MEDIA WATCH - Alinsky’s children: CBS, TNR and Andrew Sullivan

Headline banner showing how CBS News uses the Alinsky method of Radical/Progressive thought and tactics. Image Credit: CBS News via Fausta's Blog

MEDIA WATCH - Alinsky’s children: CBS, TNR and Andrew Sullivan

A Blog entry prompted by a headline that appeared on an Opinion piece posted at CBS News. It appears that CBS had reworked a piece that had run in The New Republic and changed the opinions around to meet their agenda using Alinsky's rules - targeting, personalization, polarization, and personification ... The plight of the Iranians is just another opportunity.

Saul Alinsky is the father of Radical/Progressive thought and tactics and the references in this posting highlight the use of these tactics.

This excerpted and edited from Fausta's Blog -

Alinsky’s children: CBS, TNR and Andrew Sullivan Fausta's Blog - June 15th, 2009 at 8:49 am

The CBS’s article Meet Iran’s George W. Bush
New Republic: Can Anyone Beat Ahmadinejad In This Week’s Election?, was a retread from an article in TNR:

Lest we forget, Jim reminds us of two facts:
One:

CBS forgot the part about Bush liberating over 50,000,000 Muslims from two of the most violent regimes in history and bringing democracy to the Middle East.

And two:

For the record- The New York Times detailed the recount investigation paid for by a consortium of newspapers and admitted that BUSH WON in 2004.

Look it up yourself: the NYT actually said,

Acomprehensive review of the uncounted Florida ballots from last year’s presidential election reveals that George W. Bush would have won even if the United States Supreme Court had allowed the statewide manual recount of the votes that the Florida Supreme Court had ordered to go forward.

But it’s time to slander, so Andrew Sullivan was over at The Atlantic saying that Ahmadinejad is Karl Rove. The link takes you to Stacy’s post; if you want to check out Sillivan’s post you go there. Sullivan never misses a chance to indulge his Sarah Palin fixation, while at it,

Ahmadinejad’s bag of tricks is eerily like that of Karl Rove - the constant use of fear, the exploitation of religion, the demonization of liberals, the deployment of Potemkin symbolism like Sarah Palin.

What is even more bizarre is Sullivan’s recurrent and perverse focus on Palin’s children, which he constantly indulges in his posts, about which Althouse comments,

And why should the governor of a state be called an “attention-starved celebreality star”? Is it because you don’t respect her as a politician? You might call everyone with the nerve to run for President/Vice President an attention-starved celebreality star, but the fact is you don’t. Apparently, it’s because she’s got kids who do things that you think we can sit back and view as objects of idle amusement. If anyone is to be a politician — in your nasty little world — their kids better toe the line and stay perfectly prim and healthy and smart (or hide).

But back to Sullivan’s first post: Iran is a Red State:

Think of this regime as Cheney and Rove in a police state setting, and you see what’s been going on. (Of course, Rove and Cheney live within a democratic system utterly unlike Iran, and there’s no evidence they would violate democratic norms as Khamenei just did. But their demagoguery, abuse of the state, dedication to conflict abroad, co-optation of the armed forces, and manipulation of rural and religious voters all have parallels in Red State Iran.)

So what Sullivan’s saying, in his heightened consciousness and loftier intellect which given the chance he probably will humbly acknowledge, is that he would have you believe that voters in red state America don’t vote out of their own free will since Karl and Dick manipulate them any which way, through the deployment of Czarist shams like Sarah Palin and her children. From there to taking the leap and equating George Bush = Ahmadinejad is simply putting the icing on the metaphorical cake, or am I missing something here?

What these statements in CBS, TNR, Sullivan and others have in common is Alinsky’s rules:

“Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.”

“One of the criteria for picking the target is the target’s vulnerability … the other important point in the choosing of a target is that it must be a personification, not something general and abstract.”

Targeting, personalization, polarization, and personification: The plight of the Iranians is just another opportunity.
Reference Here>>

... And the hits just keep on comin'!