Why Can’t The GOP Answer Questions Like This?

Epic.

Hat tip: At The Point Of A Gun: Why Can’t The GOP Answer Questions Like This?.

When Dogma Poses as Rationalism

Charles is one of my favorite conservative bloggers simply because he and the community he has built at Little Green Footballs have such a savvy style about them. These are the people who exposed Dan Rather for the fraud he is, after all.

But lately Charles and company have been on a jihad of their own against intelligent design (Creationism.) I’m an agnostic / atheist myself and I consider the whole premise of ID to be simple theology posing as science. It’s laughable.

However, there is a large, large number of people who still believe in Creationism, and as Charles revealed this week three of them happen to be popular GOP governors Mark Sanford, Tim Pawlenty, and Bobby Jindal – all of whom are considered potential Republican frontrunners for 2012. LGF’s take seems to be that the instant you have a politician who publicly expresses support for Creationism in any form, then they are no longer a viable candidates in the GOP and must be removed from contention. Their empirical evidence supporting this theory?  The number of Google search results for “sarah palin creationism.”

In sum of all things responsible for the downfall of the McCain/Palin ticket, I would put “collapse of the economy under incumbent president of same party” as the 90% factor, media portrayal of Sarah Palin’s intellect and experience  as a 9% factor, and everything else, including Sarah’s devout religious beliefs, in some minute category comprising the remaining 1%. But then again, that’s just my opinion.

Charles and company couch their resistance to Creationism as an intellectual/rationalist effort to combat pseudo-science being taught in schools, a completely understandable movement given that the vast majority of Americans believe in Creationism over Evolution. However, in the spectrum of political issues that plague this country, Creationism in schools is a minor one – if you want to see some pseudo-science in schools that’s actually harmful then see what our nation’s teachers are preaching about climate change and “social economics.”

So why the fuss over whether or not prominent GOP governors are Creationist? Why should the GOP cut its nose off despite its face by taking the three most viable candidates for 2012/2016, four most if you count Sarah Palin, out of contention simply because of some belief that by and large most Americans agree with?

My Theory: Charles, Allahpundit, and a slew of other conservative bloggers who rightly regard Evolution as the currently accepted theory of the origin of humanity are personally embarassed by being associated with Creationism.

These people are “rationalists” supposedly, yet they haven’t produced a single shred of hard evidence that Creationism is a major factor that can ruin the chances of otherwise fantastic candidates.

They haven’t set up any repeatable experiments where they have been able to conclusively state that “Creationism” is the specific, isolated factor that caused one candidate to lose.

They haven’t even produced any political science data which indicates that belief in Creationism is a significant negative for any candidate.

All they have done is equate Creationism with defeat, without any correlating evidence aside from anecdotes, and doggedly decried any GOP candidate who dared express a belief about the origins of humanity that wasn’t firmly in lockstep with their own.

I can only conclude that the jihad that LGF and others are waging against Creationist candidates isn’t one rooted in rational thought, but rather one waged out of personal embarassment to have to defend and associate themselves with these people. Scientists don’t wage crusades – they try to argue and persuade; they don’t shut the door on any debate, as the LGFers have, and say “nope, our theory is right yours is wrong it shall not be discussed hence forth you are wrong goodbye.” That’s what Dogmatists do, and that’s what Charles and Company are – they are dogmatists.

I love reading Little Green Footballs, but they’re so far off the reservation now that they actually want Hot Air to ban Creationists. Open debate and free exchange of ideas, even if one idea is considered to be an unsupported theory in the eyes of science, should be the highest conservative value and these people are so personally aggrieved by Creationism that they are willing to put that value aside just to wipe it out.

So shame on them for masquerading as rationalists when really, they’re just as dogmatic and close-minded as the Creationists they hate so very much are.

Conservatives Need to Step outside Their Own Echo Chamber if They Want to Be Heard in the Court of Public Opinion

I read a post this morning on the #dontgo Movement’s website which asked “When will the right start collaborating?” One specific point which got my attention was this:

Love or hate Digg, you have to admit that liberal eActivists have been able to pass around enormous web influence using Digg.com. If you’ve been on the front page of Digg, and I have, you know that a link there is worth at least 15,000 unique visits within a few hours.

And while Digg.com isn’t necessarily “liberal owned”, the left has dominated the Digg community and the right has done very little as a collaborative effort to respond. When will we realize that we too can be VERY competitive in this realm?

