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One reason I am not a political moderate is that moderates focus too much on tone rather than substance.

Tone can confuse, obscure, even overwhelm substance. Tone is often used as a misdirection to cover a lack of substance, and therefore, becomes suspect via past experience.

Just the same, I see portions of substance on both sides. But we’re not allowed to mix and match. No, no, no. Yer with us, or agin’ us. If you’re not red, you must be blue. Or vice versa.

I just get to the point where this binary blather all begins to sound quite alike. In tone, if not substance.

And I say this in a totally bipartisan manner: when I look at our two party political system and what it has wrought in DC, I feel like I am looking at a crack addict who is one step above in the gutter.

And I keep wishing he’d just go ahead and fall all the way down, so there can be some kind of rehab.

A scorecard:

Lying:
Cheney; Any editorial page.

Perhaps not lying, but not bothering to check if what they’re saying is true:
GWB; NYT.

Not lying:
WSJ; WP.

Don’t know him well enough:
Harry Reid.

One reason I am not a political moderate is that moderates focus too much on tone rather than substance.

I’ve found that extemists have no substance. They merely have bullshit they accept from their masters, who profit at their expense. It’s all about power. They’re going to spout whatever BS is going to help them aquire and then maintain that power, and people being people, they will find enough suckers to believe their BS and work on their behalf to obtain power for them. It’s a great scam—everyone else does all the work and you get all the perqs.

It’s just like any other heirarchal organization that utilizes an ideological component to evangelize and gain believers. You got the guys at the top who don’t really believe this bullshit, they just want to be in control and enjoy the wealth and privelage that power brings. Then you got their lieutenants who work in the background. They might believe this bullshit, but they know that if you can’t have power, the next best thing is to have access to that power so you get a kind of Contact Power.

Below them sit the organizers. They handle the organizational activities of the operation (mainly logistics and manpower). They tend to believe most of the bullshit, but they’re really just jockying to move up to the Lieutenant level. Then you’ve got the evangelizers, who troll the waters with their chum. They actually believe this shit and are generally happy right where they’re at. At the bottom are the bait, who taste of the chum, decide they like it, and then do all the footwork and drudgery that no one else wants to do. They may also double as evangelizers, but most of them won’t get paid for it like the professionals who do it for a living. In fact, they are a major funds resource for the entire operation. So not only do they do most of the footwork, they actually pay to do it! They tend to do the most work and reap the least profit.

The last group is who you tend to find doing blogs. The evangelizers are usually attached to fancy-sounding Institutes and Foundations, as well as magazines and all the other propaganda apparata. If you were to knock out those two levels, you would effectively destroy the Parties’ capability to make Politics. If you wanted to kill them, you would disrupt and destroy the logistical and organizational levels. Unless there’s any charismatics in the Party, you really don’t have to worry about the rest. Like a Pyramid, the closer you get to the top, the fewer people you’ll find.

One reason I am not a political moderate is that moderates focus too much on tone rather than substance.

Generally what I’ve found is that the extremists are using tone to disguise one thing- the fact that they’re without real substance in their arguments for or against a position.

A good example the the whole ‘BUSH LIED BUSH LIED BUSH LIED BUSH LIED’ routine- it’s gotten to be where this is a commonly held fact, only because you can’t drown out the chanting with the question of exactly how he did so. So far I can see that he may have gotten bad information, and made the wrong conclusion based on it, but so did many other world leaders, including many of the people who are even now chanting ‘BUSH LIED BUSH LIED’ to the press. This is an example of where tone has become the message, rather than the message having a tone.

So many issues today are really non-issues, molehills become mountains. The extremists on both sides are using a strident tone to move their agendas, not facts. The reason they don’t use facts is because they just don’t have the facts to show us.