Cowboy Confessional

Posted By Guy Smith on January 8, 2012

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Propagandist will trip over one another while rushing to microphones.

Such was the state of organized ineptitude displayed the day after Iowa Republicans delivered a three-way draw. In an odd show of self restraint after the caucuses, leading Republican presidential contenders did not lob incendiaries at one another … for the few days it took them to arrive in New Hampshire. Instead, members of Obama’s bunch stormed every microphone laden rostrum with messages designed to motivate, demotive and misdirect.

Impatient little propagandist.

Obama campaign manager Jim Messina messed himself while instigating inflammatory language. Jim’s job at this phase of the campaign is to make sure Obama’s base is motivated, which according to CNN is a becoming a significant White House worry. Messina uncorked the old standard of politics, The Lie of Fear (“creating a false sense of fear in order to motivate people to action while easing them past critical thinking”). While pitching agitprop to reporters, Messina messaged that the “extremist Tea Party agenda won a clear victory.” Ignoring that Tea Party regulars will choke on volcanic bile should they have to vote for Romney, it is the pairing of “extremist” and “Tea Party” which was a meme for Messina’s masses. Having proven the Tea Party’s prowess in taking scalps, Messina needs to ensure that Obama’s base votes. Waving their chief opponent like a red cape, while irrationally branding the Tea Party as ‘extremist’ is merely the opening salvo sound bite of what will be an ugly Obama offensive (which many independents think is a redundant phrase).

“We’ve got to be ready,” he added without necessity.

Messina then leveraged his boss’s favorite fear mongering foils, The Lie of Looming Catastrophe (“using worst case scenarios, regardless of how remote, to instill a fear of uncontrollable danger”) and The Lie of Invalidatable Conclusions (“pronouncing with certainty what has never been and can never be proven”). The ever menacing Messina declared that Republicans are “vowing to let Wall Street write its own rules, end Medicare as we know it, roll back gay rights, leave the troops in Iraq indefinitely, restrict a woman’s right to choose, and gut Social Security to pay for more tax cuts for millionaires and corporations.” Here Messina messed-up by trying to breathlessly pitch to every voter segment in one breath. Since his statement cannot be proven, cannot be evenly spread across all Republican candidates, and since Jim lacks crystal balls (or any other variety) to accurately predict future legislative initiatives or their probability of success, his words come more from his own personal fear than reality.

Then again nobody has ever accused political campaign managers of living in a state of reality.

More interesting was David “Lighting Rod” Axelrod, who could not be kept quiet (call it a character flaw on his part). Axelrod’s axe grinding is designed to help Republican’s pick Obama’s opponent, which apparently is Mitt Romney (one truism in marketing is that people tend not to switch from one product to a similar one, and Romney’s past positions will make some independents believe there is little difference and not bother to vote at all). David drew a bead on Romney by raging “His economic vision isn’t the vision of Americans.  At every turn, Gov. Romney stands for an economy rigged against everyday people. Romney symbolizes what concerns most people about this economy.”

Axelrod’s rhetoric is a tough sell to everyone who has stood in unemployment lines for the last three years.

Obama’s campaign press secretary irrationally added “Governor Romney has made clear he has not learned the lessons of the economic crisis, instead, he’s giving the most irresponsible financial actors a bright green light to pursue profit at any cost.” We’ll assume the “irresponsible financial actors” to which he refers are not Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Due to his lingering albatross economy, Obama must convince people that either Barack can fix it (which nobody believes) or that someone else will make it worse. With the now pleasantly quiet Occupy Wall Street crowd in hibernation, Obama’s team is attempting The Lie of Association (“using invalid associations to demonize a person or position”) and make Romney appear to be in the pockets of people which they alleged are responsible for our current economic curse. Without evidence or attribution, and ignoring that the sub-prime real estate bubble-and-bust was orchestrated by Washington and the retiring Barney Frank, Obama’s apostles of agitprop attempt to extend his mismanagement of economic recovery to someone else.

