re: #17 Targetpractice

The only conclusion I can come to, as I voiced earlier today, is that she’s being hated for bringing facts into the debate that they can’t simply argue away. That birth control pills have uses besides contraception, that insurance companies utilize such archaic regulations to deny claims on technicalities, that contraception is not “cheap” for those working on strict budgets, and that women are suffering from otherwise treatable conditions due to inability to afford something that should be covered by every comprehensive insurance plan.

So the only recourse they see is to destroy not only her, but her testimony. That means demeaning her, dubbing her a “liar” and a “fraud,” and doing everything possible to make people reflexively avoid her testimony.

I think you’re overcomplicating it. It has been demonstrated many times that bringing facts into a debate, incontrovertible facts, is utterly irrelevant when dealing with a cult. It doesn’t matter how obvious the fact is, the equation remains the same. Shout angrily against the facts, rant about something unrelated, use the appropriate keywords, and the following will happen:
1. Conservative cultists will be enraged and attack the same target/support the rant.
2. Conservativist media will create a story out of whole cloth that bears only a passing resemblance to the actual story.
3. All other news sources will report the actual facts/story as one side of the story, faithfully teaching the controversy.
4. Average Americans will get upset that ‘everything is so polarised’, ‘both sides are fighting’, and believe that the truth lies somewhere between the facts and the made-up rant.

The point is, they don’t need to attack Sandra Fluke to discredit her facts. They don’t need to reframe the debate to have people avoid any uncomfortable truths. Facts are not important. What matters is that you present a visceral, emotive reaction to her so that everyone, most importantly the cultists who are looking to you to know what their reaction should be and the journalists who are waiting to know whether they can report this as a story of two opposing views, knows what emotional response is appropriate.

What Sandra Fluke said is irrelevant. She was up there to testify in support of a Thing Liberals Like. Therefore, it is important to Conservativists that she be demonised, so everyone in America knows what emotional response they should have. Even if you now remind everyone that she didn’t say any of the things she’s being demonised about, and that the facts are really obvious and not especially debatable, it’s too late. Everyone has now had their emotional response, and now their minds cannot be changed. It is now ‘fact’ that she was talking about her sex life, and that one side thinks she’s a slut and the other side is defending her right to be a slut. And average Americans now think that yes, Rush and the rest are totally inappropriate to be calling her names like that, but Congress definitely shouldn’t be wasting time hearing about people’s sex lives when we’re in so much debt and we’re totally broke.

And if you then demonstrate that she didn’t talk about her sex life, they will be upset that both sides are fighting.