Sarah Palin And Jesse Griffin: Alinsky’s Rules For Radicals Turned On The Left

August 5, 2009 / 11:10 am • By Dr. Melissa Clouthier

Rule 11: Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, polarize it. Don’t try to attack abstract corporations or bureaucracies. Identify a responsible individual. Ignore attempts to shift or spread the blame. –Saul Alinsky

The purpose of Leftist blogs is to achieve a political goal. The purpose of Right blogs is to report the truth. Dan Riehl gave approximations of these thoughts for my radio show airing tonight on RFCradio.com at 10 EST.

Do you believe his statements? It seems true to me.

Why, for example, do Lefty bloggers seem to have no problem spouting inane lies as fact. Think Andrew Sullivan and his Trig Palin stories. Think, now, Jesse Griffin, and his Trig Palin and more recently, Palin divorce rumors.

Dan’s premise is that on the Left, blogging is deemed successful if it achieves a political purpose. That is why scores of Lefty blogs picked up an unsourced, unconfirmed, anonymous blog post and wrote it as fact. More than that, the tone of the writing was generally breathless and had a tabloid feel. Certainly not measured and reasoned.

Now, Dan Riehl has been investigating the blogger at Immoral Minority and found out that he’s not very anonymous. The blogger outed himself, in fact, after being contacted by the Palin legal team. He didn’t have to do that, but chose to, evidently, after being asked to take down the defamatory post at his blog.

On the Left, there is cheerleading for a blogger whose claim to fame has been trading in falsehoods. There has been mostly silence on the right except for the digging done by Dan Riehl and Robert Stacy McCain.

The Palin family has been subjected to an incredible amount of lies and smears. In this case, they fought back. In this case, some Right-leaning bloggers did some digging of their own. And while the credibility of the now, not anonymous blogger is now in question, he will suffer no ill effects on the left (think Michael Moore and Andrew Sullivan) for being a wackadoodle. He’ll actually get street cred. The point isn’t to reveal a truth, for guys like this, it’s to score political points which often means obscuring truth, providing a distraction, or outright lying.

O’Reilly had a segment last night discussing whether the Palins should fight or if they had a case:

My thought is that they should fight. Because of Jesse Griffen’s not-so-hidden identity, people seeking the actual truth have done some digging and published it. No one has to make anything up–good reporting is just giving the facts. At the very least, fighting back against a harasser will harass him and make him feel some of the discomfort he’s inflicted elsewhere. Since liberals have trouble with empathy, this could be an education.

John Hawkins said that the Right needs to fight dirtier like this. Since the Left dictates the rules of the game–dirty, personal and isolating as Saul Alinsky says–why not turn the tables on them? And in the case of the Left, things don’t need to be made up. The truth is bad enough.

Note: I’m thinking about Rush Limbaugh here, too. He refused to be cornered. He fought back against the most powerful radical, Barack Obama. The fighting actually strengthened Rush. Perhaps the same thing will happen with Sarah Palin. This makes me think that the wise course for her is to fight.

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  • http://www.peekinthewell.net/blog Morgan K Freeberg

    I know it’s become a mindless made-for-teevee movie cliche, but I think there’s a legitimate concern about “fighting dirty” when it comes to the prospect of becoming precisely what you loathe. It’s a real possibility. On the other hand, I look at this bloodletting from last fall, and I’m forced to concede John is correct; if the playing field is never leveled, we’ll just have to get used to seeing the same thing every other November.

    Methinks an appropriate compromise is this: Let us confine our attacks to what is really true. And within that military target, concentrate the most intensive flak onto the bits of support that is in the enemy’s camp, but in the periphery. Powell is just plain WRONG — most Americans do not want to pay higher taxes for a bigger government. They voted for Obama because they want to be liked; they want to be cute and adorable; they want to be hip; they don’t know that much about politics.

    They can’t stand being deceived.

    Mr. Griffin — in my place, we call him “Mr. Use Parentheses Like A Girl” — typifies what you’re talking about with just running with whatever B.S. it takes to win. Obama has handed the Republicans a huge opportunity with regard to this health care boondoggle, because with every passing day the moderate voter understands that’s just another policy that is good for liberal politicians and not so good for anyone else. So center the message around that. Liberal policies don’t aren’t good for anyone except for the politicians and bureaucrats who would actually manage them day-to-day; therefore, the propaganda that sells them always relies on three things. Character assassinations, gullibility and short memories.

    Stay away from arguing that Republicans always tell the truth. That is simply false, and can be proven false in a heartbeat. The message should be that both sides might be caught lying from time to time — but democrats absolutely have to because the truth is not on their side. That is powerful, because there are many in the democrat camp who’ve been swindled into thinking that somehow stengthens their character and makes them more decent people. When it’s shown that the reverse is true, this changes the game much more than the enemy is willing to let on. So we don’t see it. But the damage is certainly being done, and Mr. Parentheses has earned our thanks for dealing his own side just a little bit more.

  • http://shakeypete.blogspot.com Peter

    Nobody said that Republicans always tell the truth, Doc Melissa said that right wing bloggers deal in truth. I’ve made a couple of pretty serious errors on my blog, when they were brought to my attention I corrected those errors and did so quite visibly. I didn’t sneak a correction in, hoping no one would notice. I didn’t disappear the mistake down the memory hole, I made a post and admitted my error. That is what we on the right are supposed to do. Do we all? Of course not. But those of us that stay, do. If a right blogger is caught shading the truth, away goes the readership.