Keep It Simple, Stupid

Regarding Rove and his naughty indiscretions, the Rude Pundit notes something that’s worth being aware of, not only because it (sadly) probably explains better than just about anything else why the media is willing to pursue it tenaciously, but also because it can and should be used to our advantage: For the first time in Bush’s reign, narrative simplicity is on our side.

Karl Rove outed a covert CIA operative as political payback.

See how easy that was?

Narrative simplicity, combined with a media who’s willing to run with the narrative (since it doesn’t require any of the pesky context and elaborate research that, say, the Downing Street Memos do—ahem), and an American people who are quite angry about the outing of a spy* and following the trail of crumbs back to the White House front door, is a dream issue for any of us who know that this is only one part of a larger pattern of misbehavior and malfeasance. If this is the issue that finally catches everyone’s attention, well, fine—we’ll be patient. In the meantime, let’s keep it simple.

I’m talking to you, Dems.

The last thing the Dems need to do is, well, Dem it all up with a bunch of unnecessary shit that doesn’t need to be there. It’s a one-sentence story, and there’s no need to turn it into a novel.

Jack at CommonSenseDesk points to a great post by Michael at The Mighty Middle, who takes the Dems to task for mis- or over-telling everything:

Dear Democrats: of course it matters how you tell a story you imbeciles. It's always mattered. It always will matter. It matters how you tell the story, and it matters who tells the story, and it matters how often you tell the story and when and under what circumstances. Here's an idea: fire some of your pollsters and your lawyers and your political-hacks-turned-media-gurus and hire some writers. Everything you have just discovered over the course of decades and at a cost of millions and the loss of every branch of government was already known to anyone who has ever told a story. You need writers and you need soldiers because you don't get storytelling and you don't get strategy.

It matters how you tell the story and it matters what the fucking story is. If the story is Romeo eats a wheel of Parmesan, you know what? It's not going to matter how you "frame" it, it's still not going to be as good as Romeo bangs Juliette [sic]. It matters what you believe. It matters what you want to do. It's not just style, you overeducated post-modern twits, it's still story, story, story. It's still: what does the hero propose to DO?

You can take my word for it, or you can dick around for another decade or so until some new academic comes and explains it to you with a hot new book and a hot new lexicon.

There. Have I framed that clearly enough?

YES!

And I hope with every molecule of my being that this story continues to be repeated as simply as possible, as often as possible, while the GOP and their hacks and their goons and their whores spin and stutter and stammer and spew legalese, sounding for all the world like their arch enemy Clinton and those who love him.

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* Just why are Americans so mad about this, in particular?

The Rude Pundit has a theory—and I’m convinced it’s a good one, because I said the same thing (ha ha) to Mr. Shakes when I first heard about the outing of Valerie Plame, although I was predicting Americans’ reactions when it was inevitably traced back to the White House, and the Rude Pundit uses it to explain that very reaction now...

If the powers that be didn’t want all but the most fixated, delusional, GOP party-line ideologue Americans seething with outrage over the outing of a CIA agent, they probably shouldn’t have embarked on a plan 30 or so years ago to flood the pop culture landscape with examples of government spies who are utterly, unflappably cool—and always the good guys with America’s best interests at heart—to distract and inoculate the drooling, teevee-addicted populace against the reality that sometimes our covert operatives do really shitty things, and not always in our best interest. Now the masses love spies, maybe even more than the president, because spies aren’t corruptible, not the likes of James Bond, Jack Ryan, or Jason Bourne, anyway, and Rove might as well have pissed on one of them.

Bad idea. We lurrrrves us some spies, Turd Blossom. And what kind of code name is that, anyhow?