I am disappointed. Showing their hand this early in the race is unwise, for it makes beating Barack the centerpiece of the national conversation (wise warriors would advise Obama to let Republican’s continue destroying themselves uninterrupted). I also expected more subtle propaganda, so we may be seeing signs of early desperation as Obama’s campaign pours over polls and sweats on the print-outs. If so, expect their propaganda to increase in volume, frequency and absurdness.

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Posted By Guy Smith on January 4, 2012

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As the judge allegedly said at the beginning of each trail, “Let the lying begin!”

Semantic slight-of-hand and prolific propaganda will be the norm this 2012 presidential election cycle, which most pundits agree began in December of 2008. Already various factions have donned snake-oiled overcoats with the intent of using the entire Catalog of Canards to slither (back) into the White House. Smooth-tongued and misleading sound bites, crafted by marketing professionals in the political prostitution industry, are dangled like shiny objects before child-like Motor Voter masses. An odd effect of such corrupting campaigning is that the glibbest contenders are the most readily electable.

Hence, expect a showdown between Mitt Romney and Barack Obama.

In Shooting The Bull, I remind readers that the reason anyone in politics lies is to get something they could not if they were honest, such as getting elected. Since the alleged leader of the free world – or more accurately the leader of the allegedly free world – holds the power of life, death and (even worse) taxes over a vast portion of the population, honesty is not an option. Presidential candidates have and will continue to nuance everything, misrepresent opponents, spread the manure of misinformation, and distract anyone who recalls their actual voting records.

In this, Mister Obama’s climb will make Sisyphus’ look like a stroll.

Indeed, Obama has a veritable litter box of misdeeds which GOP operatives will sift on a regular basis. Mitt Romney has prematurely recalled Obama’s prediction that failure to repair the economy in three years is justification for presidential unemployment. There is the unfinished matter of Fast and Furious – a Watergate-level cover-up – which the lead congressional investigator will likely relaunch later in 2012. In play too will be Obama’s trillion dollars of ineffectual spending that failed to stimulate anyone outside of SEIU offices.

An entire election cycle could be spent on Solyndra alone.

Yet nobody in the GOP field has political baggage small enough to fit in the overhead bin of their campaign jet. Romney has a left-of-center past from attending Mass. Paul’s naivety on the realities of geopolitics frightens anyone outside of Al Qaeda. Santorum’s and Bachman’s social conservatism causes libertarian-minded independents to squirm. Perry doesn’t perspire in the Texas summer heat, but wilts every time he speaks. And Gingrich will likely self-destruct in a blaze of incoherent neo-conservative wonkery reminiscent of FDRs free market meddling.

He makes Jimmy McMillan look credible by comparison.

Republican candidates have already initiated the time honored tradition of shooting off their toes, mainly through mutual character assassination. Whomever wins the GOP nominations – a Pyrrhus-level victory – will limp into battle against Obama, who has the luxury of ducking confrontation for the next six months. Battered and penniless, this unfortunate Republican still has better than even odds going against Obama, who received less than 53% of the popular vote in 2008, and that was against an old, weak and philosophically erratic opponent with a lightening rod running mate.

However, Obama has the media to help peddle his propaganda, and such leveled odds make even bookies sweat.

In Shooting The Bull, I concluded that the media is no longer in control of the national conversation. But they can start conversations and time them for maximum political damage. One of their objectives is to pick the Republican nominee. Before the first Iowa caucus commenced, a CNN reporter declared that Mitt Romney was the “presumed Republican front-runner,” which pre-positioned Mitt as CNN’s choice (a cluster of polls released that same morning showed a three-way dead horse race). For a few months many media outlets – none accused of having conservative or libertarian leanings – have been echoing one another’s notion that Mitt is every Republican’s second choice, and thus the inevitable winner (the Catalog of Canards declares this to the “The Lie of Invalidatable Conclusions: Pronouncing with certainty what has never been and can never be proven”).