We actually DO have a site on our own site that uses the Digg philosophy of crowd powered news over at R-igg.com. R-igg was developed by a brilliant young mind of the right in Aaron Marks. But there has been no collaborative movement to help it reach critical mass. Why not? How hard can it be for 500 center-right eActivists to collaborate and help this Beta site rise in predominance?

There is something wrong with this line of thinking; what is it?

The problem is that developing a center-right social media destination does little to influence public opinion. All it does is create an echo chamber where other right-wingers can see a reflection of their own opinions, and while this may be comforting, it is ultimately unproductive in terms of advancing conservative philosophies and candidates. Digg is powerful because it’s perceived as “mainstream” and because it’s treated credibly by other mainstream media outlets.

Did conservatives learn nothing from How Obama Got Elected? There’s a sizable portion of the electorate that doesn’t vote down a party line, but rather they’re influenced by what they learn through the mainstream media. Developing a parallel alternative to the mainstream media accomplishes nothing if we fail to influence the mainstream media.

Rush Limbaugh is a good example. He isn’t effective because he’s simply an alternative voice to the mainstream media; he’s effective because his audience is so large that the media has to account for him. Rush is able to convert liberals to conservatives because he’s able to get mentioned in liberal thought mediums frequently. Every verbal molehill uttered by Rush that the MSM tries to turn into a mountain is another instance where some liberal inevitably tunes into him to “learn thy enemy” and begins to understand the correctness of conservatism.

Digg already has a massive audience and the website itself is declaratively politically neutral; the mainstream media thus takes Digg seriously for the same reason that it has to take Rush seriously: size of audience. Yeah, in theory we could build a conservative Digg that would one day be large enough to influence the media, but it took years for Digg to become as powerful as it is now. Instead of building another echo chamber where conservatives share ideas with each other, why not go to Digg instead and fight the liberal userbase for frontpage real-estate? Not only will it be easier to assert some control over Digg, assuming that conservatives have the balls to go there, but it will be cheaper and more successful than building an alternative echo chamber.

Digg does not have a declarative bias; it doesn’t identify itself as “all the best liberal news.” Digg isn’t like the rest of the mainstream media – IT’S USER-CONTRIBUTED CONTENT. Right now, most of the users are heavily liberal. Don’t you get it? Conservatives have just as much of a shot at getting an article on the front page of Digg if we get off of our duffs, sign up, promote our articles, and bury the ever-loving-shit out of every DailyKos, Democratic Underground, ThinkProgress, Raw Story, and Media Matters article.

Digg is fair game – everyone gets a vote on every story, and we have been terrible at taking advantage of that. Rather than just surrender, yes that’s the correct word, the largest, most credible social media outlet to the liberals, why not fight them for it! If we’re going to fight the American electorate’s ignorance, we aren’t going to do it by talking to ourselves. We need to drill our ideas so loudly that the mainstream media can’t ignore it, and Digg is the perfect place to accomplish that.

Do yourself a favor:

• Sign up for Digg.
• Friend me.
• Shout articles that you want buried or Dugg to me, and I will do the same. Repeat this exercise for everybody else.

You want a chance to fight the MSM? This is the easiest way you can do it.

Republican Netroots Job One: Restoring the Integrity of the Republican Brand

If conservatives want to get serious about actually winning some elections in the near future, then they had better be willing to do some heavy lifting beginning today. As I have iterated over and over again, the biggest problem with the Republican Party is that it presently stands for nothing; this, again, complicates the major marketing problem that the conservative movement has. Notice how I have to separate the GOP and the conservative movement – pathetic, is it not?

The biggest enemy of the GOP is itself – many of its prominent members simply do not stand for conservatism; instead they want to out-liberal liberals and try to retain their power by promising better goodies than the Democrats. Here’s today’s most glaringly obvious example of this truth:

As the Hot Air article points out, Representative Joe Knollenberg is a Republican Congressman, yet he says outright that our own Government’s “money does not belong to [us, the citizens]!” How can the GOP look itself in the mirror and say “I believe in small, accountable government” when it lets it representatives get away with saying utterly un-American things like that? All of the Government’s money belongs to the people of this country, regardless of what Barney Frank and Joe Knollenberg think.

We finance all of it, and to say that “it doesn’t belong to us” is an outrage. Has it sunk in to all of you what the problem is yet? We can’t differentiate ourselves from the now majority party, the Democrats, if we sound exactly like them! The rest of Congressman Joe Knollenberg’s positions are irrelevant; the mentality that the Government’s money does not belong to the people who are willingly governed provides us with abundant justification for kicking this man’s ass swiftly out of the Republican Party.

