“secret” conservative meeting

conservatives are planning a “secret” meeting thursday, 2 days after the election, to strategize about why they will have lost and what to do in the future. their meeting will apparently focus on how they think the republican party has gotten too centrist and mainstream, and has to abandon the moderate middle completely and become a completely wacko ultra-right-wing extremist party if it ever wants to win again. so let me get this straight: voters are going to be rejecting conservatism and embracing liberalism as they did in 2006, and conservatives think the answer is to become even more conservative. good idea, if you want to become a permanent minority party. the republicans are so brilliant... their plan is to alienate and insult everyone. they hate gays, they hate muslims, they hate atheists, they hate black people, they hate mexicans, they hate chinese, they hate liberals, they hate democrats, they hate socialists, they hate women, they hate smart people, they hate people who live in urban or coastal areas, etc. ok basically this is how it works: either you are a conservative christian heterosexual white male who is a natural-born u.s. citizen and lives in a rural area far away from the east coast or the west coast and has an iq below 100, or the republicans hate your guts. period. that is what they have devolved into. they insult anyone who does not meet those standards. they do not like anyone who is different from them. and if you think the sarah palin pick means they do not hate women, just look at how the mccain campaign itself has treated sarah palin, and how the mccain camp and the palin camp are now exchanging fire through insults that advisers to each of them leak to the media anonymously. think about why sarah palin was picked: john mccain thought american women, in general, are stupid enough to vote for him just because he picks a female running mate, and he thought that men would be dumb enough to go for it if he picked someone attractive, a former beauty queen. the mccain campaign has either not had a strategy at all, or has had a strategy of appealing to stupid people and nobody else, over these past few months. this first became apparent with the “celebrity” ad john mccain put out comparing barack obama to paris hilton and britney spears. that ad was designed to appeal explicitly to complete morons and nobody else at all. since then, the mccain campaign has consistently appealed to idiots, morons, cretins, retards, dumbasses, fools, the mentally handicapped, the mentally challenged, and subgeniuses. john mccain fake-suspended his campaign in a blatant act of pandering to the retard vote. he again pandered to them with all of his “joe the plumber” nonsense. and sarah palin does nothing but constantly pander to the dumbass demographic. she has become the most unpopular vice presidential nominee in history, out of all the vice presidential nominees that had not yet served as vice president (obviously dick cheney takes the cake in terms of vice presidents up for re-election). and this “secret” meeting of the conservative anti-intelligentsia is not even secret at all, because some idiot went and leaked the story about it to a prominent reporter/blogger on the 2nd most popular political news website, politico (huffington post is #1 and drudge report is down to #3). this just proves yet again what the dubya/cheney administration has been proving for 8 years: conservatives are almost all incompetent fools. a very small percentage of conservatives are actually smart, and this elite intelligentsia are not the people who are being invited to this meeting. why not? because they have all either publicly endorsed barack obama or at least publicly offered harsh criticism of john mccain and/or sarah palin recently. the smart conservatives include people like david brooks and george will, both very intelligent pundits who have been quite critical of john mccain and sarah palin. that does not mean they are actually supporting barack obama, of course, since they have strong philosophical disagreements with barack obama and democrats in general. for them the choice is between idiots they agree with or competent people they disagree with. but i suspect the conservative intelligentsia will not be at this meeting, because this supposedly secret meeting has an agenda of making the republicans into an ultra-conservative party when the rest of the country is moving in the exact opposite direction, towards an all-out embrace of liberalism. if they actually wanted to win, they would campaign from the center, even if they governed from the far right. democrats have learned the importance of campaigning from the center, after the stinging defeats of the 1980s. george w. bush may have “won” the 2000 and 2004 elections, but both elections were quite close, showing that the democrats have not been completely out of it when it comes to campaign strategy. the real deciding factor in elections, other than turnout/get-out-the-vote measures, is the media. the media are a fickle bunch who sometimes favor one side and sometimes the other, but are never neutral. the media game is the most important part of any election nowadays. whoever gets the news media on their side wins the election. period. another part of the media game, besides cozying up to the media and getting them to like you, is attacking the media when they don’t cover you favorably, and trying to dig up dirt on them or turn the public against the media. often when the media are attacked, instead of defending themselves they chicken out and side with their attackers, and