Saturday, June 28, 2008

Anatomy of a Republican Rant

Now the main body of this piece isn’t to be found within this text, it is actually found by clicking on the photo below.

Tina Benkiser, thrice-elected Chair of the Republican Party of Texas has released a four page rant on the evil that is Rick Noriega and all that is good about Texas’s junior senator, John Cornyn.

So you really need to read it yourself. Click on Tina Benkiser’s photograph to view the letter, minus references to the addressee, in its full glory. You won’t be disappointed. What I want to do here is extract the demagoguery by sifting through its nouns and adjectives and present them in a single organized list. A daunting task. My purpose? Just to show you that you don’t need to read this letter in its full context in order to understand what it is about or the tone that it takes.

Here is the list. You can use any of these noun/adjective phrases to construct any generic Republican rant for just about anyone.

Texas Liberals
National Democrats
Greedy Liberal Trial Lawyers
Hollywood Red Carpet Crowd
Most liberal Senate candidate
A liberal’s liberal
His liberal Democrat challenger
Liberal Democrat Rick Noriega
Out-of-State Liberal
Barack Obama
Bill and Hillary Clinton
John Kerry
Ted Kennedy
Speaker Nancy Pelosi
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid
George Soros’ Move-On.org
Spending frenzy
Government-knows-best brand
Shameless hypocrisy
Politically-correct liberalism
Washington and Austin powerbrokers
Drunk with power
Power-crazed Democrats
Powerful liberal donors
Radical ideas
Federal spending
Tax load
Gasoline prices
Pivotal senate race
Shameless campaign tactics
Shady financiers
Shadowy 527 groups
Vicious attacks
Liberal Democratic lies
Ugly lies
Their dastardly plans
Their hateful ads
Honest and honorable
Optimistic as a Texas sunrise
Our conservative friend
Our remarkable conservative friend
A true Texas conservative
Our conservative values
Our conservative ideals
Our Conservative Republican Truth
Our Texas values
Our moment of truth
Our conservative allies
Your financial leadership
A willingness to take action
Emergency financial help
My mayday call of distress
$50, $75, or even $100
The resources we need
Your generous Texas spirit
Your powerful checkbook
Your personal check
Your generous help
Your most generous check
Your most generous special gift
Your election-winning check

Get the idea? Tina Benkiser’s playbook without a single verb.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

She is a graduate of the Newt Gingrich School of Language. Which teaches how to use nouns and adjectives to demonise your opponent.

dembones said...

Fantastic take, Hal! Your condensation reads like the pan flute march of the lemmings over the deep end.

Anonymous said...

I met Tina back in the early 90's. Then she was busy making sure that any Republicans that weren't hard core anti-abortion were not allowed to go as delegates to the county convention (a dark time in my past). She was a cold conniving bi@#h then and she's only gotten worse. In short, she's the perfect person to lead the party.

Sam

Anonymous said...

WELL, I'm glad to know that the pittances I have sent to Noriega put me in the ranks of the "shady financiers." HAHAHAHAHA!!!!!

The Rethugs have NO CLUE about small contributions from a whole lotta people adding up to something significant. You'd think they would at least be paying attention to the Obama method of garnering money from the masses.

Anonymous said...

Any idea why the reader needs Benkiser’s instruction to turn over the page, then to go on to the next page to continue reading, despite the pages being numbered?

AMI

Hal said...

My guess is the readers are so thoroughly inculcated with the need to follow explicit orders, that unless there was an explicit order to turn the page and read on, they might not.

Bill Clinton said it best: "Republicans want to fall in line, Democrats want to fall in love."