Rightwords... Prudent Conservatism

These are the rules of the Radical Left for sowing dissention. You can see them in action daily if you look sharply for them. Paraphrased from :
Craig Miyamoto, APR, Fellow PRSA


RULE 1: "Power is not only what you have, but what the enemy thinks you have." Power is derived from 2 main sources - money and people. "Have-Nots" must build power from flesh and blood. (These are two things of which there is a plentiful supply. Government and corporations always have a difficult time appealing to people, and usually do so almost exclusively with economic arguments.)
RULE 2: "Never go outside the expertise of your people." It results in confusion, fear and retreat. Feeling secure adds to the backbone of anyone. (Organizations under attack wonder why radicals don't address the "real" issues. This is why. They avoid things with which they have no knowledge.)
RULE 3: "Whenever possible, go outside the expertise of the enemy." Look for ways to increase insecurity, anxiety and uncertainty. (This happens all the time. Watch how many organizations under attack are blind-sided by seemingly irrelevant arguments that they are then forced to address.)
RULE 4: "Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules." If the rule is that every letter gets a reply, send 30,000 letters. You can kill them with this because no one can possibly obey all of their own rules. (This is a serious rule. The besieged entity's very credibility and reputation is at stake, because if activists catch it lying or not living up to its commitments, they can continue to chip away at the damage.)
RULE 5: "Ridicule is man's most potent weapon." There is no defense. It's irrational. It's infuriating. It also works as a key pressure point to force the enemy into concessions. (Pretty crude, rude and mean, huh? They want to create anger and fear.)
RULE 6: "A good tactic is one your people enjoy." They'll keep doing it without urging and come back to do more. They're doing their thing, and will even suggest better ones. (Radical activists, in this sense, are no different that any other human being. We all avoid "un-fun" activities, and but we revel at and enjoy the ones that work and bring results.)
RULE 7: "A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag." Don't become old news. (Even radical activists get bored. So to keep them excited and involved, organizers are constantly coming up with new tactics.)
RULE 8: "Keep the pressure on. Never let up." Keep trying new things to keep the opposition off balance. As the opposition masters one approach, hit them from the flank with something new. (Attack, attack, attack from all sides, never giving the reeling organization a chance to rest, regroup, recover and re-strategize.)
RULE 9: "The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself." Imagination and ego can dream up many more consequences than any activist. (Perception is reality. Large organizations always prepare a worst-case scenario, something that may be furthest from the activists' minds. The upshot is that the organization will expend enormous time and energy, creating in its own collective mind the direst of conclusions. The possibilities can easily poison the mind and result in demoralization.)
RULE 10: "If you push a negative hard enough, it will push through and become a positive." Violence from the other side can win the public to your side because the public sympathizes with the underdog. (Unions used this tactic. Peaceful [albeit loud] demonstrations during the heyday of unions in the early to mid-20th Century incurred management's wrath, often in the form of violence that eventually brought public sympathy to their side.)
RULE 11: "The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative." Never let the enemy score points because you're caught without a solution to the problem. (Old saw: If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem. Activist organizations have an agenda, and their strategy is to hold a place at the table, to be given a forum to wield their power. So, they have to have a compromise solution.)
RULE 12: Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it." Cut off the support network and isolate the target from sympathy. Go after people and not institutions; people hurt faster than institutions. (This is cruel, but very effective. Direct, personalized criticism and ridicule works.)

Watch for them.

Reference The American thinker for more:
September 25, 2008
Barack Obama and Alinsky's Rules for Psychopaths By James Lewis

