Matthew Broderick played a hacker kid in the movie War Games who dialed into a government computer named WOPR, and triggered a global thermonuclear war game simulation with it. In the movie, WOPR was located at the NORAD complex inside Cheyenne Mountain and it controlled our nuclear arsenal. No one at NORAD realized there was a simulation going on and the military mobilized as if the threat was real. The plot brings the world to the brink of nuclear war as the game between the hacker and the machine plays out. Things eventually resolve and at the end the WOPR computer concludes the moral of the story–in a suitably robotic voice, “The only way to win is not to play the game.”
There you have the answer to Saul Alinsky and his Rules For Radicals.
msnbc.com news services
updated 9/18/2010 10:15:40 PM ETWASHINGTON — President Barack Obama came out swinging against Republicans in a fiery campaign-season speech to black lawmakers Saturday night, urging them to “guard the change” he was delivering with the kind of organizing that propelled the civil rights movement.
“I need everybody here to go back to your neighborhoods, and your workplaces, to your churches, and barbershops, and beauty shops. Tell them we have more work to do. Tell them we can’t wait to organize. Tell them that the time for action is now,” Obama said in his remarks.
Members of “the other side,” Obama said, “want to take us backward. We want to move America forward. In fact, they’re betting that you’ll come down with a case of amnesia. That you’ll forget about what their agenda did to this country when they were in charge. Remember, these are the folks who spent almost a decade driving the economy into a ditch. And now they’re asking for the keys back.”
“What made the civil rights movement possible were foot soldiers like so many of you, sitting down at lunch counters and standing up for freedom. What made it possible for me to be here today are Americans throughout our history making our union more equal, making our union more just, making our union more perfect,” Obama said. “That’s what we need again.”
The effort began Monday with a White House reception for black college officials. It included speeches by the president on Wednesday to the Congressional Hispanic Caucus and by first lady Michelle Obama to a black caucus legislative conference that same day.
The president told the Hispanic group he is committed to an immigration overhaul, even though it has stalled in Congress. He blamed GOP opposition and said Hispanic voters should keep that in mind.
“You have every right to keep the heat on me and keep the heat on the Democrats,” he said. “But don’t forget who is standing with you, and who is standing against you. … Your voice can make the difference.”
Looking at this latest push from Obama, it’s obvious he’s dealing race cards, class envy cards, illegal immigration cards, culture cards, xenophobia cards, and probably a handful of others–pretty much red meat for everyone, whether you are for or against his hope and change.
If you’re for Obama’s change, he means to inspire you to action. But even more importantly, if you’re against Obama’s change he means to inspire you to reaction. It is in the reaction of the majority that his real power to control events lies.
Without conservative reaction to Obama’s racism, victimization and division, all he has is an echo chamber within the minority. The real play, the big fish he’s trying to reel in, is the resonance from the majority, because their reaction makes the playing field on which to continue the game.
The main goal of community organizing is to provide a continuing provocation to the majority to get them to react irrationally, emotionally, to lose control, and to thereby become subject to manipulation.
Conservatives need to stop reacting to all of the dividing philosophies promulgated by the Left. The basket full of plainly harmful and emotionally supercharged red-meat ideas that the left uses to cause division in America all deserve to be ignored. There’s nothing new there, nothing to be learned, nothing to be gained, and conservatives know this on an intellectual level.
Conservatives need to stop allowing themselves to be jerked around by their emotions. The left will carry on as they will. No one can reasonably expect to change members of a brainwashed cult. Conservatives should take themselves off the playing field and out of that game and allow the left’s ideas, such as they are, to just resonate among themselves.
If conservatives disempower the left’s harmful ideas by ceasing to react to them, I expect their politics of division will lose relevance and gradually die out. And one day we’ll be able to put Alinsky’s Rules For Radicals into the ground where they belong with him.