Paul A. Ibbetson
Techno-politics: the war for downloadable supremacy
By Paul A. Ibbetson
It used to be that the world was a place of "hands." Every important exchange came slowly and directly through face-to-face conversations sealed with a handshake or a newspaper placed in the palm and digested by the slow and deliberate hand turning of the page. Today's modern world offers a plethora of almost mindboggling opportunities to reach vast numbers of people with the mere extension of a fingertip. When it comes to the ideological battle continually being waged between political forces, there has never been a better opportunity for conservatives to dominate by shear majority of numbers than now, but that is not happening.
Most struggle to some degree to answer the question of why a nation with an overwhelming majority of conservatives finds itself with the most liberal congress in modern times and a socialist president who tells the American people in his primary campaign speeches that the most prosperous nation on earth is in need a "fundamental transformation," and he wins!
The most intelligent conservative thinkers usually surmise that the Republican losses in 2006 and 2008 were hinged on the following: fiscal irresponsibility, political correctness, poorly articulated values, and too many wishy-washy politicians under the Republican tent. The analysis usually starts and ends there. It's not a bad list as all are true, but it lacks one critical addition, which without acknowledgment makes future conservative victories doubtful. This lacking component, which plagued the 2008 election as badly as John McCain's inability to be the rock-solid conservative when one was needed, was the GOP's total failure to harness modern technology to disseminate their message.
Jason Mattera's book Obama Zombies lays out in a detailed fashion how the Barack Obama campaign machine used technology to not only lift a Democratic presidential candidate to a cult-like persona, but also to maximize social networks that got people to the polls in numbers, outworking and outperforming John McCain. Mattera's book is a remarkable read once you absorb the mental impact of Facebook and Youtube in electing a presidential candidate with no qualifications to govern and no vision for the future that cannot be referenced from Karl Marx's Communist Manifesto and Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals.
Mattera's book focuses on the youth and how Obama's campaign machine used social networks to bring in new voters and coordinate rallies and events like free rock concerts for the purpose of creating future Obama Zombies. They were more than successful in this endeavor, and the fundamental reality that elections have consequences has never been more forcefully shown to the American people.
So while Barack Obama and his surrogates in the Democratic Party continue to inflame the majority of this nation, don't count them out. Why? Because right now on some computer, somewhere, they are live streaming and excuse, they are downloading some spin, they are twittering a tantalizing tall tale of twisted half-truths or its equivalent without an adequate conservative challenge. Conservatives must engage in the war of techno-politics that is raging. Liberals today use their mastery and organization of technology and the "power of the download" to tell the young and old to hate and fear conservatives such as Sarah Palin for using the term "reload." The rebuttal to such attacks by the liberal left must be felt in endless volleys of terabytes that shake the world's information systems to their foundations. Any efforts less than this are the same as tossing messages in corked bottles into the ocean. For those of you with slow downloading capability, here it is one more time: America needs a president that adheres to traditional conservative values and can articulate that clear message to the American people, but if that message is not allowed to resonate fully through modern technologies, it's four more years of Barack Obama.
© Paul A. Ibbetson
April 8, 2010
It used to be that the world was a place of "hands." Every important exchange came slowly and directly through face-to-face conversations sealed with a handshake or a newspaper placed in the palm and digested by the slow and deliberate hand turning of the page. Today's modern world offers a plethora of almost mindboggling opportunities to reach vast numbers of people with the mere extension of a fingertip. When it comes to the ideological battle continually being waged between political forces, there has never been a better opportunity for conservatives to dominate by shear majority of numbers than now, but that is not happening.
Most struggle to some degree to answer the question of why a nation with an overwhelming majority of conservatives finds itself with the most liberal congress in modern times and a socialist president who tells the American people in his primary campaign speeches that the most prosperous nation on earth is in need a "fundamental transformation," and he wins!
The most intelligent conservative thinkers usually surmise that the Republican losses in 2006 and 2008 were hinged on the following: fiscal irresponsibility, political correctness, poorly articulated values, and too many wishy-washy politicians under the Republican tent. The analysis usually starts and ends there. It's not a bad list as all are true, but it lacks one critical addition, which without acknowledgment makes future conservative victories doubtful. This lacking component, which plagued the 2008 election as badly as John McCain's inability to be the rock-solid conservative when one was needed, was the GOP's total failure to harness modern technology to disseminate their message.
Jason Mattera's book Obama Zombies lays out in a detailed fashion how the Barack Obama campaign machine used technology to not only lift a Democratic presidential candidate to a cult-like persona, but also to maximize social networks that got people to the polls in numbers, outworking and outperforming John McCain. Mattera's book is a remarkable read once you absorb the mental impact of Facebook and Youtube in electing a presidential candidate with no qualifications to govern and no vision for the future that cannot be referenced from Karl Marx's Communist Manifesto and Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals.
Mattera's book focuses on the youth and how Obama's campaign machine used social networks to bring in new voters and coordinate rallies and events like free rock concerts for the purpose of creating future Obama Zombies. They were more than successful in this endeavor, and the fundamental reality that elections have consequences has never been more forcefully shown to the American people.
So while Barack Obama and his surrogates in the Democratic Party continue to inflame the majority of this nation, don't count them out. Why? Because right now on some computer, somewhere, they are live streaming and excuse, they are downloading some spin, they are twittering a tantalizing tall tale of twisted half-truths or its equivalent without an adequate conservative challenge. Conservatives must engage in the war of techno-politics that is raging. Liberals today use their mastery and organization of technology and the "power of the download" to tell the young and old to hate and fear conservatives such as Sarah Palin for using the term "reload." The rebuttal to such attacks by the liberal left must be felt in endless volleys of terabytes that shake the world's information systems to their foundations. Any efforts less than this are the same as tossing messages in corked bottles into the ocean. For those of you with slow downloading capability, here it is one more time: America needs a president that adheres to traditional conservative values and can articulate that clear message to the American people, but if that message is not allowed to resonate fully through modern technologies, it's four more years of Barack Obama.
© Paul A. Ibbetson
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