The Common Enemy of the Conservative Movement: Ignorance

As Rush Limbaugh always says “ignorance is the most plentiful commodity in this country.” The problem that the conservative movement has isn’t ideological, it’s a marketing problem. Our party sucks at it. The Fiscal conservatives have been ineffective marketers since Gingrich left office, the social conservatives are really really bad at it, and Libertarians can’t even market their ideas to other conservatives without sounding like nutcases.

We are bad marketers, folks. Really, really bad. Want an example of just how ineffective our marketing is? Check out this nine-minute clip from How Obama Got Elected and observe how our party failed to disseminate even the most obvious facts about our candidates and the Democrats’ to the voting populace at large:

I know the first thing that conservatives will tell me:

But Tacitus, these people got their information from NPR, PBS, Jon Stewart, and Bill Maher! There’s nothing we can do to about that! Those sources are blatantly biased towards Democrats!

While that may be true it still isn’t a sufficient excuse. Good political marketing easily overcomes the media bias, because good marketing depends on a combination of self-owned information channels and infectious messages.

Look at how well we marketed Joe the Plumber! That’s the one thing that the otherwise inept McCain campaign marketed correctly! The media wanted him destroyed, but that only made the problem worse for them and the Democrats – he would not go away because the idea, the idea of a plumber standing up to a Presidential candidate, the idea of someone who should be helped by that candidate’s economic policy rejecting that policy as dubious, hurtful, and unneeded, was infectious and could not be contained. It wasn’t enough to get McCain elected, but it was enough to do some damage to Obama’s poll numbers.

That’s the power of good marketing. The way to market our ideas is something that I’m going to focus on obsessively over the next couple of years, because that’s the key to getting into the office. We don’t need to redefine ourselves; we are plenty comfortable with who we are. What we need to do is make the marketing decision to agree on what our priorities are across the board, organize a movement to support those priorities, and educate all members of the movement on how to market those priorities to non-members. It’s easy.

Boy, We Sure Have Seen More of Bill Ayers Since the Election Ended

Imagine that! Obama wins the election and suddenly we have Bill Ayers stepping outside the confines of his home to spread love and peace to all Americans, but without the pipe bombs.

“Who, me bro? We Weathermen totally weren’t terrorists – we were just out there trying to educate people! Oh, and by the way, I got a call from my homeboy, Barack, and we’re still cool. We just had to keep the ole friendship on the D/L when he was running for office. He said it was ‘totally chill’ or whatever.”

Golly gee! Could it have been that Bill got a call from Axelrod and company and was told to keep a own-lowday onway ethay elationshipray until the election was over? Something like that, I suspect.

Oh well.

The Coldest “Hottest October on Record” Ever

As someone with a background in science and a family who works primarily in science, I have never bought the hype about global warming. I’m not skeptical about the science behind it, but rather the lack of science. The proponents of global warming remind me of the scientific prostitutes from the Big Tobacco Era; these sorts of scientists go to where the biggest grant money is, even if earning that grant money requires them to forgo the requisite objectivity expected of them.

Over the weekend my skepticism about the authenticity of global warming data was rewarded:

A surreal scientific blunder last week raised a huge question mark about the temperature records that underpin the worldwide alarm over global warming. On Monday, Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), which is run by Al Gore’s chief scientific ally, Dr James Hansen, and is one of four bodies responsible for monitoring global temperatures, announced that last month was the hottest October on record.

This was startling. Across the world there were reports of unseasonal snow and plummeting temperatures last month, from the American Great Plains to China, and from the Alps to New Zealand. China’s official news agency reported that Tibet had suffered its “worst snowstorm ever”. In the US, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration registered 63 local snowfall records and 115 lowest-ever temperatures for the month, and ranked it as only the 70th-warmest October in 114 years.

So what explained the anomaly? GISS’s computerised temperature maps seemed to show readings across a large part of Russia had been up to 10 degrees higher than normal. But when expert readers of the two leading warming-skeptic blogs, Watts Up With That and Climate Audit, began detailed analysis of the GISS data they made an astonishing discovery. The reason for the freak figures was that scores of temperature records from Russia and elsewhere were not based on October readings at all. Figures from the previous month had simply been carried over and repeated two months running.

