Check out this bizarre report on one of the Tea Party locations. First of all, the participants were not unwashed masses duped by a slick "right wing" campaign.
The idea simply went viral. Regardless of how involved Fox may have been in the organization, it resonated with a substantial number of Americans. More specifically, the reporter could not detach herself emotionally from the issue, and she could not, or was unwilling to see there is a legitimate concern about the long term effects of the stimulus packages.
I absolutely love hearing regular folks on the street articulate historic American principles, and this guy was doing it well, and it was heart-felt. But she had to shut him down.
This tactic is called "framing the issue" but once she got to "anti government" it turned into a blatant lie. "Propaganda" would be a nice word for it. At the end she says "this is not family viewing." No, legitimate and peaceful free speech is okay... as long as it is anti-Republican. This was an absolute abuse of the reporter's profession.
She wanted those people to be unthinking, troglodytes. She wanted them to be anti-government rednecks. But she didn't like the fact that the man had a cogent idea ready to be expressed.
How DARE you quote Lincoln!
Did you notice she said "the State of Lincoln?" Is this a new metaphor for the administration, or perhaps a new term coined by the Left in order to romanticize themselves? Maybe not. Hard to tell. I don't want to build a mountain out of this molehill but that still brings up a tactic used by the Left.
The Left will heavily use certain terms with the hope that everyone will associate such positive terms with their policies (as does the Right, i.e. the "Freedom to Farm" bill benefitted global ag conglomerates). For example, they started calling themselves "progressive" and now that term is associated with the Democratic side. The implication is that if you are not on their team, you are not progressive- you are therefore REgressive and backward. It is propaganda through semantics, and I feel it is dishonest.
Conservatives should have called them on this a long time ago, but they were asleep at the wheel, too busy worrying about one world government and conspiracies, while the entire time the liberal left was working on getting themselves written into history books as "progressives." Conservatives need to realize that this semantic game is far more powerful and far more insidious than international organizations.
The intention is that, in the long run, such language will get written into US history. When later generations read "progressive" (and maybe even "State of Lincoln") in history books, it will color their interpretation of our time period in favor of one political agenda and by then the fact of a semantic game won't matter any more. History will have been written, and you won't be there to balance out the story.
Does this historical manipulation really work? I mean, does this kind of political opportunism really affect how future generations view history? I can give you a perfect example. Consider the following quote by Confederate Major General Patrick Cleburne:
...It is said slavery is all we are fighting for, and if we give it up we give up all. Even if this were true, which we deny, slavery is not all our enemies are fighting for. It is merely the pretense to establish sectional superiority and a more centralized form of government, and to deprive us of our rights and liberties.
So Cleburne proposed that Black men be conscripted as soldiers to help supplement the dwindling Confederate army. This wasn't the first time such an idea was put forth, but "conservatives" during the Civil War were too busy being loyal to ideas of aristocracy, and Cleburne made this historic prediction regarding how their failure to address the bigger need allowed someone else to determine how the South would be remembered:
...It means the history of this heroic struggle will be written by the enemy; that our youth will be trained by Northern schoolteachers; will learn from Northern school books their version of the war; will be impressed by the influences of history and education to regard our gallant dead as traitors...
The result? Slavery is now the official reason why the South fought the Civil War. Hundreds of thousands of Southern men fought, were maimed, endured POW camps- all just to “keep the black man down.” Not only did it color our modern interpretation of history, but also fuels the rise of an entire academic field that says "hundreds of thousands of Confederate veterans either remembered everything wrong or they passed on false information; and those Confederate soldiers with non-racist motives were forced to fight against their will."
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