"... the community organizer ... must first rub raw the resentments of the people; fan the latent hostilities to the point of overt expression.' -- Saul Alinsky, Rules for Radicals
"THERE IS ONLY THE FIGHT --- An analysis of the Alinsky Model."
-- Hillary Clinton, BA Honors Thesis, Wellesley College, 1969.
"(Barack) Obama worked in the organizing tradition of Saul Alinsky, who made Chicago the birthplace of modern community organizing...."
-- The Nation
A psychopath is a person without conscience; someone who constantly breaks the moral rules of the community. Saul Alinsky was a "community organizer" who found a career that fit that personality disorder. In the Orwellian upside-down world of the Left, community organizers disorganize communities. That is the meaning of revolution, to overturn whatever exists today in the raw pursuit of one's own power.
Alinsky boasted about his close alliance with Frank Nitti, Al Capone's second in command in the Chicago Mob during the 1930s. Al Capone's Mob were domestic terrorists, and not for any noble cause either. They poisoned the Chicago politics of their era. Alinsky's close alliance with Frank Nitti tells us something crucially important today. Alinsky was also a lifelong ally of the Stalin-controlled Communist Party, at a time when Stalin was known to have murdered tens of millions of people. He was proud of building a bridge between organized crime and the power hungry Left. That tacit alliance may continue today.
Alinsky's personality fits the definition of a psychopath -- someone who has no guilt or shame toward others. But Alinsky also discovered how to teach psychopathic behavior to college students. That is the key to his success: To persuade hundreds of thousands of ignorant young people that it is much more moral to be immoral. Or, as Bill Ayers famously said, "Bring the Revolution home; kill your parents."
Bill Ayers is now a highly influential professor of education. That is not an accident; it reflects a deliberate program of radical agitation and propaganda through the school systems. If you want to know who brought down American education, Bill Ayers is part of the answer.
A lot of the Boomer Left is marked by psychopathic behavior, in politics and in the rest of life. That is why the actions of the Left are so shocking to many of us.
Alinsky's disciples -- including Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama -- have a warlike political style. They learned politics as war from the Master. Obama is so well-trained in Alinsky tactics that he used to teach workshops on it. That is why Obama can knowingly violate Federal law against usurping the presidential power to negotiate with Iraq before ever getting elected. Actual election to head of state by the voters means nothing, just as it means nothing to Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer, who have negotiated with Syria and the Muslim Brotherhood in clear violation of law while serving in Congress.
Teaching hatred for the normal majority is the key to power for radicals. But Alinsky taught that you can't easily hate millions of people. To do that effectively you need a one-person scapegoat to focus all your hatred on. "Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it." That is the politics of personal destruction, and it doesn't matter if the target is black like Clarence Thomas, or a woman like Sarah Palin, or a severely wounded war veteran like John McCain.
That is why Obama is now instructing his followers to "get in their faces" of those Americans who are not down for his cause. Obama acts like a nice guy, but he is a political warmonger. He's been very clear about that: "If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun." That's the language of gang war.
Today we can see the Left's rage reaction to John McCain's choice of Sarah Palin. The New York Sun quoted one feminist saying "All of my women friends, a week ago Monday, were on the verge of throwing themselves out windows ...People were flipping out. ... Every woman I know was in high hysteria over this. Everyone was just beside themselves with terror that this woman could be our president -- our potential next president."
The "comedienne" Sandra Bernhard suggested that Sarah Palin would be "gang-raped by blacks in Manhattan" if she dared to go there.
A British Leftist writing for Pravda (!) called "Sarah Palin - The Devil in disguise...
Sarah Palin, Mrs. Nobody know-it-all shreiking cow from Alaska, the joke of American politics, plied with a couple of vodkas ... cheap little guttersnipe ... suppose you shut up ... you pith-headed little bimbo from the back of beyond ... So next time suppose you keep your mouth shut and while you're at it, make sure the members of your family keep their legs shut too. ... "
That warlike rage has been systematically whipped up over decades by the Left. That's what college "Women's Studies" does, just as "Black Studies" is deliberately designed to whip up black rage and victimhood. Michelle Obama's Princeton thesis is a case in point.
