The moustache of understanding opines today:
A Washington Post-ABC News poll released on Friday found that two-thirds of Americans would consider voting for a third-party presidential candidate, while 48 percent definitely wanted a third party in the race. Now what does that tell you? It tells you that with the campaign about to go into full swing, as the president delivers his State of the Union address next week, voters are still casting about for a leader with a winning message.
No, it tells what it tells, you stupid Fuck
.
The American people are looking for a new "party." That's what the poll says.
If they are looking for a "leader" with a "message," but that's not what the poll says.
Unlike authoritarian followers like Friedman, the American people retain enough from Civics 101 to understand that institutions are not the same as people.
[pounds head on desk].
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Yes, they think
all that's needed is a better "message". As if slogans and advertising will hide the reality we Americans live through every day.
The Obama administration is particularly infested with this mindset.
There's a difference between hyping a mortgage modification program, and creating one that actually relieves the foreclosure crisis. There's a difference between talking about jobs, and actually putting people to work.
The media finds this distinction particularly confusing.
“a winning message”
It’s a familiar dodge that those who try to foist their actions or policies on others to “explain” the resistance—the “message” is wrong, it’s all a “communication problem.” (Recently, a director of marketing told me, “It’s not that people don’t like being ‘sold to,’ it’s that we’re talking to them in the wrong way.”)
Re: “Communications,” the Obama administration and the media
Here’s Richard Wolffe, just after the November, 2010 “shellacking” of the Democrats, criticizing the Obama administration for conflating communication with policy: “the White House has failed to realize that the communications problem is a symptom of Obama's problems, not a cause”—specifically, “lack of agreement on economic fundamentals” leading to not having a single economic “message.” (A “single message” is infinitely better than actual economic policies that work.) Wolffe points, approvingly, to President Bush’s 2004 “disciplined message…to keep America safe and fight terrorism,” not withstanding a brutal civil war in Iraq and job loss at home—which seems to be a prescription for keeping communication as far from reality as possible. It’s a view of political communication straight out of 1984, I’d say.
Every apathetic citizen is a silent enlistee in the cause of inverted totalitarianism.—Sheldon Wolin
I'm surprised it didn't turn into an Americans Elect ad
This guy really irks me.
This fool spent half the article on the deficit, and then continues on about what he, of the 1%, wants imposed on the rest of the proles.
He was smart enough to marry a billionaire
which makes him considerably smarter than the other flacks at Izvestia
.
Friedman & the NYT
There's a reason that Friedman writes for the NYT. I used to think the NYT was a liberal paper. That was before I discovered that my definition of "liberal" was not the same as everyone else's. And the reason that I'm no longer a liberal.
The important thing is to never stop questioning. - Albert Einstein
You know there are some
You know there are some columnists that you just have to mention the name and we know instantly what kind of pompous idiocy we are in store for. With Friedman it is his Frankenstein prose and his ability to misstate the obvious.
Hugh