The media has made their choice and are trying to stick Republicans with it.

One new element makes this election year different. For the first time in modern memory, there is a lexicon for political propaganda and a citizen’s media ready to use it. The Catalog of Canards, included at the end of Shooting The Bull and available online, gives voters the tools to publicly identify how candidates, party bosses, pundits and other purveyors of poppycock mislead the public. Analysis once ineptly handled by the mainstream media will now be the pastime of the hoi polloi. Politically aware non-patricians will decide the election by eviscerating whichever candidate lies the most, or at least lies the worst.

Let the lying begin, and let us find joy in dissecting it.

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Posted By Guy Smith on January 3, 2012

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Barack Obama is a discount FDR, and Roosevelt was no prize to begin with.

Many men mistreat their women by trying to fix whatever problems they have, whereas women generally prefer that men listen, then fix problems on their own terms. Such is the nature of The People and government, where certain elected footmen mistakenly take it upon themselves to spot-fix every societal woe in an attempt to create happier homes, which leads to an unhappy abode and eventual divorce. Politicians also believe that government policy, applied by allegedly intelligent beltway denizen, makes smarter decisions than the daily transactional havoc committed by millions of hoi polloi.

Barack Obama and FDR, flying by their britches bottoms, attempted to fix economies and failed, leaving a frustrated populace drafting separation papers.

The common thread within the Great Depression and the Great Recession is uncertainty. Since everyone shops, saves and invests at different levels depending on their means and personal objectives, no central planning can ever stimulate everybody. FDR, in an unpatriotic attempt to restructure America without constitutional approval, assigned armies of analyst in the Nation Recovery Administration (unaffectionately referred to as Nuts Running America) to fix prices, set wages, engineer corporate collusion, reduce farm crops, add new employment taxes and generally keep The People in a dazed state of uncertainty. With uncertainly amplified via every new government initiative and stranglehold on economic activity, businesses and individuals decided to avoid shopping, saving and investing. The resulting double-dip depression and persistent high unemployment were quite uniquely FDR’s/Obama’s doing because they inserted uncertainty suppositories into America’s economic rectum.

John Stossel reports that Obama is oafishly echoing FDR.

In an Op/Ed of interest, Stossel reports on a set of CEOs who head organizations as small as a chain of diners, to the chief of the largest consumer electronics retailer, and to a captain of the banking industry. Each exec echoes that Obamacare alone is keeping them from hiring new people. Aside from over 1,000 pages of arcane falderal, the legislation leaves many yet unmade decisions to the secretary of health and human services (whoever that will be next week). The CEOs say that they have no idea what hiring employees will cost in the future, and thus are hiring nobody until there is some clarity.

Don’t hold your breath boys. This administration never provides clarity.

Uncertainty’s definition includes the concepts of unpredictability, indeterminacy and indefiniteness. When deciding one’s own direction, self-doubt pales in comparison to the unknown. The darker the woods, the less likely one will enter lest they be eaten alive. American business and the unemployed have few doubts about what they want to do, namely hire and be hired. External unpredictability creates hesitation. Nobody in America dares make an economic move until surer footing is available, and as long as Obama continues economic meddling – everything from “stimulus” shush funds to Solydra-style crony capitalism – anybody with multiple functioning dyndra won’t dare dive deep into our darkening economic ocean.

Yet there is hope, though it be the false flavor.

Many people sentimentally attached to their ideological alignment say that FDR offered “hope.” This vague notion, uttered by vague-minded people, expresses the dream that some semi-divine being is manipulating the levers of fate to produce better times. After all, as I concluded in Afterlife, “Hope is what gives us the very reason to live.” Yet hope is not action, and until there is action by all individuals to move in their desired directions, then hope is all they have.

This is why Obama ran under banners peddling hope. It is an easy sell to the weak minded.

