Alinsky's rhetoric

By K.E. Campbell

Leftist journalists, politicians, and activists have made much of conservatives' use of certain symbols or metaphors, targets and crosshairs in particular. Weaponry and military metaphors are part of political campaigns and political discourse and probably always will be. Think "battleground states", "targeting for defeat", "kill the bill", even the word "campaign" for that matter.

Before the Left goes too far down this road of casting aspersions at the language of their political opponents, they might want to take a fresh look at the president's own community organizing playbook, Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals, a book the author dedicated to Lucifer.

Using Amazon.com's search inside the book feature, I cursorily noted the use of the word "target" 12 times, "attack" 26 times, "enemy" 32 times, and "weapon" 11 times. The Prologue includes the following: "you can miss the target by shooting too high as well as too low." Alinsky's Rules include the following (bold added):

Power is not only what you have, but what the enemy thinks you have.

Whenever possible, go outside the experience of the enemy.

Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules.

Ridicule is man's most potent weapon.

A good tactic is one your people enjoy.

Keep the pressure on, with different tactics and actions, and utilize all events of the period for your purpose.

The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself.

The major premise for tactics is the development of operations that will maintain a constant pressure upon the opposition.

If you push a negative hard and deep enough, it will break through into its counterside... every positive has its negative.

The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative.

Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.

In his book Alinsky also wrote, "Before men can act, an issue must be polarized. Men will act when they are convinced their cause is 100 percent on the side of the angels, and that the opposition are 100 percent on the side of the devil."

We're seeing Alinsky tactics at work, most shamefully from many sources that would have us believe they are unbiased arbiters of news.