Lather, Rinse, Repeat

If you're not reading Digby and tristero over at Digby's site, you really should. The political acumen that is displayed there is perfect for the new media environment.

First, the problem:

It is vitally important to distinguish between the methods used to establish that a fact is a fact and the tactics used to persuade the larger public to accept that fact. They are not one and the same.

For example, it is beyond dispute, by reasonable people, that contrary to the assertions of Bo and Ti of the Heaven's Gate cult, there really was no UFO hiding behind the tail of Comet Hale-Bopp. However, if you had a child who was in thrall to these dangerous crazies, no amount of logic or reason would convince them otherwise:

The New Yorker...reported on a camera shop in Southern California that had sold an expensive 3 1/2" Questar Maksutov-Cassegrain telescope (a favorite of amateur astronomers for decades) to two of the Heaven's Gate cult members, who said that they wanted to see the UFO following Hale-Bopp. They came back weeks later to return the telescope, disappointed that it could not reveal the UFO and was thus obviously a defective instrument.

So how do you save your child from such crazies, when they are beyond reason? Well, you don't have too many choices. Most boil down to, "Shut up and get in the car. We're taking you away from these idiots before you piss your life away. Get in the car, now." And some people get so desperate they kidnap their kids and hire a deprogrammer to reverse the brainwashing.

And what's the solution when over half the country believes some equally ridiculous nonsense....like...say....that Congress had the same intelligence that the President did in the run-up to the war?

The President is a liar. The Democrats did not have the same intelligence as the White House did.

And that's all any Democrat has to say. Don't try to explain it. Don't let the Republicans misdirect you into the details or distract you in any way. Just keep hammering the same line over and over and over because the public already knows it's true: The President is misleading the American people. The Democrats did not have the same intelligence as the White House did.

Rinse and repeat all the way to 2006.

Read the rest of the post, it's a gem. The message has to be blunt, assertively repeated over and over again without getting into the reasons, nuances, "facts", details and other sleep inducing media presence that Democrats fall for all the time.

For an old fart like me, I'd put it this way. We live in the MTV generation. Messages and images have to be fast, aggressive and dramatic in order to be heard and to stick. It's unfortunate. But that's the way it is Dems.

Get used to it or lose.