admit that the people attacking them are correct. however, the way the media respond depends on the circumstances, because many other times the media holds its ground and does not chicken out. usually republicans are the ones who attack the media the most, while democrats cozy up to the media, both for the same purpose: getting more favorable coverage and less unfavorable coverage. it is clear at this point that barack obama has totally kicked john mccain’s ass when it comes to the media, ever since mid-september when the financial crisis hit. i think people need to remind themselves that reporters and politicians are people too, and they respond to things in a human way just like anyone else. if they are attacked or insulted, they get sad, angry, annoyed, or are just so used to it that they ignore it. if they are praised, they tend to feel really good about themselves and think they are the greatest thing ever, or maybe instead they think the people praising them are mindless brainwashed drones and that their evil plans are working perfectly. anyway, john mccain has seriously mismanaged media relations during this campaign. now the media does lose sometimes, like in 2000, when they overwhelmingly supported john mccain over george w. bush in the republican primaries, and went on to see their favorite guy in the world get beaten badly. nowadays, the media act like john mccain is their ex-husband or ex-boyfriend, and they are spurned former lovers out for revenge. that is mainly because john mccain is not acting or campaigning at all like he did 8 years ago, and he is not the man they fell in love with anymore, and they feel betrayed. barack obama has had a love affair with the media ever since he first became a national figure, and while there were tough parts this spring when the media went after him with all the rev. wright, tony rezko, and william ayers stuff during the primaries, he managed to get the media back on his side again afterwards. the tough parts for obama only happened after saturday night live parodied the media as being sycophantic obama supporters back this spring during the primaries. the media overreacted to that parody of them by having about a month of almost nothing but negative stories about barack obama, since they felt their reputation for being credible had been undermined and they had to show “balance”. once they felt they had accomplished that, they went back to supporting obama again. and it has been great. there is nothing better, when you are a candidate or a supporter of a candidate, than having the media on your side. remember, the media are people too, and they are the most vital constituency for politicians to pander to. the arch-conservatives going to the not-so-secret meeting are probably the type who like to go on the offense and attack the media for supposedly having a liberal bias. attacking the media may sometimes help you get better coverage in the short term, but in the long run, you alienate the very reporters and commentators you need on your side, and get them to hate your guts permanently. john mccain is understandably upset that the media is not in the tank for him like they were in 2000, and he also feels sorta like a bride left at the altar. he is not really used to negative coverage, because for many years he has been a media darling, and that did not really change until mid-september this year. to some extent though, media coverage just reflects reality, and reality did change in a fundamental way in mid-september when the economy, as john mccain put it, “cratered”. until then, the election had sort of been a big reality tv show and was not really taken too seriously, but now suddenly everything was really serious. and of course, besides the economy thing, sarah palin turned out to be a dismal failure with her media interviews and her debate performance, plus the mccain campaign ran a number of blatantly dishonest advertisements that shocked many journalists who had fallen in love with mccain years ago because they thought he was incredibly honest for a politician. the mccain-palin camapaign has basically been like a disaster movie where everything just goes wrong, and all john mccain himself has offered is an endless series of stunts and gimmicks to try to win the news cycle for a day or two, stunts and gimmicks that usually backfire, but he keeps doing them anyway. it is said that if you do the same thing you did before and expect a different result, that is the definition of insanity, and that is exactly how the mccain campaign has been operating for quite some time. that is also the problem that the people attending the not-so-secret conservative summit suffer from, that same type of insanity. what type of people will be there, if not the actual intellectuals? anti-intellectuals and pseudo-populist demagogues, of course. people like ann coulter, bill o’reilly, rush limbaugh, sean hannity, michael savage, pat buchanan, william kristol, karl rove, dick morris, grover norquist, etc. basically a bunch of professional right-wing propagandists who believe their own bullshit. they are like people who find themselves in a hole and decide to keep digging. i, for one, hope they keep digging themselves even deeper into a hole for quite some time. eventually, of course, they will probably hit some underground oil reserves with all their deep digging, and their chants of “drill baby drill” will finally pay off. and i will keep digging myself into the hole of this metaphor that i have dug too deep, until it makes no sense whatsoever. or i could just end this blog post right here, abruptly.