Bush says, "Our agenda ought to be able to stand on its own two feet."

But that's the problem with the Conservative Agenda. It can't stand on it's own two feet. So they call their agenda that pollutes more, Clean Skies; they call their agenda to clear cuts old growth stands, Healthy Forests; they call their agenda that drives up the deficit, Tax Relief; Bush/Cheney lied about WMD's in Iraq to settle an old grudge and for Halliburton get more oil, and they call it Freedom. And now they are manufacturing a crisis to gut social security; but they can't call it what it is, privatization, so they invent some other poll-tested word to mask their agenda.

The Conservative Agenda could never stand on its own ideas, that's why the Bush campaign had to push a War on Terror, in order to divert peoples attention from the real agenda; that's why the Bush campaign creates social division over gays and abortion, in order to manipulate people into voting Republican, against their own economic interests.

Bush and the Republicans haven't tried the run on a Conservative agenda that says what it is since 1964; and they got so rejected, so crushed and humiliated, that they've been running on lies ever since.

And (as discussed in the update to the post below) they created the Great Wurlitzer, the Republican Noise Machine of foundations, pundits, commentators, "analysts", talk radio and Faux News, to create, manufacture, shape, publish, distribute, repeat and support those lies. Our problem is twofold:

1. We don't have an equivalent infrastructure (we had academia and control of the government, and so it seemed we didn't need one -- we were wrong);



2. Even if we did, we have much too much respect for truth and the realness of reality (as opposed to ideologically-determined fantasies of what reality ought to be) to ever win back power using a similar regimen of deception. Hence the emphasis not on lying, per se, but on framing our ideas in ways that can percolate through and under the barriers erected by the right's command (and warping) of the national political conversation, and on telling stories that express the liberal/progressive values (yes, values, since that's what humanism is all about) in ways that people can take in without automatically rejecting because they go against everything they've been told about the left.

So it's not enough just to build the infrastructure, we have to work just as hard on the message, since we don't have the advantage the opposition does of simply lying.

One advantage we do have: although the right controls the political discussion, most of the actual victories in the culture war have gone to our side -- which is the very reason why the right must lie to get their agenda through.

This is a very powerful factor that we shouldn't overlook, and should use to our advantage in re-framing the debate. Most people -- discounting those who are ideologically committed to the radical agenda of the fundamentalist right, and putting aside those particular wedge issues which have been used so effectively by them (i.e. abortion, gay marriage, etc.) -- are drawn to agree with progressive arguments in favor of diversity, personal freedom, equal opportunity and so on, and we need to use their basic decency as the hook for the stories we tell, and the policies that stand behind them.

Postscript: Digby has more on personal wingnut lying here and here.