Ideas are the source of all actions. Once we adopt ideas they form the basis of how we live and how we support events in our community. “Ideas shape the course of history,” said John Maynard Keynes.
They are things that make us feel great, inspire us, or crush us. We can roll them around, play with them, or hush them up and censor them.

Like businesses, churches and political parties use marketing techniques to promote ideas. In ancient days, Aristotle wrote about rhetoric and set the foundation for modern marketing which shows us how to segment groups by the way people adopt ideas and products. Once we understand these different groups, we can communicate effectively with them and persuade them to buy.

Innovators and early adopters are the venturesome, educated individualists who use multiple sources of information and push for social progress. Creative thinkers, they lead society forward. They are early to embrace, if not do the original research for, new issues like Global Warming. As a leader in justice, Vincent Bugliosi, an extremely successful former LA County prosecutor, has done research to reveal how even revered Supreme Court Justices can commit the most offensive crimes against the public. Bugliosi shows us, in vivid legal details, how a U.S. president can be indicted for the most heinous crimes in our history.

Early and late majority groups obtain ideas and information from friends and family and think in conventional, traditional ways that their church or televangelist or scientologist leader teaches them. They represent the majority of our population, the largest market of goods and of ideas. Their sheer numbers represent the largest potential votes and buyers of consumer goods. Election campaign strategists and marketers break these large groups down into more precise segments by cultural behavior based on race, religion, income, and other attributes.

Laggards are the mentally slow moving groups, the skin heads, the motor heads, the redneck racists who live on the margins and in gangs and organized crime rings. They often succeed in obtaining or maintaining money and power by illegal means. Laggards can include extremist political groups like the right-wing Republican Party currently in power who, once paid by status quo industries, use illegal means to assure higher profits for the most inefficient markets like health insurance, tobacco, energy, and war contractors.

Laggards do not necessarily belong to the dregs of social classes. Educated professionals can easily fit into the laggard segment by their backward, illegal behavior and ideology. For many years, and despite Al Gore’s public information campaigns, Bush Jr. criminally suppressed and distorted information about the looming global warming disaster, as he did regarding invading Iraq. The Laggard neocons placed their financial and ideological interests above public interests and thus held society from advancing forward with solutions to avoid energy disasters and war.

Even though Bush Jr. and the members of his neoconservative Republican Party are well educated professionals, many of them close to the president have committed crimes and others have already been convicted of felonies (Scooter Libby, Tom Noe, Abramoff, Tom Delay, and a long list of others).

Early and Late Majority Consumers

The early and late majority groups enjoy platitudes and preconceived ideas void of any connection to reality. The early and late majority groups make up the bulk of mainstream America. They tend to ignore facts for the sake of what they feel convenient to believe.

”There you have it encapsulated, the McCain campaign for president, an irrational mélange of patriotic swagger and blindness to reality that is proving disturbingly successful with uninformed voters. How else to explain the many millions of Americans who tell pollsters they prefer a continuation of Republican rule when so many of them are losing their homes to foreclosure and the nation is devastated by out-of-control military spending?” – quoted from Robert Sheer’s Smirking Chimp article, McCain’s Warped Worldview.

Despite McCain’s lack of understanding the economy, his own wealth, and the situation in Iraq, as in so many other issues, a surprisingly large number of Americans buy into his policies to stay the same course Bush charted. Even though McSame is too feeble minded to remember how many houses he owns, or the difference between Sunni and Shiite, or the location of Iran, many members of the Majority segments cling to the illusions of Bush Jr.’s heroic presidency and crave for more.

Typically people in these Early or Late Majority segments are afraid of ideas, especially the new and innovative or even scientific. In most of our current forms of American Christianity, and especially in Islam, new ideas are evil and can cause a person to be banished, even imprisoned or executed, for not following the authoritarian or the group’s way of thinking.

In the 1960’s, American writers emphasized individual thought and creativity. It was a time of revolt against preconceived ideas. Politically aware songs, rock ‘n roll, novels, and activism inspired even some of the Majority groups to consider issues like racism and unjustified war.

Now, as usual, the majority segment of Americans have settled into their conforming mold, more willing to follow authoritarian, political laggards and commercial trends. Many novelists write purely escapist, commercial stories that only entertain in order to sell for maximum income. They care little about revealing the lies of powerful laggards. Many song writers and novelists have had a negative effect on today’s culture by closing their eyes and allowing the extremist right-wing laggards to gain political power and to strengthen their position. Popular art can broaden awareness to the Early and Late Majority about political deceptions.

Majority segments even believe the twaddle the so-called experts tell us on television. The Majority segment falls behind in culture and remains merely eager consumers of cheep ideas, just as we consume junk food and poorly designed products so long as they are properly packaged and shine on the surface. We let ourselves become gullible and docile like the characters in some mindless Disney Channel movie.

