Rules for Patriots, by Soiled Againsky
This is a slightly different treatment of an oft-covered subject: how Obama and congress are using Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals along with with the Clowart-Priven Strategies to execute a coup d'état of the United States federal government. And, more importantly, some of the ways that we can combat their nefarious scheme.
As you know, B. Hussein Obama was well educated in the techniques espoused by the father of community organizing, Saul Alinsky. Alinsky’s rules have become second nature to Obama, so in order to successfully defend against them, it’s is imperative that his opponents (us) become familiar with them as well.
Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals.
In case you’ve forgotten, here’s a refresher on Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals:
Rule 1. “Power is not only what you have, but what the enemy thinks you have.”
Rule 2: "Never go outside the expertise of your people."
Rule 3: "Whenever possible, go outside the expertise of the enemy."
Rule 4: "Make the enemy live up to its own book of Rules."
Rule 5: "Ridicule is man's most potent weapon."
Rule 6: "A good tactic is one your people enjoy."
Rule 7: "A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag."
Rule 8: "Keep the pressure on. Never let up."
Rule 9: "The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself."
Rule 10: "If you push a negative hard enough, it will push through and become a positive."
Rule 11: "The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative."
Rule 12: "Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it."
Stop and think. How many examples can you identify that illustrate how the radical democrats use these techniques to further their political ambitions? I’ll bet you can think of many examples.
In fact, this could be viewed as a teaching moment. We could enlist our middle and high school students to use their intellectual curiosity to identify the ways that Obama and the democrats are using the Alinsky techniques. They could be provided with Alinsky’s rules and encouraged to list the ways that the democrats and Obama are using them. Wouldn’t that be a great political science lesson? In a free and open society, that would be possible – under current circumstances, not a chance.
One of the ways that the radical left uses Alinsky’s rules is when assassinating someone’s character. Take Sarah Palin for example. Here we have a full-bore application of Rule 12, with an assist from Rules 5 and 8. When they targeted Sarah Palin, they ridiculed her, they created an image of a backwoods hick who went to a no-name college and did little more than shuffle papers as Mayor of a dinky small town in Alaska. “She’s a joke,” they said. They pushed that package, over and over, through the bought-and-paid-for OM (Obsolete Media) until the uninformed public thinks that’s who Sarah Palin really is.
And of course, don’t forget President Bush, they used the same techniques (Rules 5, 8, and 12) on him. They ridiculed his intelligence (he couldn’t spell “cat” if you spotted him the “c” and the “t”), created an image of a lying war monger, polarized him (he was for the fat cats and didn’t care about the “little” people), and applied relentless pressure to reinforce that caustic image (which in fact, is still continuing). They have pushed the negative lies hard enough and long enough that they have become (in the minds of some) de facto “truths.”
But Saul’s rules are only part of their arsenal. There’s another basic philosophy that contributes to the left’s playbook.
The Clowart-Piven Strategies.
Cloward-Piven is a socio-political strategy developed by Richard Cloward and Frances Priven (a pair of radical leftist and Colombia University professors) in the 1960s.
It’s a strategy of forcing political change through orchestrated crisis. The “Cloward-Piven Strategy” seeks to hasten the fall of capitalism by overloading the government bureaucracy with a flood of impossible demands, thus pushing society into chaos and economic collapse.
If some of this sounds familiar, it is probably because Cloward and Piven were inspired by radical organizer Saul Alinsky.
Alinsky wrote in his 1989 book Rules for Radicals, “Make the enemy live up to their (sic) own book of rules.” When pressed to honor every word of every law and statute, every Judeo-Christian moral tenet, and every implicit promise of the liberal social contract, human agencies inevitably fall short. The system’s failure to “live up” to its rule book can then be used to discredit it altogether, and to replace the capitalist “rule book” with a socialist one.
They designed the strategy to create political, financial, and social chaos that would result in revolution, all the while blending in Alinsky concepts to bring about a change in U.S. government. To achieve their revolutionary change, Cloward and Piven sought to use a cadre of aggressive organizers assisted by friendly news media to force a re-distribution of the nation’s wealth.
