Beck's bust?  Will media covering 9/12 rally note huge turnout predictions?

I wonder if this is why the DNC sent out a release warning Dems in Congress that there might be millions of tea-baggers descending on town. They know that if Dems represent fear, the media gasbags are more likely to cover it, this they set the bar high as well.

"the largest gathering of fiscal conservatives ever."

With an average IQ of what? Isn't it dangerous to the environment or something to put that many stupid people together in one place?

First, let me give you some background. I’m not a therapist. I was a health teacher for33 years, but I recognized early that simply dispensing information and advice was never going to cut it. So much of what people do wrong and what goes wrong in their lives happens because they or others generate more emotion than is necessary or helpful. I knew that if I was ever going to be more effective I was going to have to learn how to teach people to disturb themselves less and thereby free themselves to act in healthier ways. That’s why after I got my masters, I took 75 post graduate hours, most of it in counseling type areas, including 30 hours in Rational Emotive Behavioral Therapy, made famous by the late Dr. Albert Ellis. In order to do my job, I had to learn the mechanisms by which people normally disturb themselves needlessly and to a dysfunctional degree. That’s why I recognize exactly what conservative talkers do. They work with those same mechanisms to encourage people to disturb themselves and then suggest that the cause of how they feel is Obama, Democrats and Liberals.

There are six things going on.

1) What people on the right and at town halls are really generating is technically anxiety. Anxiety is about things that haven’t happened yet, and often never do, and never will. Anxiety is a figment of imagination. The formula is “catastrophizing + awfulizing”. First you imagine something you perceive as bad happening, and then tell yourself if would be awful, the end of the world, if it did. Because if you said “So what, who cares” you wouldn’t get anxious.

What guys like Limbaugh, Hannity and Beck are really good at is presenting their listeners with possible, but highly unlikely scenarios about what they say Democrats, Obama and liberals want to do, and are going to do. They make it believable by routinely misrepresenting what Democrats, Obama and Liberals believe, thereby making the scenario seem like a perfectly logical extension of such beliefs.

One of the most dishonest things they do on a regular basis is put words in the mouths of Obama, Democrats and liberals rather than letting them speak for themselves. Oh they use audio clips, but carefully edit those. They never have opposing points of view on that might challenge what they say, except for an occasionally distraught, inept caller that their screener knows they will be able to rip to shreds and ridicule. thereby adding more credibility to their case. They never allow themselves to be interviewed except for an occasional softball one on Fox. Ed was right, they’re cowards.

One of the ways they foster the awfulizing is to tap into deep contempt we all were raised with for socialism and communism during the cold war by framing what Dems, Liberals and Obama want to do as just that.

2) In relationships, if you want closeness, you have to have equality. If a father or husband acts like a dictator, the rest of the family can’t feel close to him. It works the same way with leaders and citizens of a country. So what do they do? Portray Obama as a wannabee dictator, thereby getting their listeners to disenfranchise themselves from the government as it is, even when Obama and Dems are trying to help many of those very same people.

3) They are so effective at fostering anxiety that many people plug into fight or flight. You’re seeing the fight part of that at many town halls when people are angry and verbally attacking legislators, or bringing assault rifles with them.

4) There are some points about anger that are relevant. Once people get mad, it’s hard to get them to let go of it because it gives them a false sense of power, righteousness and permission. These “righties” are on a high caused by being angry and no matter what facts are presented to them, it will be difficult, or maybe even impossible to get them down. The question is just how much the anger is going to dictate their behavior.

But it’s also important to understand how people make themselves mad, and I’ll explain why I say it that way in a minute. Everyone has the right to want whatever they want. The mistake people make is to start to demand what they simply want, prefer and desire. When people get mad, they’ve basically demanded that everything and everybody be exactly the way they want it to be, and they’re weren’t. When I say it that way, how old does it sound like I am? Two or three maybe. That’s why Dr. Ellis called anger a temper tantrum, because you’re being demanding like a two or three year old.

So conservative talkers and to a large extent Republicans are basically throwing temper tantrums and demanding that everything be the way they want it to be, and encouraging their listeners and supporters to do the same.

5) One of the other types of irrational thinking they really encourage is label and damning. Label and damning is blatant overgeneralization. Like saying “liberals believe….” Or “liberals want to….” and implying that every single one does. I wish I had a nickel for everytime Limbaugh and the rest do that.. Conservative talkers have made Obama, Democrats and liberals into four letter words and encouraged their listeners to. The negative effect of label and damning others is it makes it harder to resolve conflicts and find common ground. You don’t want to try to work it out with someone you’ve labeled and damned. But that’s exactly what they want. Divide and conquer. Get 51% of the population on your side in elections, and win enough elections, and you have the power and control.

