The Fox effect

So I was reading this article about the death (for now anyway) of the immigration bill yesterday and was thunderstruck by the following passage:

In a recent poll by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center, 55 percent of the respondents said penalizing employers who hire illegals is the best way to reduce illegal immigration. One in four said more border agents is the best answer, and 7 percent favored more border fences.

When the word "amnesty" was not invoked, 62 percent of Republicans said they favored letting illegal immigrants now in the country obtain citizenship if they have jobs, pass background checks and pay fines. But only 47 percent of Republicans said they favored giving amnesty to illegal immigrants if they met those same conditions.

Democrats, independents and moderate and liberal Republicans were most concerned about jobs, but conservative Republicans were about equally concerned with jobs and terrorism.

The scary thing about Fox, Rush, O’Reilly, et al. is their ability to make certain words or phrases taboo in America. There are some brilliant wordsmiths on the Right, Frank Luntz comes to mind, but the Luntzes of the world need a distribution network. That’s were the Rightwing Noise Machine comes in. They work to pound whatever the talking point of the day is home. They repeat the message over and over again, and they never, ever leave the script.

The estate tax is a perfect example of this phenomenon. Tell people you want to tax dead rich folks and they say great idea. Call the same thing the “death tax” and those same people will demand that Congress repeal the tax. The success of this tactic has stalled and/or killed any number of good ideas; the aforementioned estate tax, national health insurance (“socialized medicine”), environmental responsibility (“global warming is a hoax”) and so on. It appears they have succeeded once again.

This would explain why 62% support what is de facto amnesty, while only 47% support it when it is actaully called amnesty (not to mention why immigration is conflated with terrorism). To a lot of (stupid) people out there, amnesty is the new death tax. The 15% who hold this contradictory view occupy the overlap area of a pro/anti immigration Venn Diagram. That these folks are so confused is not an accident. They drank the Hannity Kool-Aid. What amazes me is that this crap still works.