Alinsky called ordinary Americans "the enemy." Normal people don't declare war on all of society. But Alinsky wrote in Rules for Radicals that radicals
"...have contemptuously rejected the values and way of life of the middle class. They have stigmatized it as materialistic, decadent, bourgeois, degenerate, imperialistic, war-mongering, brutalized and corrupt ... They are right ... "
Normal, decent America is the enemy for these people.
Obama and Hillary are lifelong followers of Alinsky. They use his tactics and ideology. That is why American politics became the politics of personal destruction when the Boomer Left came to power.
These claims require proof; but we have been looking straight at the evidence since the first Clinton term. Bill Clinton fits the diagnostic description of psychopathic personality, now relabeled "antisocial personality' in the DSM IV, the official diagnostic manual for psychiatry. Three out of the following seven criteria nails the diagnosis:
1. Failure to conform to social norms ...
2. Deceitfulness ... or conning others for personal profit or pleasure;
3. Impulsivity or failure to plan ahead;
4. Irritability and aggressiveness ... ;
5. Reckless disregard for safety of self or others;
6. Consistent irresponsibility ... ;
7. Lack of remorse, as indicated by being indifferent to or rationalizing having hurt, mistreated, or stolen from another.
I would give Mr. Clinton credit for Numbers 1, 2, 6, and 7, and possibly 3 (impulsivity) and 4 (irritability and aggressiveness). Dick Morris, who advised the Clintons for 20 years, describes dramatic scenes that certainly fit the description. Or Bill's inability to stick with a meeting agenda, impulsively running endless bull sessions at the White House. As for 5, his picking up women opportunistically and in a way that put his career, not to mention his family life and American security, at risk. The Monica affair showed an impulsive, reckless president who got into power by endless lying and conning.
Liberal Democrats used to be normal Americans before the Boomer Left rose to power. Hubert Humphrey and Harry Truman had a strong sense of American morality. They despised the Stalinist Left and fought to keep them out of the Democrat Party. They were sensitive to ordinary shame and guilt, the emotions that make us civilized. When Bob Dole asked "Where is the shame?" in the 1996 presidential election, the answer came out: Not in the modern Democrat Party. People without guilt or shame make merciless power mongers.
Normal people slow down in School Zones where kids might run across the street -- not because they're afraid of getting a speeding ticket but because they can't stand the thought of hurting kids. They don't need to cheat compulsively on wives and husbands to prove how irresistible they are. Normal people have internalized some modesty and humility, and are capable of respect and love for others. A common feature of psychopaths is the inability to feel authentic love and respect for others.
True psychopaths are often charming, seductive, and treacherous. They make natural con artists. Many psychopaths are extremely manipulative -- and what is more manipulative than stirring up hatred among victim groups to empower oneself? That is Jeremiah Wright, the diabolical Father Pfleger, James Meeks, and by his own definition of radicals, Saul Alinsky.
The worst are "malevolent psychopaths" -- people who sadistically hurt others. Hitler and Stalin, Kim Jong Il, Pol Pot, and probably many famous Western intellectuals fit the description of malevolent psychopaths. That is tragic and shocking. Historian Paul Johnson presents compelling evidence for malevolent psychopathy in the life of Jean-Paul Sartre, for example, and many others in his important book Intellectuals. Western intellectuals have been the home team of Leftist radicalism for a century now.
But the single most important point about Alinsky's "community organizing" strategy is that normal people can be trained to act like psychopaths: To become convinced that a "higher morality" allows them to act without conscience. As Alinsky wrote admiringly about V.I. Lenin, well known as a large-scale murder leader:
"Lenin was a pragmatist; ... he said that the Bolsheviks stood for getting power through the ballot box but would reconsider after they got the guns!"
That is a laugh line, believe it or not.
Alinsky called this "pragmatic radicalism." He differed from his Communist friends only in being more practical and less ideological. Alinsky was a radical because it suited his personality, because it was fun, brought him power and influence, and made him feel good. He was very clear in saying that, and he inspired the Boomer Left to follow his lead.
Alinsky dedicated Rules for Radicals:
"... to the very first radical . . . who rebelled against the establishment and did it so effectively that he at least won his own kingdom - Lucifer."
If that doesn't send a shiver down your back, you haven't been paying attention.
James Lewis occasionally blogs at dangeroustimes.wordpress.com
on "Barack Obama and Alinsky's Rules for Psychopaths

Labels: Elites, Liberalism, Radicalism

# posted by Mannning @ 2:19 PM