Obama’s actions are the only thing worse than his empty hope. His “shovel-ready” jobs program – disgusting in his elitist notion that everyone outside of the White House turns shovels for a living – violated the single most important principle in macro-economic revival, that all participants in the economy receive relief and then be left to decide how to improve their condition. Thus his jobs “plan” produced so few jobs, and in such segregated industries and geographies, that his promise of keeping unemployment under 8% is an utter failure (official unemployment went higher than 10%, still hovers near 9%, and if we include people who gave up or are seriously under-employed, the unemployment rate is about 22%). And Obama economic growth is abysmal.

Certainty is never absolute, but it is always personal. Had Obama anything resembling wisdom, his objectives would have included stabilizing the financial sector, then clearing away brush in front of those who create jobs. Instead he launched serial gimmicks and arranged ideological schemes that produced nothing, leaving everyone to wonder what the state of the economy really was. Obamacare added to the brush and erected blockades against hiring, the seeds of economic revival. People can plan in a market economy, but not a political one. Barack has done the opposite of what is essential to initiate economic wellness.

You could put everything Barack Obama knows about macro economics into a thimble and still have room for Mitt Romney’s policy consistency.

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Posted By Guy Smith on December 19, 2011

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Seth Godin, the homeliest man since Henry Waxman, presents never-ending and hyper intelligent insights into what works and what doesn’t. Waxman has yet been spotted saying anything intelligent, which demonstrates that the traits of diminished physical beauty and smarts are not linked.

One recent Godin missive accurately dissected the difference between failure and mistakes, where failures are experiments that produced undesirable results, and mistakes are repeating failed experiments and expecting something new to happen. Thomas Edison relished in failure, noting that “I am not discouraged, because every wrong attempt discarded is another step forward.” Edison was, however, bright enough to never bother repeating failed experiments.

Occupy Wall Street (OWS) is not likewise burdened.

Endearing as juvenile free speech may be, it typically lacks essential elements for making change. OWS has generated little aside from media attention and several metric tons of refuse left for tax-paid employees to clean-up. Frustrated children, when tired and denied what they want (even when they don’t know what it is they desire) throw tangent tantrums, as OWS did by blockading west coast ports last week, preventing goods from arriving to consumers and factories, keeping truck drivers and longshoremen from earning paychecks.

Said one formerly productive truck driver “They should occupy a job.”

Common failures are being repeated by the OWS mobs (and we must now classify them as mobs since their protests have morphed into disrupting other people’s freedoms). Repeating three well known failures makes OWS a triple mistake.

First, OWS is a disorganization without real leadership. OWS was an idea virus launched by a Canadian anti-consumer magazine to form an unconstitutional American commission with an end goal of dividing money from government. Ignoring the fact that Canadians meddling in American internal politics provides ample justification to relocate the wall project from the Rio Grande to upstate New York, we must marvel at the notion that money can ever be separated from government since American government, in its modern form, has always been about organized theft of people’s money. The two cannot be separated, though taking the product (government power) off the shelf would vastly reduce the number of buyers in the political influence market.

Hence, OWS has no real leadership and thus tends to wander from topic to topic without ever articulating a policy. The absence of anything resembling a leader causes OWS’s accumulated rabble to act out in predictably unpredictable manners, such as shutting down ports and robbing truck drivers of the right to feed their kids. Despite some attempts by ad hoc individuals to foment followers, OWS remains without figureheads who can marshal the mobs toward a victory, much less a goal.

Note to OWS: Having a clear goal is the first step, even before banging rocks together.

Their second failure is the lack of clear objectives. To be kind (which is difficult given the broadside bulls eye OWS provides writers) the Tea Party didn’t have clear goals when they started. But it took a month for the initial Tea Party goal to solidify, namely unelecting anyone who had a hand in unconstitutional bank bailouts. Recently the occupiers have started splintering into factions, dragging single issue separatist in different directions. Shutting down ports was the first incarnation of internal disarray. I look forward to their proposed march on Egypt – given how the local military there enjoys shooting their own citizens, premature respiratory failure for American socialists would be guaranteed.

