Day: May 2, 2007

Lawyer Won’t Even Tell ABC His Client’s Name So They Can NOT Link It to D.C. Madam

Trish

Now that’s keeping a secret!

A lawyer with “good reason” to suspect his client will appear on the D.C. Madam’s list has contacted ABC News to keep them from revealing the client’s identity.

But his client’s name is so secret, he didn’t even tell ABC. Wha?

In a letter to ABC News, Steven Salky of Zuckerman Spaeder in Washington, D.C., said he has “reason to believe” that his client might be named in this Friday’s “20/20” report about the alleged prostitution ring.

But Salky did not identify who his client is.

Jeane Palfrey, the so-called “D.C. Madam,” is pulling a Jack Abramoff and spilling her guts so she won’t be the only one in jail for breaking the law. She is also suing former employees who engaged in real sex, as opposed to the “fantasy sex” she says her business offered and that all her clients claim to have purchased.

Whoever the mystery man is, he must be really, really impotent. Sorry, I meant he must be “important,” if his lawyer is trying that hard to keep him out of the public mud.

Maybe ABC can hire Miss Cleo to figure out who the client is so they can comply with the lawyer’s request. Or to be safe, just not mention the name of any Republicans known to be flaming hypocrites. On second thought, calling Miss Cleo would probably be more realistic.

Study: Bill O’Reilly is a Propaganda Pro

Buck Banks

While I knew Bill O’Reilly was a bloviating blowhard before I read the Indiana University study, I did not realize that 40 percvent of Americans consider him a journalist while only 30 percent of Americans think Bob Woodward is a legit journalist. Now granted, Woodward’s creds have been somewhat reduced by his recent tactics, but still, he was half of the team that exposed the Watergate scandal, so he at one time was the kind of journalist that journalists want to be.

But O’Reilly has never been a journalist and should not be confused with one. Instead, according to the study, which used methods employed in the 1930s to measure propaganda, O’Reilly should be considered a master at propagandizing.

Politicians and media, particularly of the left-leaning persuasion, are in the company of illegal aliens, criminals, terrorists — never vulnerable to villainous forces and undeserving of empathy.

Using analysis techniques first developed in the 1930s by the Institute for Propaganda Analysis, [researchers] found that O’Reilly employed six of the seven propaganda devices nearly 13 times each minute in his editorials. His editorials also are presented on his Web site and in his newspaper columns.

The seven propaganda devices include:

  • Name calling — giving something a bad label to make the audience reject it without examining the evidence;
  • Glittering generalities — the oppositie of name calling;
  • Card stacking — the selective use of facts and half-truths;
  • Bandwagon — appeals to the desire, common to most of us, to follow the crowd;
  • Plain folks — an attempt to convince an audience that they, and their ideas, are “of the people”;
  • Transfer — carries over the authority, sanction and prestige of something we respect or dispute to something the speaker would want us to accept; and
  • Testimonials — involving a respected (or disrespected) person endorsing or rejecting an idea or person.

The same techniques were used during the late 1930s to study another prominent voice in a war-era, Father Charles Coughlin. His sermons evolved into a darker message of anti-Semitism and fascism, and he became a defender of Hitler and Mussolini. In this study, O’Reilly is a heavier and less-nuanced user of the propaganda devices than Coughlin.
[…]

Quote du Jour

Buck Banks

Western thinking has become conservative; the world situation should stay as it is at any cost; there should be no changes. This debilitating dream of a status quo is the symptom of a society that has come to the end of its development.

— Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Conservative Icon Willam F. Buckley Worries Bush Is Killing GOP

Jon Ponder

William F. Buckley, ancient founder of the National Review and leading light of the once powerful country-club wing of the GOP, is worried that Pres. Bush is destroying the Republican Party:

“The parallel [to Iraq insurgency] even comes to mind of the eventual collapse of Prohibition, because there wasn’t any way the government could neutralize the appetite for alcohol, or the resourcefulness of the freeman in acquiring it.”
— Bill Buckley

The political problem of the Bush administration is grave, possibly beyond the point of rescue.

Buckley sees the fatal issue as Bush’s war in Iraq and fears that while the president’s aggressive campaign to win short-term political victories at home — like vetoing his own “emergency supplemental” war funding bill — may bolster his hardcore, mostly Christian nationalist base, it is all just a misdirection meant to hide the fact that Bush and his team know that the war is lost:

[Beyond] affirming executive supremacy in matters of war, what is George Bush going to do? It is simply untrue that we are making decisive progress in Iraq. The indicators rise and fall from day to day, week to week, month to month.

Buckley compares the Iraqi insurgency to the spread of early Christianity, casting America in the role of the faltering Roman Empire:

When the Romans were challenged by Christianity, Rome fell. The generation of Christians moved by their faith overwhelmed the regimented reserves of the Roman state. It was four years ago that [Vice Pres.] Cheney first observed that there was a real fear that each fallen terrorist leads to the materialization of another terrorist. What can a “surge,” of the kind we are now relying upon, do to cope with endemic disease?

He even suggests the insurgents’ cause is as unstoppable as your typical country clubbing freeman’s need for drink:

The parallel even comes to mind of the eventual collapse of Prohibition, because there wasn’t any way the government could neutralize the appetite for alcohol, or the resourcefulness of the freeman in acquiring it.

Finally:

There are grounds for wondering whether the Republican party will survive this dilemma.

Buckley ignores the source of his party’s affliction. Bush would have never reelected without the votes of the Christian nationalists, especially the ones in Ohio who turned out in droves to vote for Karl Rove’s anti-gay marriage amendment. These same easily fooled voters are largely still behind Bush and his lost cause.