RUSH: The Los Angeles Times on July 9th. We’ve talked to you about the new message maker the Democrats have glommed onto, this guy named Drew Westen. He’s described here as a ‘genial 48-year-old psychologist and brain researcher.’ The Democrats have thrown George Lakoff (rhymes with) overboard, and Lakoff’s not too happy about it, but they’ve glommed onto this Westen guy. He’s talked to what is described here as ‘a rapt liberal audience about the role of emotion in politics, how to talk back aggressively to Republicans, and why going negative is not to be feared. It was Day 2 of the progressive ‘Take Back America’ confab, and those who had crowded into a meeting room of the Washington Hilton were about to discover why Westen, a psychology professor at Atlanta’s Emory University and former associate professor at Harvard Medical School, had quietly become the great rumpled hope of Democrats who believe their candidates should have won the last two presidential elections. … Westen has spent many years training psychologists, psychiatrists and social workers, and his major brush with fame before now had been the occasional commentary on National Public Radio. … In his new book, ‘The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation,’ Westen, who is not affiliated with a particular candidate, lays out his argument that Democrats must connect emotionally with the American electorate — and that he can teach them how,’ to do it. ”The political brain is an emotional brain,’ [Westin] said. ‘It prefers conclusions that are emotionally satisfying rather than conclusions that match the data.”
(Gasp!) What a profound admission! Let me read that to you again: ‘The political brain is an emotional brain. It prefers conclusions that are emotionally satisfying rather than conclusions that match the data.’ In other words, lie! If the data is not on your side, lie about it and make people feel good about your lie. That’s how I interpret this. None of this is new. This is what the Democrats instinctively do. The fact that they think they have some psychologist come in and teach them how to do it is hilarious. This is in their DNA, and I’ll tell you what else it does here, folks. This points out why they are so determined to silence people like me on talk radio. They can’t as easily get away with all this emotional garbage when people like me are out there providing the facts in an optimistic and entertaining. Well, I’m not optimistic today because I’m highly irritable and in a foul mood, but most of the time I’m optimistic and of good cheer, and I present facts in that atmosphere. So for their plan to work, fact purveyors have to be ‘dealt with.’ The man running America is a problem and they’ve gotta deal with that problem. Facts, by this guy’s own admission, get in the way of the Democrats’ mission.
A couple days ago we had that article on female guilt, the Melinda Henneberger story about all these women out there that don’t really like Hillary and it’s tearing them up. They just feel guilty about it, and so dubbed a new term, White Gal Guilt. In that whole story there was not one mention I can recall on her policies or any disagreement on that. It was all emotional. All of the talk, all of the comments that Melinda Henneberger quoted dealt with emotion. In Hillary’s candidacy, nobody’s dealing with facts and figures and all these issues. It’s total emotion. The inevitability. ‘She is owed this. Look at what she did! She saved the Democrat Party. She saved the country by not leaving her husband. She gave up a promising career as a feminist, or whatever, and had to trudge on down to the sticks in Arkansas to mop up this guy’s message for all these years.’ That’s the stuff that’s driving her candidacy. If you look at her issues and things that she’s botched, politically and lawsuits and this sort of thing, there’s nothing to recommend her candidacy — but emotion? So basically let me summarize this.
What Drew Westen is telling Democrats (and what they already think anyway because they do this; they really don’t need to be taught this) is they’re basically saying that their potential voters are idiots, derelicts, stupid poltroons. If it’s that easy to ignore facts and cover up facts with the right kind of satisfying emotion, then you’ve gotta be dealing with lunatics. You have to be dealing with idiots. Their voters are stupid, and they need to appeal to voter emotions because it doesn’t make sense to argue an issue using facts and figures. It actually says this later on in this article. ‘It doesn’t make sense to argue an issue using facts and figures and to count on voters to make choices based on sophisticated understandings of policy differences or procedures.’ Oh, really? Tell that to Ronald Reagan. Anyway, avoid the facts; just go right for the heart and lie. Don’t bore your constituents with facts. Just tell ’em whatever makes ’em comfortable, warm, happy, and fuzzy. Tell ’em that the people that own Ferraris ignorant be owning them for very long, and the people that have yachts are not going to have them very long and make them feel good. Play into their resentments; play up class envy, and we’ll take care of you. Don’t worry your pretty little empty heads. The Democrat Party will take care of you, and that’s their message. As I say, I’m struck by the fact they need somebody to come in and teach ’em.
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RUSH: One of the newspapers today, it’s either the Los Angeles Times or maybe the Washington Post, said that this interim report, the Petraeus report, the pre-Petraeus report on September 15th, the interim report shows that Iraqi troop numbers and deployment have reached their benchmarks. I don’t want to be confusing about this. It’s the political dimension that isn’t there, and some are saying, ‘Well, yeah, Bush set those benchmarks so high, they were impossible to meet. Maliki, nobody could have hit them,’ and that’s going to be the excuse for getting out. That’s Democrats floating that around, hoping that that is a rumor that takes hold and will be used to force Bush into some sort of withdrawal policy because they don’t have the votes to force it in either the Senate or the House. Now, remember, the Democrats were all over. They were just as critical as they could be of the fact that the Iraqis were not stepping up. The military of the Iraqis, the training wasn’t going well, remember all that?
