Thursday, October 21, 2010
This morning Pamela Geller is angrily denouncing Christine O'Donnell, Republican senatorial candidate for Delaware. Geller endorsed O'Donnell early on, and O'Donnell posted Geller's endorsement on her website. Then this week, a leftist online rag called Salon attacked O'Donnell for posting Geller's endorsement, repeating a lot of vicious lies and exaggerations about Pamela Geller. Someone in O'Donnell's organization got spooked and removed Geller's endorsment from the O'Donnell website. Geller saw the removal and went ballistic. The Salon strategy worked: Geller and O'Donnell were transformed from political allies into political enemies and a nasty public fight ensued. Both Geller and O'Donnell will come away from this with mud on their faces.
Saul Alinsky stressed the use of ridicule and other strategies for causing political opponents to lose their tempers; once these opponents lost their tempers, they would self-destruct in a very public way, neutering themselves politically. Geller has made herself a shining example of how effective this strategy can be. With her ego gored, Geller was transformed into an attack dog for the left.
The only question in my mind is this: how could Pamela Geller allow herself to be so easily played? This stratagem will be celebrated in the annals of the left for years as an example of the effective use of slander and "playing one against the other."
The left has become quite effective at turning decent people into public pariahs through out and out lies and propaganda. The reason, of course, is to silence these people, or erode their credibility with the public, or lacking that, to merely punish them by invoking as much psychic pain as possible. Fueled by hatred and immorality, the purveyors of "tolerance" are truly hypocritical, anti-democratic and completely ruthless. They will destroy the life of a political opponent if they can, or cause that opponent to suffer for his conscience for a very long time. Examples are plentiful: Robert Bork, Clarence Thomas, Joe McCarthy, Kathleen Harris, Linda Tripp, Carrie Prejean, Tom DeLay, Robert Stacy McCain, to name only a few. (See my former post "How the Left Punishes Conservatives.") Now you can add Pamela Geller to the long and growing list of "the Slimed."
Pamela should have confined her concerns to private communications with the O'Donnell campaign. Denouncing O'Donnell's "cowardice and lack of character" two weeks away from the election is truly destructive to the conservative cause. Pamela, it isn't all about you.