I wonder if you guys didn’t make use of bad economic news the last few years? And no doubt the conservative operatives who wrote up anti-Obama guidelines had a similar approach. Don’t you think?

When drunk drivers contributed to a disproportionate number of deaths, do you think it was fair to point that out and make drunk driving illegal?

What’s your point?

While this document happens to address guns, it’s much more important to note that the heavy emphasis placed by these people on emotion over intelligence as a political strategy, is common to multiple issues.

A definition:

Demagogue:

1. A political leader who seeks support by appealing to popular desires and prejudices rather than by using rational argument.

Replaced “propaganda” in the header with “demagoguery.” An awkward word, but very precisely defined.

Actually, this distinction is primarily linguistic. In other languages, the very term ‘propaganda’ (that which is propagated) carries no moral or political baggage, it is emotionally neutral. The Vatican has a Propaganda Office (for the Propagation of the Faith), and in Spanish the word is often used as a synonym for ‘advertising’, or even for material like brochures and training manuals.

But in America, propaganda is what the Nazis and Communists do. WE wouldn’t resort to that sort of tactic ourselves, but THEY can be counted on to do so. The very act of calling something ‘propaganda’ is to imply that it is not to be believed. It is easy to do this in English, a language perfectly suited for hypocrisy and evasion. It may be because, unlike Spanish and Italian which were derived from the extraordinarily precise Latin; English borrows heavily from the cruder tongues of primitive Nordic and Teutonic barbarians and other illiterate savage tribes.