6) The last thing they do is use everyone’s natural tendency to have an external locus of control. The vast majority of people wrongly believe and talk as if what others say and do makes them feel bad. It doesn’t. It’s what they think about what others say and do that makes them feel good or bad.

We all have a host of cognitive choices we make all the time that determine how we feel. For example, how we choose to look at things, what meaning we attach to what happens, what we choose to focus on, what we compare things to, what we expect or imagine. It’s a choice because there’s always more than one way to look at things.

Ironically, the people who most preach about taking personal responsibility neglect to take the ultimate in personal responsibility, responsibility for how they make themselves feel. They blame Obama, Democrats and Liberals for how they are making themselves feel by imagining things that haven’t even happened and probably never will. And they’re encouraging their listeners to do the same.

I happened to catch Glenn Beck say “It drives me crazy that no one else sees this” when he was attempting to make a case for subliminal communist symbols on the concrete of Rockefeller Center. No Glenn, IT doesn’t drive you crazy, You drive yourself crazy, and the fact that no one else does see it should tell you something.

I would love for you and Ed and other progressive talkers to start telling conservatives the way it really is. “No, Obama and Democrats aren’t upsetting you, you’re upsetting yourself. And you’re doing that by imagining things that haven’t happened yet, and in all likelihood, never will.

It would be nice if the media would note, if only for political perspective, that an estimated 1.8 million people showed up for Obama's inauguration and that 38 million watched coverage of it on television---more than double the audience for 2004 Bush inauguration. I will be looking for tv ratings numbers when all is said and done---if only for political perspective, mind you.

They seem to think that the Obama administration is much more evil than even the evil that the anti-war protesters saw in Bush's plan-free optional war in Iraq.

Now anti-war protesters in 2002-3 did not have a dedicated TV channel pushing for people to come, "stars" and a freak show with Beck to entertain, nor did we have an entire political party telling us that we had to come and stop the war or our nation would end and fall to ungodly forces, nor did we have 'hores for the corporate interests propping up and paying the bills for the protests. (yea I know, the corporations were scheduled to make too much money ever to oppose the war.)

But let's see if Teabaggers can top these figures...

If they don't draw at least 200,000 then their movement will have been proven to be a huge fraud, a small band of rabble rousing manipulated people absent reality, and a hoax that the media still gives time to.

- On January 16, 2002, more than 200,000 Americans protested against the war in Washington, DC.

-On October 26, 2002 over 100,000 people took part in a protest in Washington. 50,000 people took part in a demonstration in San Francisco.

- January 18, 2003 in San Francisco, between 150,000 and 200,000 people attended the demonstration.

- Largest war rally was in NY, some estimates point to upwards of 250,000 in a single event.

This whole thing is a fraud. Complete Astro-Turf. Perhaps a few small blades of grass, but that's about it as far as the real grass goes, except maybe the grass you'r smoking if think these people are actually grass-roots. They are funded and organized largely by corporate interests and organizations, and sold by conservative frauds and/or racists who want to make the miniscule opposition to Barack Obama seem like something more than it is. Even if they manage to somehow stage-manage this thing and ship in a significant number of people, it's still a fraud at the end of the day and they know it.

THANK YOU.
njguy93@yahoo.com

you libs sure are an angry bunch. Hypocritical too. I bet if this was a code pink or some other left-wing loon event, the media would be all over it.

Does anyone actual read these links of”proof” above? The one comment their referencing here is as follows: "The march, organized by Armey’s political group FreedomWorks, is scheduled for Sept. 12 and is already generating hundreds of thousands of responses , the Texas Republican tells Newsmax.TV" (you can read it to click on suggest) How do you translate hundreds of thousands of responses to hundreds of thousands will show up? I know it’s convenient just to make things up but you can't post the proof right on your own site. Also I noticed that you couldn't find one reference to Millions mentioned (i clicked on them all). I'm sure you must just be referencing the DNC house memo PLANT that stated it (and then leaked to fox news), so they could latter claim the rally was a failure! Really that’s a trick older than this country. If you’re going to try and manipulate people come up with some new moves, your readers are after all the LIBS that can read.

So you can't post if someone might disagree or point out falsehoods i assume?

Huh. Interesting. The lowest estimates are from sources that pooh-pooh the "teabaggers" and they say 350,000. The organizers and conservative pundits are saying 2,000,000.

I watched part of it on live cams. This was easily 10X the size of the largest anti-war protest I've seen in DC. There were easily 500,000 people there, probably more like 1,000,000.

So they really *did* attract "hundreds of thousands". Does that mean Media Matters "better involve frequent use of the word 'flop'" in describing itself?