Control the narrative. Then you control the votes, the money, and the power. That is the narrative of politics circa 2010, friends. Know the game.
Here’s the new narrative: Control your own narrative. Know what you believe. Know why you believe it. Know how the game is played. Know the stakes. Look your kids in the eye. And own the narrative of events entering into their minds.
Because the players on left and the right are now coming out into the light of day. It is a good thing, disruptive as it is to card-carrying lefties and righties among my dear friends.
The window of opportunity to craft a new narrative will only be open for so long. Who will seize it? Get ready. The players are circling. The shift from culture wars to spirit wars gets back to the basics. Where you at?
For now, at least know the game. The left vs. right narrative is not where the real game is played, even though many of the players and much of the audience still thinks so.
The light of day hits the left (HT: @j_strong):
“You know, at the risk of violating Godwin’s law, is anyone starting to see parallels here between the teabaggers and their tactics and the rise of the Brownshirts?” asked Bloomberg’s Ryan Donmoyer. “Esp. Now that it’s getting violent? Reminds me of the Beer Hall fracases of the 1920s.”
Richard Yeselson, a researcher for an organized labor group who also writes for liberal magazines, agreed. “They want a deficit driven militarist/heterosexist/herrenvolk state,” Yeselson wrote. “This is core of the Bush/Cheney base transmorgrified into an even more explicitly racialized/anti-cosmopolitan constituency. Why? Um, because the president is a black guy named Barack Hussein Obama. But it’s all the same old nuts in the same old bins with some new labels: the gun nuts, the anti tax nuts, the religious nuts, the homophobes, the anti-feminists, the anti-abortion lunatics, the racist/confederate crackpots, the anti-immigration whackos (who feel Bush betrayed them) the pathological government haters (which subsumes some of the othercategories, like the gun nuts and the anti-tax nuts).”
“I’m not saying these guys are capital F-fascists,” added blogger Lindsay Beyerstein, “but they don’t want limited government. Their desired end looks more like a corporate state than a rugged individualist paradise. The rank and file wants a state that will reach into the intimate of citizens when it comes to sex, reproductive freedom, censorship, and rampant incarceration in the name of law and order.”
And the right (HT: @mikeallen):
New GOP group uses secret donors to fund attacks — Kenneth P. Vogel: “A new political operation conceived by Republican operatives Karl Rove and Ed Gillespie formed a spinoff group [501(c)4] last month that — thanks in part to its ability to promise donors anonymity — has brought in more money in its first month than the parent organization has raised since it started in March. The new group, called American Crossroads GPS, has been telling donors their contributions would be used to dig up dirt on Congressional Democrats’ ‘expense account abuses’ and to frame the BP oil spill as ‘Obama’s Katrina.’ The GPS group pulled in $5.1 million in June, its first month in operation, while the original American Crossroads [a 527], … has pulled in $4.7 million …
“According to a ‘concept paper’ that was distributed last month to wealthy Republicans donors, American Crossroads GPS intends to build ‘micro-team(s) of researchers and polling professionals’ and ‘list development professionals and direct contact (mail/phones) consultants’ to develop and disseminate ‘hard-hitting issue advocacy attack Democrats by ‘exposing ObamaCare’ as well as ‘the great “stimulus” rip-off’ and ‘the new federal bureaucrat elite’ … Jonathan Collegio, a spokesman for both groups, said Tuesday that ‘we’ve consistently said that we intend to raise at least $52 million overall for our efforts – the fact that we’re raising it for two groups instead of one is a distinction without a difference.’”
