How's that Republican Rebranding Going?

Unless I misremember recent history, the Republican Party said a while back that it needs to rebrand itself. Looks like they finally accomplished the mission in ironic fashion when Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy burned his Circle Idiot brand deep into the GOP's hide.

The first rule of deceptive communication, whether it's the mild deception of marketing or the intense deception of propaganda is don't believe your own bullshit. There's a good reason for that. To be effective, deceptive communication has to have some correlation with reality. It's those tiny links to reality that give the deceptive part of the message an air of plausibility.

If you start believing your own bullshit, you lose those links to reality. Not only does your message lose plausibility, it also gets weirder. Instead of creating a fiction that's grounded in reality, you create a fiction that's grounded in a fiction that's grounded in a fiction.

In other words, you go loony.



This was well illustrated in Joseph Heller's novel "Catch-22". In one scene, our hero Yossarian, an American bombardier stationed in Italy during World War II,  is drunk at a club and decides to mess with another officer. Yossarian tells him that the German's have invented something called the LePage Glue Gun, which glues an entire squadron of bombers together in midair. The officer brushes him off, but the rumor spreads.

Later, a much drunker Yossarian is leaving the club when someone else bursts in to announce that on their next mission, they'll be going up against the LePage Glue Gun, which glues an entire squadron of bombers together in midair.

Yossarian collapses to the ground, crying out, "My God, it's true!"

He believed his own bullshit.

And that's today's Republican/Tea Party. Since Obama was elected president, the GOP/TP's main agenda has been to demonize him. You've heard the progression. He's a socialist. He's not just a socialist, he's a communist. He's not just a communist, he's a Marxist. He's not just a Marxist, he's a Muslim Nazi from Kenya who not only plans to destroy America, but already has.

And when the GOP/TP hears someone repeat these stories back to them, they cry out, "My God, it's true!"

And that's how the GOP/TP, the talk-radio conservatives, created yet another phony crisis with their attempts to make Bundy look like a victim of tyrannical government, even though Bundy enjoyed years of enriching himself off public resources while enjoying more pampered due process than most Americans would get. Bundy's not a victim of heavy-handed government. He's a beneficiary of government leniency and mercy. That's especially true since almost anyone else who engaged in such rebellion after renouncing his loyalty to the United States would be in Gitmo or a grave.

But the GOP/TP, the talk-radio conservatives, really thought that Bundy was a victim.

Because they believed their own bullshit.