The Enemy Play Book

By James Marshal, Commentary
For most, watching the NFL Super Bowl can be quite exciting, especially when the fourth quarter begins to wind-up with the score still close enough to provide a real nail biter ending. Fun indeed! However, this type of situation isn't nearly as much fun for us politicos where it's much more exciting to actually see the other side be completely routed in a landslide victory. Of course, a Super Bowl game like that would have people heading home early or turning the TV channel to catch a Sunday movie. Not as much fun especially for those companies with high dollar commercial segments airing in the second half.

After the game, a thought occurred to me. Would the score have been any different had the Colts been offered a copy of the Saints playbook a week or two before the Super Bowl? My answer… certainly! How different? My answer… by a landslide margin!

With the election season of 2010 now hard upon us, and with so much more at stake in our Nation than simply a years' worth of bragging rights or lucrative commercial contracts, perhaps an honest introspection is in order. Is your organization fully trained and conditioned for the war that team Obama, Pelosi, Grayson, and Kosmas will be bringing to the field against all conservatives? Is your coaching staff fully prepared? Are you sure?

Even the most skillful teams will have difficulty playing against a lesser skilled team who has acquired a copy of your playbook well in advance of the game. If you're like me, you're not looking to have a "nail biter field goal with 3 seconds left on the clock" styled win in November… you want a landslide win in November! Therefore, I have some good news and some bad news for you.

First the good news – Your team and coaching staff can actually get a copy of the Obama playbook! Furthermore, by having Obama's playbook you also have access to the same plays currently being used by every community organizer, every radical leftist, and nearly every Democrat in Washington DC (some of them can't read).

Now for the bad news – You have to open up the playbook and read it. Study each play and tactic. Understand why the tactics work and how they can easily unravel the very best of our efforts. Failing to do so will only serve to increase the odds that we'll see a nail biting fourth quarter finish in November. In politics, that's not fun.

To paraphrase some sage advice, "keep your friends close; keep your enemies (playbook) closer."

This political life changing book comes highly recommended not only by Obama but also by the esteemed National Education Association (NEA) specifically for their teachers:

Here is the review of the book Rules for Radicals from the largest teacher’s union in the country:
"Saul Alinsky, who was a labor and civil-rights activist from the 1910’s until he died in 1972, has written here a guidebook for those who are out to change things. Alinsky was hated and defamed by powerful enemies, proof that his tactics worked. His simple formula for success…“Agitate + Aggravate + Educate + Organize”

Born to Russian-Jewish parents in Chicago in 1909, Saul Alinsky was a Marxist who helped establish the dual political tactics of confrontation and infiltration that characterized the 1960s and have remained central to all subsequent revolutionary movements in the United States.
Though Alinsky is generally viewed as a member of the political left and rightfully so, his legacy is more methodological than ideological. He identified a set of very specific rules that ordinary citizens could follow, and tactics that ordinary citizens could employ, as a means of gaining public power. His motto was, "The most effective means are whatever will achieve the desired results."
In the Alinsky model, "organizing" is a euphemism for "revolution" -- a wholesale revolution whose ultimate objective is the systematic acquisition of power by a purportedly oppressed segment of the population, and the radical transformation of America's social and economic structure. The goal is to provoke enough public discontent, moral confusion, and outright chaos to spark the social upheaval that Marx, Engels, and Lenin predicted -- a revolution whose foot soldiers view the status quo as fatally flawed and wholly unworthy of salvation. Thus, the theory goes, the people will settle for nothing less than that status quo's complete collapse -- to be followed by the creation of an entirely new system upon its ruins. Toward that end, they will be apt to follow the lead of charismatic radical organizers who project an aura of confidence and vision, and who profess to clearly understand what types of societal "changes" are needed.

As Alinsky put it:

"A reformation means that the masses of our people have reached the point of disillusionment with past ways and values. They don't know what will work but they do know that the prevailing system is self-defeating, frustrating, and hopeless. They won't act for change but won't strongly oppose those who do. The time is then ripe for revolution."

But Alinsky's brand of revolution was not characterized by dramatic, sweeping, overnight transformations of social institutions. As Richard Poe puts it:

"Alinsky viewed revolution as a slow, patient process. The trick was to penetrate existing institutions such as churches, unions and political parties."

He advised organizers and their disciples to quietly, subtly gain influence within the decision-making ranks of these institutions, and to introduce changes from that platform. This was precisely the tactic of "infiltration" advocated by Lenin and Stalin. As Communist International General Secretary Georgi Dimitroff told the Seventh World Congress of the Comintern in 1935:
"Comrades, you remember the ancient tale of the capture of Troy. Troy was inaccessible to the armies attacking her, thanks to her impregnable walls. And the attacking army, after suffering many sacrifices, was unable to achieve victory until, with the aid of the famous Trojan horse, it managed to penetrate to the very heart of the enemy's camp."

In 1946 Alinsky wrote Reveille for Radicals, his first major book about the principles and tactics of "community organizing," otherwise known as agitating for revolution. Twenty-five years later he authored Rules for Radicals, which expanded upon his earlier work. His writings, and the tactics outlined therein, have had a profound influence on all "social change" and "social justice" movements of recent decades.

Winning was all that mattered in Alinsky's strategic calculus:

"The morality of a means depends on whether the means is being employed at a time of imminent defeat or imminent victory."

"The man of action … thinks only of his actual resources and the possibilities of various choices of action. He asks only whether they are achievable and worth the cost; of means, only whether they will work."

For Alinsky, all morality was relative:

"The judgment of the ethics of means is dependent on the political position of those sitting in judgment."

Alinsky studied criminology as a graduate student at the University of Chicago, during which time he became friendly with Al Capone and his mobsters. Ryan Lizza, senior editor of The New Republic, offers a glimpse into Alinsky's personality: "Charming and self-absorbed, Alinsky would entertain friends with stories -- some true, many embellished -- from his mob days for decades afterward. He was profane, outspoken, and narcissistic, always the center of attention despite his tweedy, academic look and thick, horn-rimmed glasses."

Conservatives have been subject to Alinsky tactics and rules by and for radicals for several decades now. It is only with clear understanding of these tactics and rules that conservatives can then begin to understand the forces being applied against traditional America. To then map out counter strategies that can help other Americans realize just how close we are to loosing the very freedoms previous generations fought so hard to keep.

The campaign to immunize conservative people and organizations from any further impact of radical tactics begins with your willingness to study one book. To frame the importance of this appropriately, one would say that if we are asking a soldier now or in the future to pick up a rifle and fight for our liberty, we should all be willing to pick up at least one book to stave off the tactics of impending tyranny.