Note to OWS: Pick a battle … any battle … then stick with it. I suggest the Egypt march.

Their last mistake is the ages old error of demanding a powerful government authorized to commit robbery. The never masked undercurrent of OWS protests are naked calls for every flavor of authoritarianism from mild socialism to overt communism to violent overthrow. History, being the report card of failed experiments, shows that powerful and centralized government has the unhappy side effect of crushing everybody. It is odd that in one breath OWS oddballs decry the state-sponsored theft of bank bailouts, then during inhalation demand more state-sponsored theft to plunder the rich and nationalize everything. Interestingly one splinter faction within OWS simultaneously bellyaches about bank bailouts while begging for taxpayers to pay-off their student loans.

Note to OWS: Didn’t your parents advise against a degree in Russian literature?

The benefit of experimentation is that you can measure failure. When the test is repeated and the same results occur, you can predict the probability of it failing again. I predict OWS will be a mere memory come November 7^th.

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Posted By Guy Smith on December 12, 2011

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A large gathering of naked Santa Clauses caused nobody in San Francisco to do a double take.

Immune residents are to the chaos that is San Francisco. From the moment gold was discovered in California and a mob of disreputable drifters, brewers and prostitutes landed here, San Francisco has been uniquely American, Un-American and more than a bit unsavory. Public nudity is not only permitted here, but often encouraged, promoted, organized, staged and rewarded with performing arts grants. An annual athletic event where people streak from San Francisco bay to the ocean is now largely occupied by streakers (can we really call them “streakers” when they sashay the entire race course).

Anything resembling innocence in San Francisco is left in the maternity ward.

In a recurring desire to present as much flesh as possible, a group of civic minded San Franciscans decided to corrupt the icon of Christmas, namely Santa Clause (Christ is not a large factor in San Francisco’s Christmas, and is rapidly fading across the country, deferring instead to the symbol of commercial consumption. As the master Tom Lehrer said in song “Oh bless ye merry merchants, may ye make the yuletide pay.”) Corrupting the sanctity of Santa, the patron saint of greedy children, with public disrobing is entirely rational in Baghdad by the Bay.

Hence, last Saturday a minor mob attempted to establish a Guinness world record for the largest gathering of naked Santa Clauses. Holding such an event in frigid San Francisco … in December … caused many participants to come up short.

Being naked (and preferably inebriated) is part of The City’s essence. The fact that San Francisco started life as a wide open town populated by people who were often drunk and nude was the origin of our famed tolerance, which is not extended to conservatives, Republicans, Christian youth gatherings, non-marijuana smokers or people who fail to compost. Hence San Francisco has never actually outlawed public nudity, even though nearly every city, town, burg and unincorporated area outside of the Bay Area does. Nudity here is considered a birthright long after birth.

The only complaint ever uttered when encountering naked bodies in San Francisco is if they are of sufficient aesthetic quality to be presented.

Open air al natural is one glimpse into the generalized essence of America’s twisted sister. Molded by people who enjoy being different has brought any number of non-conformists to The City. Given the early and enduring need to adapt to your neighbor’s unconventional behavior has taught San Franciscans to put up with every aberrant act. Reciprocation is the grand compromise. In order to enjoy your particular perversions, you must never raise objections to other people’s peccadilloes.

This absence of mutual self-restraint has caused public nudity to be the least of San Francisco’s flaunted fetishes.

Folks far away denounce The City for what it has always been. But America should embrace San Francisco as they would any peculiar cousin. Loath The City’s activities if your moral altitude requires, but honor the essence that preserves freedom. Losing our oddball relative would mean losing your ability to appreciate the freedom of unconventionality, and that erodes freedom in general.

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