If you read through the rest of The Telegraph article you learn that after the GISS was blasted by a number of meteorologists who decried the glaring error NASA revised its figures and discovered yet another “hotspot” in the Arctic. “This only made the confusion worse because, to compensate for the lowered temperatures in Russia, GISS claimed to have discovered a new ‘hotspot’ in the Arctic – in a month when satellite images were showing Arctic sea-ice recovering so fast from its summer melt that three weeks ago it was 30 per cent more extensive than at the same time last year.”

Whoops.

This just goes to show you that even a “scientific” institute like NASA will forgo validating and examining its own data simply because the data fits their “Global Warming” template. Not only does this obvious twisting of facts to fit the theory undermine the credibility of NASA and GISS, but it undermines the entire Global Warming Industry as well. NASA and GISS simply cannot be taken at face value any longer when it comes to Global Warming; they are clearly not behaving like how scientists should. Instead, they are acting more like journalists who conveniently avoid checking sources when the facts fit the established media template.

Props to Hot Air for the article.

Gay Marriage Will Not be Fully Realized without the Will of the People

The gay community has been struggling for years to legalize gay marriage in the state of California, and without much success until earlier this year. In 2000, when Prop 22 passed via a 61.4% majority vote, the gay community made a fateful marketing decision to bypass California’s electorate and take their fight to an easier battlefield.

They took their fight to the state legislature, and in 2005 the state legislature passed a bill which would have eliminated gender requirements for marriage in California. This bill was vetoed by Governor Schwarzenegger on the grounds that repealing the previous constraints on marriage would require the assent of the electorate.

Rather than attempting to earn the assent of the electorate, the gay community took their fight to the upper courts of California. In the end they found salvation at the hands of the California State Supreme Court, which ruled that any couple had the right to marry regardless of gender. Whether or not this was an instance judicial activism or not is irrelevant, because either way the majority of Californians felt as though their opinions expressed via Democracy had been invalidated by a court that cannot be held accountable for its actions.

San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom’s now infamous post-ruling press conference only acerbated the anger of the invalidated; the majority of Californians took his words to mean “your opinion does not matter; this will happen, whether you like it or not.” The people of California responded with the nuclear option: Proposition 8, a Constitutional amendment to define marriage as the exclusive domain of heterosexual couples.

Once more, the gay community had a chance to market gay marriage to the people of California, and once more they squandered it. Rather than sell the people of California on the viability of alternative families they brushed the dust off of their No on Prop 22 marketing kit, complete with unbelievable comparisons of their struggle to that of the Civil Rights movement and counter-productive cries of “bigot” to anyone who would dare oppose gay marriage. The gay community didn’t show much respect for the intellect of voters, and were thusly rewarded by the Californian electorate with the passage of Prop 8.

One would assume, given all of the setbacks that the gay marriage movement has seen in the past decade that the advocates of the movement have learned that they can’t bypass public opinion and peacefully implement gay marriage. The gay community’s reaction after the passage of Prop 8 indicates that they have not learned anything – all they’ve done is scream “bigot” louder than they did before the initiative passed. Until those activists learn to respect the rights and intellects of voters, they will remain unsuccessful.

#dontgo: Bringing the Netroots to the Conservative Movement

The #dontgo movement, famous for calling the Democratic Congress back to Washington to vote on on offshore drilling during the Gas Crisis of 2008, has relaunched itself in order to serve as an online activism engine for the conservative movement, similar to what MoveOn.org has done for the left.

#dontgo is a free-market advocacy movement, at it’s core, so all of you unrepentant capitalist bastards out there had better sign up!

I will be blogging for the #dontgo movement here on Stop Global Laming, primarily to promote a conservative philosophy and candidates who support those philosophies here in the sunny state of California.

So if you’re interested in doing your part to help overturn liberalism in 2010 and 2012, get involved with #dontgo.

Update: Also, consider Rebuild the Party as another Rightroots alternative.

Freedom Agenda: No More Balkanization of the Electorate, We are all Americans

In my introductory post to the Freedom Agenda I mentioned that the path to victory for the Republican Party in 2010 and 2012 is to campaign on the basis of liberty and freedom.  There will be many more posts to come on the Freedom Agenda but I want to take a step back from the philosophical angle and address a political marketing issue that needs to be nipped in the bud.

