via Politico
Conservatives are coming for the Democrats on their blind side — the left.
The evidence is everywhere.
At tea parties and town halls, conservative demonstrators oppose health care reform with signs bearing the abortion-rights slogan “Keep your laws off my body” or the line “Obama lies, Grandma dies” — an echo of the “Bush lied, they died” T-shirts worn to protest the Iraq war.
Conservative activists are yelling “Nazi!” and “Big Brother!” where they used to shout “Nanny state!” and “Big Government!”
And the 1971 agitator’s handbook “Rules for Radicals” — written by Saul Alinsky, the Chicago community organizer who was the subject of Hillary Clinton’s senior thesis, and whose teachings helped shape Barack Obama’s work on Chicago’s South Side — has been among Amazon’s top 100 sellers for the past month, put there in part by people who “also bought” books by Michelle Malkin, Glenn Beck,and South Carolina Republican Sen. Jim DeMint.
Yes, the same folks who brought you Obama the socialist have been appropriating the words and ways of leftists past — and generally letting their freak flags fly.
The left-wing rhetoric and symbolism are so thick on the right, in fact, that some conservatives have been taken aback by it: The logo for the Sept. 12 protest in Washington, which organizers called the “March on Washington,” featured an image that looked so much like those associated with the labor, communist and black power movements that some participants objected to it — until they found out that’s what the designers were shooting for.
“As an organization, we have been very closely studying what the left has been doing,” explains FreedomWorks press secretary Adam Brandon, who says he was given a copy of “Rules for Radicals” when he took his current job . Brandon describes the Sept. 12 rally in D.C. as the “culmination of four years worth of work” and says that organizers were “incredibly conscious” of the symbols they chose.
With the logo, he explains, they were “trying to evoke the imagery of the counterrevolutionary protests of the 1960s that captured the imagination of the world.” And as for the phrase “March on Washington,” Brandon says, “this is something people said in the office. If we had been alive back in the 1960s, we would have been on the freedom bus rides. It was an issue of individual liberty. We’re trying to borrow some from the civil rights movement.”
From the outside, at least, it doesn't look like an obvious fit.
Dick Armey did not, in fact, participate in the freedom rides of the 1960s. Brandon said the former House majority leader was an undergrad in Jamestown, N.D., at the time, working his way through school putting up electric poles, and “wasn’t politically active at the time.”
And while they’re handing out Alinsky’s “Rules for Radicals” at FreedomWorks, Armey himself told the Financial Times last month: “What I think of Alinsky is that he was very good at what he did but what he did was not good.”
But if the tactics of the left helped end segregation and the Vietnam War in the last century, conservatives say there’s no reason those same tactics can’t be used to keep liberals in check now.
James O’Keefe, the activist and filmmaker who posed as a pimp for an expose of several ACORN offices in the Northeast, told the New York Post earlier this week] that he, too, had been inspired by “Rules for Radicals,” which includes such tactical lessons as “Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon” and “Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules.”
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