CHENEY AND BUSH: MESMER AND ELMAN

Via BuzzFlash, a searing article in the London News Review charging that "the Republicans are using simple Neuro Linguistic Programming techniques to baffle and control a nation."

The 2004 American presidential election is a terrifying spectacle. If – and God preserve us all from such an outcome – if President Bush should win, then we will have witnessed an astonishing and chilling hoodwinking of an entire nation.

In their quest to be re-elected, Bush and Cheney have left rationality far, far behind. They’ve boiled down their message into a single emotive appeal: that America should be afraid, very afraid, and the only person who can hold the fear at bay is President Bush.
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Basically, in boiling down their message to this single point of fear, and constantly associating this fear with the flimsiness of the flip-flop, the Republicans are using simple Neuro Linguistic Programming techniques to baffle and control a nation.

NLP is all about implanting ideas through suggestion, through patterns of speech – anchoring emotions and forcing thoughts. Bush and Cheney are not trying to reason with the electorate, they are programming them using fear, using keywords, repetition, reinforcement, and threats. Their message is explicitly this: stick with us or bad stuff will happen; stick with us or die: “if we make the wrong choice then the danger is that we'll get hit again and we'll be hit in a way that will be a devastating from the standpoint of the United States."

Cheney here, (like Bush when he said: “If America shows uncertainty and weakness in this decade, the world will drift toward tragedy”), is using a form of words very similar to the most loathsome of all NLP patterns: “the Door Pattern.”

The Door Pattern is an extreme NLP technique – referred to fondly in the NLP community as “the ‘bad boy’ of all patterns” which (in the words of an NLP seduction site) works by “playing on the fears and deep insecurities of women.” It involves talking about tragedy and death, and anchoring feelings of loss and abandonment in the slamming of a door:

"...then get back into the door and say, "you know, God, still you know, about life's tragedies… I mean, I just keep on thinking how…" At this point you can already see that this is starting to make her feel uncomfortable. You want to create that sense in her that you can walk out and she'll feel terrible for the rest of here life. You want to anchor that response.

"Having anchored that sense of loss and pain to the door, you can trigger it whenever needed. Whatever negative behavior may come up that you want to stop, the first time you just get up and slam the door."

This is precisely what Cheney is doing: anchoring the response of fear, threatening danger, suggesting that Bush and he will make the danger go away, and using Kerry as a trigger. This is the flip-flop pattern.

And it seems to be working.

Yeah, it's working, all right. Millions of Americans (pray God not a majority) are scared to death that if we don't have Bush and Cheney to cling to in our "time of need," the big bad terrorists will rain down nuclear fire on our family farms and suburban homes.

Wake up, America, get out of this trance. "Land of the free, home of the brave," remember? You're not free if you're being manipulated and controlled by your leaders. You're not brave if you're cowering in fear of the terrorists and pleading that Daddy tell you it'll all go away instead of taking a deep breath, assessing the threat, coming up with a strategic plan that covers both realistic and workable defense and offense, and effectively allotting your resources to the tactics of that plan. John Kerry knows how to GET THE RIGHT THINGS DONE. George W. Bush knows how to get people to do what he wants. Big difference. Big-time.