Ever since politicians discovered the fundamental marketing concepts of segmentation and targeting they have persistently pursued what I like to call “micro-politics” where politicians promise different things to each individual constituency. Salesmen use “micro-marketing” to customize their sales pitches to speak the needs of individual customers, but they all fundamentally sell the same product. “Micro-marketing” and “micro-politics” are not comparable simply because when a politician promises one thing to one constituency and something else to another you inevitably will not have both should he or she be elected.

As part of this proposed Freedom Agenda, I strongly recommend that conservative politicians disengage themselves from the practice of “micro-politics.” Mitt Romney can’t give a talk to the AARP promising to expand Medicare coverage by 20% and a speech to Citizens for Responsible Government promising to cut it by 20%. This kind of politicking is nothing more than obvious pandering and it won’t work for Republicans; Democrats can get away with it because the MSM does little to scrutinize the evolution of Democrat politicians’ campaign promises over the course of an election cycle.

What Republicans Must Do Instead

Instead of Balkanizing the electorate like how the Democrats do, we must develop a consistent pitch across all constituencies and stop treating each individual demographic differently. Most Americans want the same thing and we should speak to them, not fractured interest groups scattered across the country with a wide range of conflicting priorities.

Develop a message of positive change, like how Reagan did. Here’s a good example of the exact introduction followed by a tagline that I would use in California were I a Republican gubernatorial candidate campaigning today:

We’ve watched Government slowly encroach on our rights as private citizens, as employers, as communities, and as a common people for far too long. Government interferes not because it seeks to control you or lord over you, but because it thinks that you can’t do any better. That you need to be protected from yourselves.

The bureaucrats in Sacramento believe that the private citizens can’t make educated decisions, so they seek to impose their will upon you, “for your own good” as they say. The took away your right to use cell phones while you drive because they don’t believe that Californians can behave responsibly; they take away transfats from your restaurants because they believe that Californians can make sound health choices; they tried to take away your right to homeschool your own children, because they believe that Government can do a better job than parents can; they took away the rights of employers to create flexible hours for their employees, because they don’t believe that any of you can run businesses fairly and humanely.

People of California, the principle ideology which your state Government has adopted for the last quarter-century has been one of paternalism, one where “Father Government” knows and does best. Yes, Sacramento, the Government does indeed know how to run the lives of its citizens better than the people themselves. Look at how well the Government has done, folks! Our state is on the verge of bankruptcy, our public education system is among the worst in the country, our own state can longer fulfill its own demand for electricity, gas prices are higher here than nearly everywhere else in the country, our levels of unemployment are much higher than the national average, and businesses are fleeing our state by the truckload.

If there’s one thing that we as a people should take away from this era on California’s history, it’s that Government doesn’t solve the problem, it is the problem. All of you, all of us, all Californians, can do better. Say it with me. “We can do better!” It’s time to we stood up to our Government and told them “thanks, but no thanks.” You, me, your neighbor, we’re all Americans and we can look out for each other and ourselves without the help of Government, thank you very much. We didn’t become the great nation that we are because Government told us how to think and act; we got there because we are a nation of determined, motivated individuals who can always rise above the challenges that are thrown at us.

So come with me to Sacramento and tell them like it is. “We can do better!” Let the people of California decide what’s best for them, because we can do better! Let the people of California run their own business they way they see fit, to grow our economy, and give every citizen the right and opportunity to pursue the American dream. We can do better, people!

At any point in that speech did I start trying to carve out little niches for every tiny constituency? Did I treat any group differently than the other? No. I used a broadly appealing message which resonates with anybody who has the self-confidence to believe that they are capable of taking care of themselves, which, in my opinion, constitutes most Americans. My tagline, in case you didn’t notice, was “We can do better.”

Let’s no longer balkanize the electorate by campaigning from issue to issue with different “victim groups” or “interest groups.” Let’s appeal to the American dream and the fundamental idea of what this country is about; also notice that I didn’t call out my political opponents directly and fixate on assigning blame. In my humble opinion that doesn’t work when you’re a Republican; the media will rush to the defense of any liberal unless your criticisms are indisputably true, and even then they will probably still try it.

The idea behind the Freedom Agenda is that Government is an impediment to progress and prosperity, and that the people themselves are more capable than Government is. Use this positive message of empowerment, of freedom to act, of individualism, of liberty, to motivate and inspire citizens across every and all demographics to teach them that you believe in them, and that the Democrats do not. The Democrats are, under this message, the party of “No, you can’t.”

The Republicans, should they be intelligent enough to pick candidates who fundamentally believe this, will ironically become the party of “Yes we can, and we can do it better.”