In an article written for The Nation, Cloward and Piven were specific about the kind of “crisis” they were trying to create: By crisis, they meant a publicly visible disruption in a targeted institution. Crisis could occur spontaneously (e.g., riots) or as the intended result of tactics of demonstration and protest which either generate institutional disruption or bring unrecognized disruption to public attention.
The Cloward-Piven strategy’s main goal is to impose new stresses on targeted systems, with the ultimate goal of forcing their collapse.
To that end, they enlist two more techniques to achieve the goal. 1) Organizing previously unorganized groups eligible for government benefits, but not currently receiving all they can, and 2) identifying new beneficiaries and/or create new benefits, thereby overloading the system. Collapse of the system is the ultimate goal.
One of the most visible proponents of the strategy is ACORN. ACORN’s voter rights tactics follow the Cloward-Piven Strategy in order to overwhelm election management.
- They make the system difficult to police by lobbying for minimal identification standards.
- They register as many democrat voters as possible, legal or otherwise and help them vote, multiple times if possible.
- They overwhelm the system with fraudulent registrations using multiple entries of the same name, names of the deceased, random names from the phone book, even contrived names.
By advocating massive, no-holds-barred voter registration campaigns, ACORN sought a democrat administration in Washington, D.C. that would re-distribute the nation’s wealth and lead to a totalitarian socialist state. And now, with Organizer-in-Chief Obama in the White House and the democrats in the majority in both houses of Congress, they are in a position to exert the full force of both anti-capitalistic philosophies towards their goal of overwhelming the system. Remember that once the system collapses, Obama, et al, will ride in on their white (maybe black) horses and save the day with their new Socialist system.
As part of their Cloward & Piven plan, two of the most cherished concepts of our constitutional republic are under attack.
1. Citizen voting. Democrats have succeeded in eliminating any sort of real voter identification, thus allowing untold numbers of illegal votes to be counted. In a close election, illegal votes could change the outcome (remember Al Franken?). This activity can only continue to fester and do irreversible damage to that cherished right - our right to vote. But when ACORN is allowed to affect election outcomes by illegitimate means, our rights are in danger. Our next congressional mid-term elections in 2010 and more importantly, the 2012 Presidential election are both ripe for a Cloward-Piven crisis – especially if the left smells defeat. Voter intimidation, illegal votes, outcome challenges, recounts, and legal action will be used to overwhelm the election process for any race that isn’t a landslide – you can bet the farm on it.
2. Congress. Congress has become an elite hierarchy no longer representative of the people, their allegiance is now to the party rather than to the country. The Cloward-Piven crisis strategy is hard at work in congress and is easily detectable in the writing and passage of bills since January, 2009. Obama and the dems have created artificial crises that require “immediate passage” while providing a “solution” embedded in a bill so large and complex that it is impossible to read and comprehend before voting. This technique has become the norm for this 111th congress. They are spending this country into oblivion without even knowing the details – and they don’t seem to care. THEY MUST BE HELD ACCOUNTABLE.
Now the biggie; how do we combat this full assault on the United States that our founders created and that most of us hold dear?
We must use their own strategies against them.
The first step in defeating these anti-American radicals was to identify their strategy. We finally broke their code – they can no longer slide legislation by us in the dark of night, their attempts to impugn the character of their opponents is falling on deaf ears, and their own misadventures are being exposed for all to see.
Their leadership, in Obama, Pelosi, and Reid (oh my), are being evaluated on their job performance and found wanting. Obama’s approval ratings are plummeting and his disapproval ratings shooting up, while congress’ approval polls are at a new record low. The country, as a whole, is rejecting the rampant rush to Socialism. Breaking Rule 2, they have begun to operate outside of their expertise (campaigning and winning elections) and are now being forced to govern – a task for which they are woefully unqualified and inadequate.
We must continue to apply the pressure (Rule 8: "Keep the pressure on. Never let up"). We must be relentless in pursuing misstatements, errors, mistakes, and poor judgment by our president and our congresspersons – by name. We should not waste time pummeling congress as a whole – true, as a group, they’re awful. But we must systematically pick our targets, freeze them, and polarize them (Rule 12). Alinsky said, “People hurt faster than institutions.” We must cut off their support network by exposing it and isolate them from sympathy. We figuratively attack selected individuals, point out their negatives, criticize them, ridicule them and when they’re thrown under the bus, move on to our next target.
