Often innovators and early adopters come into conflict with the laggards who zealously attempt to conserve their status quo by arbitrary means. Henry David Thoreau was imprisoned for his ideas, refusing to pay taxes in opposition to slavery and the Mexican-American War. Christ was strung up for his mystical ideas, defying Roman and Jewish conservative authority. Likewise Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. struggled against the laggards who used violence to protect their power of wealth and convention.
That forbidden fruit of knowledge might set us apart and take us out of the garden where we sense the bliss of ignorance. So we herd our mindless bodies into the mega-churches and pray that the pastor, making millions from his consumer audience, will do all our thinking for us in the name of some vague authority.
As in churches, so too in politics, ideas are the substance that sway the Early and Late Majority to one set of policies and events. With the counsel of Machiavellian political strategist, Turd Blossom (a.k.a. Karl Rove), the Republican Party has been successful in branding their image with the characteristics that Majority segments want to believe. This is how Turd Blossom is now coaching decrepit puppet McSame to increase his popularity.
Turd Blossom has been successful in selling political ideas: Republicans will defend our nation while Democrats are spineless peacenik hippies. Republicans are righteously guided by God while Democrats practice devil worship. Republicans are tough guy patriots who fight for America's liberty and freedom while Democrats cringe and run away in battle.
The Majority Laps Up Mean Spirited Rhetoric
Republicans have excelled at negative marketing. They practically invented the idea of 'swift boating' as a technique to smear an opponent's character, particularly military veterans. They have been successful in changing the opinions of many Americans about the moral character of John Kerry. They showed that they could run a smear campaign even against a war veteran, Senator Max Cleland, who had lost both legs and an arm. Without any limits in moral discretion, Republicans have applied negative marketing techniques to ideas and people. In doing so, they've effectively increased support from many gullible Americans. They employ marketing techniques as a means to their ends. And their ends justify any means. Republicans have proven that by using mean spirited marketing of ideas, they can persuade the Majority segments of voters and even cover up outright crimes.
Not just in commerce but in the world of ideas too our age is putting on a veritable clearance sale. Everything can be had so dirt cheap that one begins to wonder whether in the end anyone will want to make a bid-Soren Kierkegaard.
The 18th century Danish theologian, Kierkegaard, reminds us how cheap ideas have always been offered, like smelly fish in the market. Unfortunately, buyers were too eager in his time. In our consumer society, though, the herding shoppers have proven ravenous even for pet rocks and the most vulgar of ideas.
Laggards Gain Power and Abuse It
Since Bush II, though, the Republican Party has used an especially aggressive mass marketing first in the 2000 election, in which Al Gore actually won the election. But the five conservative Supreme Court Judges (Scalia, Thomas, Rehnquist, O'Connor, and Kennedy) broke laws in a desperate last ditch effort to overturn the 2000 election and give the presidency to a fellow laggard.
To package their crime to the American people, the five felonious Supreme Court Judges relied on what the majority of Americans wanted to hear, that it was according to the law and the constitution, that they had to respect the deadlines, and that they had to follow equal protection. None of these justifications were true or legal, but the American people didn't know. What they didn't understand, they comfortably accepted and reclined in deep cushioned Lazy Boy chairs.
In this way, the 43rd presidency was based on a treasonous crime and covered up by the palatable idea for the majority segment of Americans. From this moment on, the Republican Party learned that it could lie and commit crimes in order to carry out their own neoconservative agenda and to hell with the rest of the country, so long as they packaged and presented their policies in traditional, patriotic ideas that the majority segment would gobble up like a cool coca-cola.
The Laggards' History of Crime
Since Nixon attempted to cover up the Watergate affair, Republicans have refined their illegal activities and used clever marketing techniques to rally support in no matter what they do, even when it's against the interests of the majority. In those days an independent journalism still had some voice in mainstream media (MSM), at least enough to reveal to the majority segment of the public about Reagan's Iran-Contra affair. But the Teflon president shielded himself from any involvement by packaging the crime as any pots and pans salesman would. The public wanted to believe that such a nice horse-riding cowboy, in the vague image of a rough-rider action hero, knew nothing of the arms for oil deal. The majority consumer market bought Reagan's Teflon pans, his defense by ignorance, as a comfortable idea that made them feel good, fitting with their idea of an American president.
When conservatives caught wind of President Clinton's little sexual affair, they rushed to it like a pack of hungry wolves and sicced their dog, Kenneth Starr, on him, spending close to $100 million in tax funds and sabotaging executive operations for months, just to prove that one of our most successful presidents enjoyed consensual sex with another adult. The affair was legal and a private, personal matter, but when the Republicans presented the behavior as a devilish, unpatriotic sin, they packaged the affair as an idea wrapped up in the puritanical righteousness that excited the otherwise dull cerebral activity of the majority segment. The idea of a president enjoying sex grated against the idea that the majority want to maintain about our president as a super-hero saint.