Why, Kerry was talking about it in the ’04 race (summarized): ‘The training is not going fast enough. We need Iraqis defending their own country. Iraqis are going to be dying for their own country. Why is it only US treasures going to help, our precious treasure, and all that.’ Well, the Iraqis have ramped up, and despite all these claims that the Iraqis can’t do it, they’re not going to do it, now they are that charge and focus not going to be availability to them anymore because the Iraqis are out there dying for their country. They are in the field. Democrats said it doesn’t happen. Democrats said it wasn’t going to happen. Democrats said it was happening too slowly. Now they’re out there saying, ‘These benchmarks, why, none of them have been met, the political, the governmental benchmarks. Oh, they’re horrible. These Iraqis, they’re not worth it.’ It’s the same refrain that they’ve been saying for four years. You know, the Give Up Caucus, the White Flag Caucus: Democrats in both the House and the Senate.
RUSH: Jim in Chesapeake, Virginia, I’m glad you waited, sir.
CALLER: Rush, thank you for taking my call, and it’s an extreme pleasure to talk with you. This problem with the Democrats and basically the Congress’ failure to see what’s happened before in the Iraqi theater and just Middle East in general, is killing me. I don’t want to have the support to pull out and have the people pay the ultimate sacrifice again to take the same ground just to protect our country and our children.
RUSH: What do you mean, by going back?
CALLER: Oh, we can go back all the way to when we sent the message to Libya, to the Iran hostage debacle, to the USS Samuel B. Roberts, the Stark, all the incidents in the area, the Beirut bombing of the Marine barracks, and even of the current areas. It it’s amazing how the only thing we hear about is it is unfortunate and sad loss of life for this particular encounter in Iraq over the past couple years, but they neglect to consider what happened in Desert Shield, Desert Storm and before and after. I never heard them cry about the loss of life.
RUSH: What you’re saying is a good point. That this is a problem, and at some point it’s be going to be dealt with. If we quit now we’re just going to have to deal with it in some other form, maybe some other place, in a bigger theater, who knows what? That’s an excellent point.
CALLER: Rush, it’s not just a bigger theater.
RUSH: We cannot hide and we cannot pretend it doesn’t exist, and we can’t leave these people alone and expect them to leave us alone. They’re fanning out all over the Western world via immigration and other things, and getting into these Western societies that they so despise.
CALLER: Yes, sir, and, Rush, it’s not just that. I’ve been in and around that theater over 20 years of service, and it’s not just there. If we don’t toe the line there and do what we did with Japan after we did have victory there and after we did have victory in Germany —
RUSH: No, I understand what you’re saying. You’re right, too.
CALLER: — we’re going to be paying the price on our shores. We’re going to be fighting them here again.
RUSH: It’s amazing that doesn’t move people. They can’t fathom that. They can’t fathom what they see on television and Gaza or in Baghdad happening in Manhattan.
CALLER: No, Rush, they view them as you would your neighbor, and they are raised differently. The lifestyle, the level of education, the value system is different than ours, and we can’t impose our value system on them. That’s something they’re going to have to acquire and learn and strive for and sacrifice for by having their people take and secure their cities.
RUSH: No, I understand. I was commenting on the fact that you said, ‘If we don’t fight ’em there we’re going to have to fight ’em here,’ and when you say to the American people, ‘Well, if we don’t beat ’em there we’re going to have to fight them here,’ most Americans are not moved by that argument because they can’t imagine terrorists coming here and causing havoc day in and day out in this country and in their cities. They just don’t believe it. Maybe they’ll bomb the World Trade Center and the Pentagon now and then, but they just can’t believe that that’s going to happen all the time. I’m just commenting on how this argument doesn’t move people sufficiently. I don’t know how you get more emotion than that! How do you get more emotional than: ‘Well, we better beat ’em over there, or we’re going to have to fight ’em here.’ Somehow that doesn’t work, it doesn’t play, because people don’t want to consider the possibility. See, there’s still too great an opportunity here — not great, much opportunity. There’s… There’s…
What’s the word? You can ignore it. If you’re in this country and you don’t want to get all caught up in the horrors and the hellholes around the world and pay attention, you don’t have to, because it isn’t happening here. People don’t stop to think why, or who’s doing what’s right. But what if it did break out here, and when will that happen? Are we prepared to deal with it? We’re not if our solution to all this is just, ‘Well, you know, it’s just those people over there, different values than us, and leave ’em alone, and they won’t bother us. Once they find out we don’t mean them any harm…’ That’s not how it works, but too many Americans still have that freedom, that luxury. That’s the word I’m looking for: luxury. They have the luxury to put their head in the sand and pretend that there’s really no imminent threat to us, and that’s not the case. You couple that with the distorted propaganda from the Drive-By Media, the Democrat Party about how none of this was even necessary. ‘Bush lied! There was no reason to go over there. Iraq had nothing to do with it,’ blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So people in this country have ample opportunity to ignore it if they want to. That’s where leadership comes in and we’re getting none of it from several Republican senators, and zilch from the Democrat Party as a whole.
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