Cognitive Dissidents

Buzzflash has a copy of the flyer urging Florida Republicans to cast an absentee ballot because:

The liberal Democrats have already begun their attacks and the new electronic voting machines do not have a paper ballot to verify your vote in case of a recount. Make sure your vote counts order your ansentee ballot today. Just sign the request form below and drop it in the mail. Don't be fooled by imitations. This is the official Republican Party absentee ballot request form.


This is post modern politics at its best. Up is down, black is white. We will tell you what is real. This is an example of the Republicans using the Democrats' own repetitive rallying cries against them. ("Political hate speech" is another good example.) It's brilliant because many people are apparently so goddamned stupid that they don't even have a second of cognitive dissonence when they see something like this. You can't really blame the GOP. It works.

I'm very glad that the Democrats have begun to fight back using some of these same techniques. Kerry and Edwards did it using the "Hope/Help is on the way" riff which was stolen directly from Cheney's convention speech in 2000. I thought it was weird. But, I've since realized that most people in the audience just felt a soothing sense of familiarily, kind of like when they hear old advertising jingles from their childhood. The jingle remains long after everybody's forgotten what it was selling in the first place.

Damn, I'm starting to pray that somebody out there is keeping track of reality because this is getting mighty difficult to follow.