FIST | 2005-12-11
I have had amateur radio license since I was twelve years old. Back then amateur or "ham" radio was almost entirely in morse code unless you had a lot more money than a twelve-year-old working on a brick plant had on hand.
My maternal uncles and granfather were all professional telegraphers for the railroad. When you do code a lot you begin to recognize the other person by his "fist." Just as each person writes differently from other people, each person hits the code key a little diferently. Each of my uncles could tell if the signal he was getting was coming from another member of the family. Since the person tapping out railroad code seldom identifies himself-- there is no station identification -- this was useful.
I have often wondered if my practice in recognizing morse code "fists" helped me in recognizing when my specific ideas were taking hold in political commentary. I have an ability to recognize that I was the reason a particular comment or approach was used on national television or on radio.
This is a hell of an advantage. One of the big problems with allocating the giant sums of money companies spend on advertising is being able to tell WHICH high-priced advertisement is bringing in the business. I don't have that problem.
So I am invaluable to YOU. I can tell what is working better than the most expensive advertising department. When I was in my teens, the television set often needed adjustments to get a good picture. You know how much trouble people have today in adjusting their computers and back then people would try and try and just make the picture worse, so most TVs were not tuned right or had any of a dozen other problems and people would just leave them taht way.
I would just walk in the door, see the problem, and fix it. My family would call me in to fix anything wrong. Never once did I fail to spot exactly what was wrong with a quick look. I'd turn the right knob and the picture would be maxed.
This ability is not easy to describe. It is like the expert mechanic who asks you to start up the engine and then tells you exactly what is wrong with your car. I am an expert mechanic in my field. And I can't explain it, any more than an expert auto mechanic could.
Respectable conservatives are getting just a little nastier and more effective all the time. The progress is slow and probably only noticable to me.
I used to be big time and I used to be a regular source on real, long-term, POWER strategy. I was also on the outside of respectability, just on the edge, so people USED my stuff in their own wayand remained INSIDE respectability. After decades of this you get an uncanny ability to tell the "fist" of your own work.
And they STILL use my stuff. A lot of this is YOUR work.
You would be astonished if you realized how short the chain of ideas is. You are hypnotized by the fact taht Big Names only QUOTE big names. But something good gets repeated in South Carolina and gets repeated elsewhere and, if it is an idea somebody can USE, which is what I got paid for, it ends up in New York and Washington with somebody who needs ideas to make a living.
It is a real shame you do not realize how effective you are the way I do.
On The Washington Gang they were discussing the choosing the next Face of CBS News after Cronkite and Rather.
Cal Thomas just said, "It doesn't matter. It'll just be another standard and packaged liberal with standard opinions."
And then he QUIT.
Full stop.
No more comments.
It hit the other commentators like a bomb.
No respectable conservative before ever knew how to drop a bomb like that and QUIT.
That is pure Whitakerism.
They kept trying to get more comment out of him and he just kept saying what he had said. The last thing in the world a professional commentator wants to be told is that everything he says is predictable and standard, and Thomas just left it at that.
Like Shari's one-sentence statement we discussed below, that statement caused our enemies, including the respectable conservatives, more grief than any five hundred page to me by William Buckley.
Congratulations, gang. We won one.