Brain-washing books? Rock on.

This video is about five and a half minutes of something wonderful.

There isn't any friction between the Constitutionalists and the Libertarians. They know they have to do something. Some of them feel the problem is those darn colleges, and the books in them. Brain-washing books. You know the kind. They will make you an evolution-believing agnostic half-a-liberal, someday....that's what an education gets you.

Mentally try and insert the sound of a record needle abruptly being scraped across the vinyl ridges of a very old and not especially well-beloved LP.

(Back in the day, children, turntables were how us old people got our music from pressed discs of wax and vinyl in an era where all sound was analog--and the concept of "scratching" was very alien to us all. We jacketed our LPs and even cleaned them and our turntables in the hopes of not "scratching" them. It was a different time.)

I think I know how to address this, now. It's like a puzzle in Highlights magazine where you have to find everything wrong with this picture.

Okay:

Parties are about like-minded people banding together to get as many votes as possible for the candidate generally agreed to be the guy/gal who best represents your agenda. Once you get down to the Libertarian Party and the Constitutional Party, you aren't even talking "third party" any more. You're just looking at people disgruntled with the Republican choices.

And....

People shouldn't be susceptible to brain-washing if they are smart enough to get into college. They aren't going there to be brain-washed, but educated in the commonly-accepted industry-approved norms of our working civilization, so that they, too, might go out and participate in it. They are about to be educated by people who--for what it's worth, were frequently hired on the basis of knowing what they were talking about, and will read books that were found by a number of people who knew what they were talking about, to be both informative and useful.

If that means they learn things different from the current beliefs of your enclave, perhaps, just perhaps, they aren't brainwashed at all--but educated. Now they know shit you don't know. Almost makes the student loans worthwhile. And you, too, can learn stuff and be self-educated.

By reading books. Because books don't wash your brain--they fill it. With stuff you can agree with, or disagree with. No one is offering electroshock therapy or whatever alongside your soupcon of knowledge. You can always put the book down if you don't like it. You can always read another.

Meh. Want the long-story-short?

These 9-12 Tea Party event, heavily associated with Fox News by now, meet-and-greet things are kind of an old meme radio stations do all the time, with little festivals, or concerts or at mall-openings. It's a publicity thing. They can do up some t-shirts and bumper-stickers and whatnot and get like-minded people together, but that's about building a lasting market-share. A stable and committed community of people who now feel personally involved with their media outlet. Because all the Fox newsies, like O'Reilly and Beck and Hannity--radio guys. So that's how they mean to market to you.

Seriously.

It's a gimmick. For the market-share of cable-not-necessarily-the-news.

I'm sorry. I thought y'all knew.

But I'm sure the swag is primo.