Conflicts between the Innovators and the Laggards

Ideas can make us dizzy and faint, especially when we are weak minded. They can make us think and thinking can be hard. Ideas can separate us from the crowd, from the group, even from our family. They can turn us into individuals with soul and spirit.

Though, in most churches, ideas are set down on a table like immovable, marble statuettes. Dissent from a group or a culture’s dogma is often considered foolish or even evil as footsteps to hell.

Often innovators and early adopters come into conflict with the laggards who zealously attempt to conserve their status quo by arbitrary means. Henry David Thoreau was imprisoned for his ideas, refusing to pay taxes in opposition to slavery and the Mexican-American War. Christ was strung up for his mystical ideas, defying Roman and Jewish conservative authority. Likewise Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. struggled against the laggards who used violence to protect their power of wealth and convention.

That forbidden fruit of knowledge might set us apart and take us out of the garden where we sense the bliss of ignorance. So we herd our mindless bodies into the mega-churches and pray that the pastor, making millions from his consumer audience, will do all our thinking for us in the name of some vague authority.

As in churches, so too in politics, ideas are the substance that sway the Early and Late Majority to one set of policies and events. With the counsel of Machiavellian political strategist, Turd Blossom (a.k.a. Karl Rove), the Republican Party has been successful in branding their image with the characteristics that Majority segments want to believe. This is how Turd Blossom is now coaching decrepit puppet McSame to increase his popularity.

Turd Blossom has been successful in selling political ideas: Republicans will defend our nation while Democrats are spineless peacenik hippies. Republicans are righteously guided by God while Democrats practice devil worship. Republicans are tough guy patriots who fight for America’s liberty and freedom while Democrats cringe and run away in battle.

The Majority Lops Up Mean Spirited Rhetoric

Republicans have excelled at negative marketing. They practically invented the idea of ‘swift boating’ as a technique to smear an opponent’s character, particularly military veterans. They have been successful in changing the opinions of many Americans about the moral character of John Kerry. They showed that they could run a smear campaign even against a war veteran, Senator Max Cleland, who had lost both legs and an arm. Without any limits in moral discretion, Republicans have applied negative marketing techniques to ideas and people. In doing so, they’ve effectively increased support from many gullible Americans. They employ marketing techniques as a means to their ends. And their ends justify any means. Republicans have proven that by using mean spirited marketing of ideas, they can persuade the Majority segments of voters and even cover up outright crimes.

Not just in commerce but in the world of ideas too our age is putting on a veritable clearance sale. Everything can be had so dirt cheap that one begins to wonder whether in the end anyone will want to make a bid—Soren Kierkegaard.

The 18th century Danish theologian, Kierkegaard, reminds us how cheap ideas have always been offered, like smelly fish in the market. Unfortunately, buyers were too eager in his time. In our consumer society, though, the herding shoppers have proven ravenous even for pet rocks and the most vulgar of ideas.

Laggards Gain Power and Abuse It

Since Bush II, though, the Republican Party has used an especially aggressive mass marketing first in the 2000 election, in which Al Gore actually won the election. But the five conservative Supreme Court Judges (Scalia, Thomas, Rehnquist, O’Connor, and Kennedy) broke laws in a desperate last ditch effort to overturn the 2000 election and give the presidency to a fellow laggard.

To package their crime to the American people, the five felonious Supreme Court Judges relied on what the majority of Americans wanted to hear, that it was according to the law and the constitution, that they had to respect the deadlines, and that they had to follow equal protection. None of these justifications were true or legal, but the American people didn’t know. What they didn’t understand, they comfortably accepted and reclined in deep cushioned Lazy Boy chairs.

In this way, the 43rd presidency was based on a treasonous crime and covered up by the palatable idea for the majority segment of Americans. From this moment on, the Republican Party learned that it could lie and commit crimes in order to carry out their own neoconservative agenda and to hell with the rest of the country, so long as they packaged and presented their policies in traditional, patriotic ideas that the majority segment would gobble up like a cool coca-cola.

The Laggards’ History of Crime

Since Nixon attempted to cover up the Watergate affair, Republicans have refined their illegal activities and used clever marketing techniques to rally support in no matter what they do, even when it’s against the interests of the majority. In those days an independent journalism still had some voice in mainstream media (MSM), at least enough to reveal to the majority segment of the public about Reagan’s Iran-Contra affair. But the Teflon president shielded himself from any involvement by packaging the crime as any pots and pans salesman would. The public wanted to believe that such a nice horse-riding cowboy, in the vague image of a rough-rider action hero, knew nothing of the arms for oil deal. The majority consumer market bought Reagan’s Teflon pans, his defense by ignorance, as a comfortable idea that made them feel good, fitting with their idea of an American president.

