I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the way conservative leaders and pundits can will untruths into “truths” by sheer repetition and how good they are at getting behind their messages.  Whether they’re saying “Democrats are waging a war on religion” or “Government spending is higher than it’s ever been in history” or “Obama is a socialist,” they are on message.  Not just on message.  They are fully scripted.  The buzzwords fall out of their mouths so consistently it’s spooky.  “Obamacare,” “job creators” (sorry, that one makes me laugh every time I hear it), “Obama is out of touch with regular people” (OK, that one’s pretty funny, too).  It’s like they’re telepathically connected to some central information core.

Try as we might, the liberals just can’t get the message machine thing going properly.  We parse too much, we consider too many things and we’re much too eager to express ourselves when we don’t agree with – well – anything.  God knows it’s rare for a liberal to come up with a pithy, sound byte-worthy statement or slogan.  Oh sometimes we hit on a “Yes we can.”  But it’s seldom.  When I came out, I joined the Gay community.  Now I’m part of the Lesbian/Gay/Bisexual/Transgender/Queer community.  (Or the Lesbian/Gay/Transgender/Queer/Questioning community, if you talk to the right people.)  LGBTQQ is all-encompassing, but it’s just blah, blah, blah to most people who aren’t a part of it.  I can almost hear my parents saying “What the hell does that even mean?”  And it’s certainly lacking in any pithiness.  If we were smart, we’d agree on a single new name that identified us all.  Of course it would have to be gender-neutral and non-traditional and couldn’t have ever been identified with any of the subgroups before and could not be offensive to anyone living or dead and —  Oh forget it.

Back to my original point.

This week it hit me.  While I was watching an MSNBC marathon (yes, I’m an MSNBCer) in which Republican after Republican was giving the exact same line on Romney’s economic “plan,” I realized that the key to the whole conservative movement is “The Village of the Damned.”  If you haven’t seen any version of this sci-fi flick, the plot involves children who pop up in towns all over the world who look oddly alike, are neat, well-behaved, only travel in groups and show no empathy, conscience or love toward anyone outside the group.  (Sound like they could trample women’s reproductive rights or fight same-sex marriage or leave the poor to fend for themselves?)  They are also actually telepathically connected to one another and can use that power on outsiders.

Of course the kids don’t just creep out their neighbors and start an exclusive club.  Eventually they actually start tele-killing the people who are different from them.  Oh, they probably say that it’s a smart fiscal move that will increase revenues even while it’s decreasing the base or that “those people” are lazy, non-contributing members of society, anyway.  Mostly, though, it’s just because they can.  Without the telepathy, they’d probably just cut off food stamps and health care.

In the end, the good guys’ only option is to blow the children up to save the world. That would be a perfect Ted Nugent/NRA-style solution, but it wouldn’t work in a civilized society like the one I hope we still live in.  But there else must be something we can do.  What could that be?

Here’s an idea!  Maybe we could just all wake up and vote the weird kids out of office.

Think about it.