Tactics for radicals

Saul Alinski was recently mentioned in an O'Reilly segment citing tactic #5 below for the growing number of far left pundits and administration officials using ridicule to demean those that do not agree with their positions, i.e. attacks on Palin, Bush, Chaney, Limbaugh, Miss California, Hannity, etc.

Wikipedia: Alinsky's teachings influenced Barack Obama in his early career as a community organizer on the far South Side of Chicago. Working for Gerald Kellman's Developing Communities Project, Obama learned and taught Alinsky's methods for community organizing.

Wikipedia: Alinsky advises his followers that the poor have no power and that the real target is the middle class: "Organization for action will now and in the decade ahead center upon America's white middle class. That is where the power is. ... Our rebels have contemptuously rejected the values and the way of life of the middle class. They have stigmatized it as materialistic, decadent, bourgeois, degenerate, imperialistic, war-mongering, brutalized and corrupt. They are right; but we must begin from where we are if we are to build power for change, and the power and the people are in the middle class majority."

Tactics for Radicals
1) Power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have (Alinsky 1972: 127).

2) Never go outside the experience of your people (Alinsky 1972: 127).

3) Wherever possible go outside of the experience of the enemy (Alinsky 1972: 127).

4) Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules (Alinsky 1972: 128).

5) Ridicule is man's most potent weapon (Alinsky 1972: 128).

6) A good tactic is one that your people enjoy (Alinsky 1972: 128).

7) A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag (Alinsky 1972: 128).

8) Keep the pressure on (Alinsky 1972: 128).

9) The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself (Alinsky 1972: 129).

10) The major premise for tactics is the development of operations that will maintain a constant pressure upon the opposition (Alinsky 1972: 129)

Rules for Radicals
1) One's concern with the ethics of means and ends varies inversely with one's personal interest in the issue, and one's distance from the scene of conflict (Alinsky 1972: 26).

2) The judgment of the ethics of means is dependent upon the political position of those sitting in judgment (Alinsky 1972: 26-9)

3) In war, the end justifies almost any means (Alinsky 1972: 29-30).

4) The judgment of the ethics of means must be made in the context of the times in which the action occurred and not from any other chronological vantage point (Alinsky 1972: 30-2)

5) Concern with ethics increases with the number of means available (Alinsky 1972: 232-34).

6) The less important the end, the more one engage in ethical evaluations about means (Alinsky 1972: 34).

7) Success or failure is a mighty determinant of ethics (Alinsky 1972: 34).

8) The morality of a means depends upon whether the means is being employed at a time of imminent defeat or imminent victory (Alinsky 1972: 34-5).

9) Any effective means is automatically judged by the opposition as being unethical (Alinsky 1972: 35-6).

10) You do what you can with what you have and clothe it with moral garments (Alinsky 1972: 36-45).

Obama has learned his lesson well.

Community Organizing and Rules for Radicals