Alinsky Again

I posted a story earlier on the blog about Sol ALinsky "Quin VS Wolf Part 2" in which I responded to an attack on me by our local facist right wing radio trash talker when I said that I called myself an Alinsky leftist. Today on the MSNBC website there is an article entitled "Reading Hillary Rodham's hidden thesis" and guess who it was about? Yep, Sol Alinsky. Quins answer to me was that Alinsky was a "Freakin Communist". The red baiting of Alinsky pops up again in the MSNBC story and not by Hillary -

But at its heart, her mentor says, the Alinsky-socialist-Rodham connection is a falsehood. "My conclusion, she was already thinking in terms of practical politics, what works, what doesn't, more than on ideology," Schechter said. "She wouldn't have paid any attention to whether Alinsky was a Marxist.”

So it seems that the Right Wing will try and use this "This Hidden Thesis" against Hillary Clinton during the 2008 election. Here Is something interesting about Barack Obama -

After attending Columbia University, he worked as an organizer on the South Side of Chicago for the Developing Communities Project. Obama and others of the post-Alinsky generation described their work in the 1990 book “After Alinsky: Community Organizing in Illinois,” in which Obama wrote that he longed for ways to close the gap between community organizing and national politics. After three years of organizing, he turned to Harvard Law School and then the Illinois legislature.

Lets take a look at some of Alinskys Rules for Radicals while we're at it.

ALINSKY's RULES FOR RADICALS

Saul Alinsky's rules of power tactics, excerpted from his 1971 book "Rules for Radicals: A Practical Primer for Realistic Radicals"
Personalize it
1. Power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have.

2. Never go outside the experience of your people.

3. Whenever possible go outside the experience of the enemy.

4. Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules.

5. Ridicule is man's most potent weapon.

6. A good tactic is one that your people enjoy.

7. A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag.

8. Keep the pressure on.

9. The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself.

10. Maintain a constant pressure upon the opposition.

11. If you push a negative hard and deep enough it will break through into its counterside.

12. The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative.

13. Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.

Alinsky is gone but his tactics live on - Use Them - Change The World