth or intellectual decency.”

Modern day examples of this surround us on all sides and as a doctor of totalitarianism, Orwell aptly diagnosed the corruption of the elites and their descent into totalitarian expediency.

“If the intellectual liberty which without a doubt has been one of the distinguishing marks of western civilisation means anything at all, it means that everyone shall have the right to say and to print what he believes to be the truth… It is only, or at any rate it is chiefly, the literary and scientific intelligentsia, the very people who ought to be the guardians of liberty, who are beginning to despise it, in theory as well as in practice.

“The word ancient emphasises the fact that intellectual freedom is a deep-rooted tradition without which our characteristic western culture could only doubtfully exist. From that tradition many of our intellectuals arc visibly turning away. They have accepted the principle that a book should be published or suppressed, praised or damned, not on its merits but according to political expediency.”

That principle is now the primary one on the left. This totalitarian cowardice that Orwell inveighed against has been elevated to an unchallenged moral standard. Animal Farm is widely reprinted, but without Orwell’s preface. Like 1984, a book whose composition effectively killed him, it has been treated according to the original plan of that publisher, stripping away most acknowledgements that it is a vicious satire of Soviet Communism, rather than a generic commentary on tyranny.

Orwell’s preface, so rarely published, concludes with his motivation for writing it, “It is the liberals who fear liberty and the intellectuals who want to do dirt on the intellect.”

Read the rest – What Orwell could tell us about the liberal appeasement of Islam

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Posted in Cold War, Free Speech, Leftist-Islamic Alliance, Liberal Fascism, Marxism, Political Correctness, Progressives, Russia | 71 Comments »

The media as highly paid trolls affiliated with Obama

by Mojambo ( 119 Comments › )
Filed under Barack Obama, Elections 2012, Media, Mitt Romney at September 25th, 2012 - 12:00 pm

Do not listen to the Peggy Noonan’s, David Brook’s, or David Frum’s  out there.  At heart they do not want Romney to win and they are collaborating in trying to discourage and suppress the anti-Obama vote and to slow down the amount of money being contributed to Romney.  A smart move by Romney was not to go on Saturday Night Live –  that is not his forum and he would be ambushed there.  It is also important to realize that the same treatment would have been meted out to any Republican who dared run against Obama, witness the hapless McCain from 2008.

by Daniel Greenfield

According to the media, the Romney campaign is struggling to recover from a terrible week after an even worse week and the man himself has no hope of winning the election. Also according to the media, the murderers running wild in the streets belong to a religion of peace and the world is in grave imminent danger of destruction from cow farts.

The three-fold process by which the noise machine inflicts its idiocy on us works like this. First the narrative is invented, then endless streams of experts are brought in to comment on and reinforce the narrative, and finally there is a hysterical denunciation of those who reject the narrative as ignorant vermin barely worth of being clubbed on the head on the shores of the Atlantic Ocean.

In the real world, Romney is still running neck and neck with Obama among registered voters, the non-stop gaffe express exists only in the minds of the media, which manufactures stories that fit the narrative, then reports on the narrative and discusses the narrative to death until enough people confuse it with reality.

The Romney campaign is not flailing and it is not guilty of missteps; what it is, is under constant attack by a massive leftist bloc composed of think-tanks, campaign operatives and the media who then use their own attacks to manufacture a narrative of incompetence. Each attack is then called a “gaffe” and used as evidence that the campaign is flailing.

This isn’t a new technique, what is the new is the complete and shameless integration of the media into the spin corps and attack poodle ranks of a political campaign so that there is hardly any difference between an anchorman, a reporter and a campaign spokesman. What is new is the level of intense coordination that allows one campaign total airtime and allows the other campaign a chance to pay for ads and be attacked all the rest of the time.

This has nothing to do with Romney, just as it had nothing to do with McCain; the same exact treatment would have been meted out to any human being who chose to run against Obama. The media’s treatment of Romney is as impersonally vicious as the behavior of students when faced with a new substitute teacher. It isn’t about Romney, it isn’t even about Obama anymore, it’s about power.

Obama is an actual failure. The only way to run a campaign against a man who has been out of public life for a bit and who has no obvious failures, is to turn his campaign into a failure, a constant failure where everything seems to be going wrong on a daily basis. The only way for the media to avoid the public’s inevitable judgement on the competence of a man who has failed them economically is to make his rival seem even more incompetent.

The narrative has certain advantages. It depresses voter turnout and contributions to the Romney campaign and it makes voter fraud safer by creating the perception going into the election that Obama is bound to win. Voter fraud in Russia and Iran met with such violent protests because the results were clearly at odds with public sentiment. In the United States, Mahmoud and Vladimir’s pal is making sure that his control of the media can sell him as an inevitable winner which will make truly obscene levels of voter fraud possible and plausible under the cover of universal popularity..

[…….]

The good news is that this does not appear to be happening in the ranks of the Romney Campaign, which is still moving steadily forward, despite the narrative. Its greatest challenge may be retaining that constancy of purpose and refusing to be affected by the constant barrage of attacks and the media’s poisonous insistence on predicting doom for the campaign. This is not an atmosphere that anyone but a handful of great and charismatic speakers could begin to shift and Romney is no Reagan.

Some have advised that Romney needs to run against the media, but that would be a mistake and it would play into the great noise machine’s agenda by making him seem bogged down in pettiness. It’s the kind of campaign that Gingrich might have been able to run, but Romney is also no Gingrich, and such a campaign, even with a great deal of force behind it, might have proven to be self-defeating.

The truly important thing to understand about the media is that it is a distraction, a noise machine that spins constantly to block the message. It is a filter between Romney and the public. Rather than fighting the filter, it is best to ignore it as much as possible. That seems counterintuitive until you start thinking of the media as some very expensive and highly paid trolls affiliated with Obama 2012 who are in substance no different than hecklers who follow candidates around hoping to get them to slip up.

Trolls have to be ignored because their only purpose is to divert and distract you from your message. The only way to beat a troll is to starve a troll. When you engage with trolls, the trolls win because the trolls are not there to honestly debate an issue, any issue, they are there only as a diversion.What they do is amusing and rewarding for them while ending any meaningful dialogue.

[…]

Media leverage came from its conditional coverage, but when its coverage is unconditionally hostile then what the media makes of a given thing no longer matters. A completely predictable media is also a completely boring media. It is a media that fewer and fewer people bother with anymore. The media’s power is the power of a troll, the power of a noise machine, the power of being paid attention to. The more people stop paying attention to it, the more it dies.

The media can only determine the outcome of an election if you play its game and give it power. Deny its power and the game is yours to win or lose.

Read the rest – The great media noise machine

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Posted in Barack Obama, Elections 2012, Media, Mitt Romney | 119 Comments »

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