xantav wrote:
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Funny story. I was talking with a friend late last week. This guy listens to nothing but conservative talk radio all day long, is up on all the latest issues, rants, etc. I asked him "So what do you think of this whole Jade Helm thing?" To which he was like "What's that?". He'd never heard of it.
I've noticed the same thing about a co-worker. Anything negative about conservatives or the republican party isn't discussed on conservative talk radio.
I maybe listen to conservative radio once or twice a week, maybe, and for like 15 minutes at most, but that's just not true. Not agreeing with it and not discussing it are two different things. It seems to me that most of what's discussed on conservative talk shows is about negative stuff liberals say about conservatives or the Republican party (and how they're wrong, of course). A huge segment of the discussion is about how the mainstream media seems to just parrot liberal/democrat talking points as fact, with conservative talk being one of the few places were any actual counter arguments can be heard.
There's plenty of discussion about what liberals are saying about conservatives. What's different is that instead of just stopping at the things liberals are saying, there's actual conservatives addressing those things and responding to them. If you want to hear both side of an issue, listen to conservative talk. Conservatives have to respond to what liberals are saying because it's so widespread, but liberals rarely have to do the same in reverse. That's why liberals do so poorly when asked predict conservative answers to moral/ethical questions. In fact, they do worse in direct proportion to how strongly they identify themselves as liberal (see research by Jonathan Haidt on the subject if you're curious).
Obviously, this doesn't say anything about any one single conservative, or one single conservative speaker (on the radio or otherwise), but to say that conservative talk in general fails to discuss negative things said about them is extremely questionable. Not joining in with the negative statements isn't the same as not discussing them.
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He is all about shouting Benghazi, but when I asked how he felt about the funding being cut for security, he looked at me like I had two heads.
Uh? Again, this is a topic I recall hearing about many many times back when it was a big topic. Are you sure he wasn't looking at you like you had two heads because he was mystified about how you could make assumptions about who or why that funding was cut? Here's a funny
article, which discusses this sort of thing (and also references Haidt's research). Relevant bit:
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But let me present a complementary, more practical explanation: If you’re a conservative who lives in a major metropolitan area or who simply reads the New York Times, you get used to being outnumbered by liberals. Liberals, by contrast, get used to being surrounded by other liberals, both in person and in culture and the media. As a result, liberals speak their minds freely, often in ways that are harshly condemnatory of conservatives and their stands on issues. As a conservative, you can defend your values against friends and acquaintances who essentially just called you stupid and evil or you can keep quiet.
Most conservatives, most of the time, choose the latter. That is, they stay in the closet to avoid being accused of hating the poor, gays, or polar bears. As a result, liberals aren’t gaining any commensurate information. In fact, the silence of their conservative friends helps reinforce their views. Much of the time, liberals’ views of conservative positions and values are simply a caricature that bear little resemblance to what conservatives actually think and, more importantly, why they think it.
He may have just not wanted to get into an argument about the subject. But who knows? I suppose it's possible he honestly hadn't heard about it. Not likely though, given the whole "But republicans cut the funding" is more or less the immediate stock response obtained any time a conservative brings up the issue of security failures in Benghazi. It would be amazing for him to have heard anything at all about the topic and not heard that particular counter. Probably a hundred times.
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Cheney shooting his friend when they were hunting? I had to be making that up. His favorite host, Rush, gets outed as a drug addict? Nah, drugs are only a problem for poor minorities.
Again, I don't know your friend, but this all looks like projection to me. You're assuming what he must think based on your vision of what a conservative is. Have you actually stopped and asked him about these things? In a non-argumentative manner even? I think that if you don't start with accusations, you might find your conservative friend actually has opinions that aren't what you think they are. Or maybe he really is one of those caricature conservatives. It's possible.
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I don't read that as not a problem, I see it as ignoring it in hopes it will go away.
Assuming you're referring to the whole "not knowing what Jade Helm was", it's not about ignoring it, but that conservatives are talking about the entire topic differently than liberals are. For liberals, it's "OMG, there's this Jade Helm operation and conservatives think it's an armed attack by the US military against its citizens. Let's make fun of conservatives for this". For conservatives, it's "Once again, liberals are trying to pin some crazy position or idea on us, and here's this guy, and that guy, and these other guys, all talking about this. When are they going to take the time to actually talk to us conservative about what we think instead of just making it up and plastering that all over the place".
See for conservatives, the story isn't about the military operation, but about the liberal attempt to paint us as in alignment with some kind of conspiracy theory. I had heard the term Jade Helm before, but prior to it being written as the title of this thread, if you'd asked me to name it, I would not have been able to. It's just not the part of this story we care about. That's the point I'm trying to make. Liberals do not understand what conservatives really care about, and this topic is yet another example of this. We don't care about Jade Helm, so the name has little meaning for us. We care about this only as an example of liberals attempting (apparently deliberately in this case) to define us incorrectly so as to dismiss or diminish us and our positions.
I'd say that it's straight out of Rules for Radicals, but that would just be too obvious. Scary how many of the tactics of the modern left do appear to be perfectly in line with those rules though. It's not about being right or wrong, but about manipulating public opinion. And this is all that this issue is about. Make conservative look bad by association. So yeah, that's the aspect we conservatives are looking at. Not the operation itself. We don't care about that.