We must publicize our conservative alternatives (Rule 11), since the OM won’t voluntarily do it. We know that our healthcare system needs reform and we have identified several reasonable, logical solutions that can quickly and economically make it better. But who knows about our alternatives? Not the OM-reading/viewing public. Allow the 1,300 insurance companies in the U.S. to sell their products nationally, institute tort reform, allow tax-free medical savings accounts, allow catastrophic-coverage policies. These are just a few improvements that could have an immediate positive effect on health costs – but the inert public is told that the only alternative we offer is a straw man named “doing nothing”; Obama said that as late as Sunday, September 7th.
“Making the enemy live up to their own rules,” (Alinsky #4) is exactly what we were able to do in our fight against the socialized medicine that was being forced down our collective throats. We used their own statements against them, we read H.R.3200 and showed our ignorant representatives the page and line where their statements were proven wrong. When our “representatives” do not read and fully understand a bill affecting millions of Americans, that is tantamount to malfeasance – and justification for termination. Congress, as a body, is supposed to draft, debate, and vote on bills. How can members debate and vote on anything when they are ignorant of its contents? Don’t congressional rules require that representatives read bills before voting?
We must hold them accountable, to their own rules – and their own statements. Perhaps the best example of accountability is when Glenn Beck used Van Jones’ own words against him. It’s hard to refute videos that capture words and statements, context and demeanor, when something damaging was said.
And what about the “race card”? Alinsky’s Rule 7 ("A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag") is related to the “boy that cried wolf.” The overuse of a “racist” accusation has become so commonplace now that it has lost its impact. The left has used a racist tag to brand anyone who: 1) disagrees with any statement or policy by any liberal black and, 2) makes any negative comment about Obama or his policies. Conservatives used to be afraid of being labeled as a racist. There was a time when it was damming and no one wanted to be branded with such an ugly appellation. But now, its luster has been worn thin by overuse – it has been so indiscriminately applied that it no longer has any real punch, so go ahead, play the race card – B.F.D.
We must impose new stresses on their systems. We can use the “Clowart-Piven strategies to throw the left into convulsions. Their “leadership” (the president and congress) are so arrogant and inept that they were caught off guard by the peasants “rising up.” They didn’t expect the pushback from the ignorant masses. We need to continue to force new stresses on the democrats, with the ultimate goal of forcing their collapse. They are in disarray now and we need to keep them fumbling to defend against our newfound assertiveness.
Growing participation in the Tea Parties and Town Hall meetings has awakened a sleeping giant – the heretofore silent majority. But we need to continue building on our successes. Rule 9 states that “The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself.” If we can convince those in congress who are up for reelection that they are going to be put out to pasture in the 2010 mid-term elections, they will be less willing to fall on their swords to benefit the party and the president. Their activities can be slowed between now and the election(s) if they’re worried about keeping their job. We want to instill caution in their votes (but vote them out anyway).
Personally, I’d be willing to sacrifice my two good North Texas representatives (Rep. Sam Johnson, and Sen. John Coryn) and start from scratch just to lose Pelosi, Reid, Rangel, Kerry, Waxman, Frank, et al. Many of these relics have made Congress a career – it wasn’t meant to be so. Only in recent years have greedy, power-hungry poseurs begun to consider “public service” to be a permanent career. Until 1901, it was unusual for a member to serve for two terms. Since then, the time of “service” has gradually increased. No longer citizen-legislators, members of congress have converted the privilege of representing the American people into a lifelong profession. We do need to implement term limitations to ensure turnover among our legislators. No more dynasties, no more “lions of the Senate,” only citizens temporarily representing the interests of their neighbors. And, as part of that “reclamation,” we must reclaim our Constitution too.
One thing that we must remember, the left has been driving towards their goal of anti-capitalistic wealth distribution through their preferred vehicles of federal agencies, nonprofits and labor unions for decades. They won’t give up easily or without a fight.
In the end, let us all make a solemn resolution to remember Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals and consider the Clowart-Piven techniques in order to remain vigilant and assure the defeat of those who would remake our USA into the USSA (United Socialist States of America).