Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All

Sunday, August 19, 2012

"Stop Repeating the 716 Billion Dollar Lie...

Obamacare cuts fraud and waste from Medicare and uses the savings to expand benefits. Romney-Ryan turns Medicare into a voucher program, cuts benefits, and uses the savings to give tax breaks to billionaires."

Repeat this, word for word. Repeat it a hundred times a day, aloud, in print, in e-mails, on the phone. Repeat it everywhere you can. Repeat it every time you get a stupid GOP word salad from your parents or from some benighted "friend" on a social network. Repeat it in your head with a mordant smile when you hear somebody else repeating it and realize that it's working.

And don't say more than that. Just repeat it again. Repeat it word for word, if they come back with their nonsense. Don't worry if it doesn't work at first. Repeat it anyway. It's like exercise, reps get results. This particular business isn't a battle of ideas, this is a jackhammer on a sheer cliff face opening a space for facts to get through so that ideas can be discussed in the first place. This is a vaccination campaign to stave off an epidemic of world-destroying right-wing talking points that are already infecting millions of brains but hasn't yet taken hold.

Every word in this mantra comes from sound-bites I've heard from administration and campaign folks. They are not mine. Mine might have been different, but that doesn't matter AT ALL. These words are plenty good enough and they are the words we seem to have, so repeat them. Others are already repeating them. You don't have to re-invent the wheel. The point now is to endlessly re-circulate them. Know that many others remote from you in space in time are also repeating them. You are not alone.

Also, be sure to include whenever possible that first bit: "Stop Repeating the 716 Billion Dollar Lie." This is a phrase that can obliterate the lie itself very straightforwardly.

Stop despairing. Stop pulling your hair out. Stop trying to come up with cleverer and cleverer ways of making these points. Just repeat these words, over and over and over again. Make this particular GOP marketing gambit fail, by confronting it with a contrary marketing gambit. It's simple. Do it.

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