When conservatives caught wind of President Clinton’s little sexual affair, they rushed to it like a pack of hungry wolves and sicced their dog, Kenneth Starr, on him, spending close to $100 million in tax funds and sabotaging executive operations for months, just to prove that one of our most successful presidents enjoyed consensual sex with another adult. The affair was legal and a private, personal matter, but when the Republicans presented the behavior as a devilish, unpatriotic sin, they packaged the affair as an idea wrapped up in the puritanical righteousness that excited the otherwise dull cerebral activity of the majority segment. The idea of a president enjoying sex grated against the idea that the majority want to maintain about our president as a super-hero saint.

Understand the Majority Segment to Win

Faced with Republicans’ mean spirited tactics, Democrat politicians react with niceness, believing that if they respond with logic and clarity, they can outmaneuver their opponents. One of the Democratic Party’s Achilles’ heel arises from their assumption that a majority of American voters are sophisticated, smart people.

They aren’t. Most Americans think in generally accepted, preconceived ideas. They live mostly on the surface of reality. They don’t think much. They don’t have time to read books. Guided by commercials, they’re too busy working hard to buy consumer goods.

Unlike Europeans, many Americans attend churches and respect the vague authority of their pastors, preachers, rabbis, or scientologist leaders. They believe what they hear on television, especially the well groomed talking head experts with brightened teeth and mirco-lasered skin. Without a single clue about civil responsibilities, they rely on ‘professional politicians’ to sort out the issues.

Stripped of national identity, denied enforcement of citizenship laws, and disappointed about government in general, Americans hardly bother to vote. Among all industrialized countries, the United States has the lowest voter turnout at 54%. America operates from a dreadfully defunct democracy.

Judging by how the Republicans cover up their crimes, Bush and his friend Turd Blossom, benefit fully from this realistic understanding of the majority market segment. By using traditional, patriotic ideas, Republicans have learned to spin any one of the Bush administration’s deplorable crimes as acts of national interest.

The majority of Americans accept the idea of invading Iraq on falsified letters and other lies (i.e. among many, Downing Street Memo, Joe Wilson affair, etc.). At the time Bush sold the War in Iraq, it was persuasively packaged as part of the country’s mythical patriotic tradition.

Though, other segments of the American market did not buy into the saber rattling rants for war. Many people, the innovators and early adopters, opposed the invasion from the earliest suggestions of it. Among this innovators of ideas were Barrack Obama and hundreds of thousands of other Americans.

Innovators and Early Adopters Change Majority Opinion

Bringing the truth out about the most recent crimes that the Laggards have committed requires patient, committed work as Gore proved regarding global warming. Vincent Bugliosi is cracking open the resistance to truth. First with his book, Betrayal of America, and now with his latest book, The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder, Bugliosi shines light on how the Supreme Court stole the voting process from the American people. And now he shows us how Bush II has committed the most heinous crimes in our history.

In promoting his ideas, though, he has run into brick walls so far as the mainstream media (MSM). Bugliosi holds a stellar reputation as LA county prosecutor, winning 21 murder cases out of 21 trials. That’s a track record that should give Dubya insomnia, assuming the man has a conscience. As a best-selling author of true crime, including Helter Skelter. Bugliosi has been on television talk shows many times before, especially regarding the murder case of Charles Mansion. Nevertheless, talk show hosts refuse to interview him.

“Ideas are far more powerful than guns. We don’t allow our enemies to have guns, why should we allow them to have ideas?”—Joseph Stalin.

Ideas can be frightful to many people. Why the MSM refuses Bugliosi’s voice regarding crimes committed by the neocons remains a mystery.

One way we can understand this media cover-up is simple business. MSM relies entirely on advertisement revenues. To give voice to the frightful truth that President Bush has committed murder through his military dalliances could jeopardize a network’s reputation among viewers and sponsors. So far, all networks seem to be afraid. Yet, on the other hand, controversy often intensifies interest and increases viewers.

We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant facts, foreign ideas, alien philosophies, and competitive values. For a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.—John F. Kennedy

Bugliosi’s logic is solid and questions the essentials of the current American predicament. Bugliosi’s latest book remains on the top of the New York Times best-seller list and has sold well over 100,000 copies in hardcover.

“An invasion of armies can be resisted, but not the invasion of ideas.”—Victor Hugo.

The idea must be uncomfortable to the majority of Americans that, first of all, the Supreme Court stole the election, and, second, that President Bush is actually not a cowboy action super-hero, but actually just a frat-brat whose father had money, connections, and bad seeds.

Despite MSM’s denial of Buglisoi, the innovator and early adopter segments have already bought and read the books. Bugliosi has been extremely well covered in the blogosphere. There’s no turning back. The early adopters are talking right now to the majority groups at the gym, around the water coolers, and at the Foster Freeze in Jackson Hole, Wyoming.

Photo by Tracy O

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