Sunday, August 19, 2012

Introducing POGO's Suzie Dershowitz

Know Your Reformers: Training Wheels Edition

The left-wing 'reform' group (they claim to be non-partisan, but their funding stream, especially as it relates to defense topics, tell a different story) Project on Government Oversight, aka POGO, has a budding young 'Public Policy Expert' named Suzie Dershowitz. Ms Dershowitz seems to have been given the opportunity to editorialize on defense spending in the relatively safe harbor of the Huffington Post with an 'article' titled: Right, Left and Middle Agree: Reshaping the Pentagon Budget Won't Hurt the Economy. Now, the Beta and Omega PuffHo's that haunt the joint should be considered 'training wheels' for young Suzie: You can float 'defense' turds all day long in that fever swamp with nary a complaint.
The reason I'm pointing Dershowitz's piece is twofold. First, I'm going to use it as another example to illustrate the sort of ploys POGO et al are far too comfortable in thinking they can pass off as 'thoughtful' on the unsuspecting public. Second, I'm using this as a sort of test to see if a typical POGO pattern emerges: POGO drops the turd, and the 'usual suspect' pseudo-news sites picks it up and passes it around (Eewww --the Imagery!).

The Major Ploys Du Jour

I'll just list them tonight, and expand on them later (Hey,it's late and I'm tired!) but I'm sure the reader can explain them once they're pointed out as well as I can.
1. False Non-Political/Partisanship claims. Hint: Libertarian is NOT Conservative.
2. This Proves/Refutes Our POV/Their POV (In this case both). Only.... it doesn't. Hint: You could lay all the economists in the world end to end and you still wouldn't be able to reach a conclusion.

The Pattern

Let's see who (if anyone) picks the POGO piece up and promotes it. (I'm running a risk here of tipping my hand, but I'm counting on the major site's tendency to focus on cranking out the pre-written memes instead of producing original journalism.

Part 2
Part 3
Part 4

2 comments:

Unknown said...

God help us...They(the reformers)got lucky to have some big names associated to them back in the 80s and now we have to listen to this crap...Just because Pierre Sprey and john Boyd were on their side,that doesn t mean we have to listen to this all day long...I cant go to a defense related website whithout reading this garbage...«the F-15 is a turkey,the TOW missile wont work,the Abrams is worst that the M-48,defense budjet is going to end our economy,the industrial-military complex is monster with acid instead of blood..» Sorry for speach SMSgt Mac but it just boils my blood to read the stuff they put out...

SMSgt Mac said...

The only thing that bugs me more than Liberal 'Hippies' (Do a search in my search box above of 'So long Hippies') is that they bred and created echo-Hippies