WOODWARD IS NOW ON THE OBAMA ENEMIES LIST

Legendary Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward called a senior White House official last week to tell him about an article he had written that was set to appear in last Friday's Post. In the article Woodward was going to call into question - again - Obama's account of how sequestration came about. 

The finger-pointing began during the third presidential debate last fall, on Oct. 22, when President Obama blamed Congress. "The sequester is not something that I've proposed," Obama said. "It is something that Congress has proposed."

The White House chief of staff at the time, Jack Lew, who had been budget director during the negotiations that set up the sequester in 2011, backed up the president two days later.
 
"There was an insistence on the part of Republicans in Congress for there to be some automatic trigger," Lew said while campaigning in Florida. It "was very much rooted in the Republican congressional insistence that there be an automatic measure."

The president and Lew had this wrong. My extensive reporting for my book "The Price of Politics" shows that the automatic spending cuts were initiated by the White House and were the brainchild of Lew and White House congressional relations chief Rob Nabors — probably the foremost experts on budget issues in the senior ranks of the federal government.

Obama personally approved of the plan for Lew and Nabors to propose the sequester to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.). They did so at 2:30 p.m. July 27, 2011, according to interviews with two senior White House aides who were directly involved.

... A majority of Republicans did vote for the Budget Control Act that summer, which included the sequester. Key Republican staffers said they didn’t even initially know what a sequester was — because the concept stemmed from the budget wars of the 1980s, when they were not in government.

At the Feb. 13 Senate Finance Committee hearing on Lew's nomination to become Treasury secretary, Sen. Richard Burr (R-NC) asked Lew about the account in my book:

"Woodward credits you with originating the plan for sequestration. Was he right or wrong?" 

"It’s a little more complicated than that," Lew responded, "and even in his account, it was a little more complicated than that. We were in a negotiation where the failure would have meant the default of the government of the United States."
 
"Did you make the suggestion?" Burr asked.
 
"Well, what I did was said that with all other options closed, we needed to look for an option where we could agree on how to resolve our differences. And we went back to the 1984 plan that Senator [Phil] Gramm and Senator [Warren] Rudman worked on and said that that would be a basis for having a consequence that would be so unacceptable to everyone that we would be able to get action."

In other words, yes.

As Woodward later told Politico, the aide "yelled at me for about a half hour."

 


In addition to the revelation that a White House staffer threatened Woodward, the Politico article offers this mild but nevertheless significant criticism of Obama:

The Woodward reporting has caused the White House spin machine to sputter at a crucial time. The president was running around the country, campaign-style, warning that Republicans were at fault for the massive cuts set to hit Friday. What Obama never says: it was his own staff that proposed sequestration, and the tax hikes he now proposes – aimed at replacing half of the cuts — were never part of that very specific plan. [Obama moved the goalposts.]

The White House instead has, with great success, fudged the facts. The administration has convinced a majority of the country that Republicans are more to blame by emphasizing that Republicans voted for the plan. Which they did — after Obama conceived it.

In addition to his appearance on Wednesday's edition of Morning Joe, Woodward was also a guest of CNN's Wolf Blitzer:

WOLF BLITZER, CNN: You're used to this kind of stuff, but share with our viewers what's going on between you and the White House.

BOB WOODWARD: Well, they're not happy at all and some people kind of, you know, said, look, 'we don't see eye to eye on this.' They never really said, though, afterwards, they've said that this is factually wrong, and they -- and it was said to me in an e-mail by a top --

BLITZER: What was said?

WOODWARD: It was said very clearly, you will regret doing this.

BLITZER: Who sent that e-mail to you?

WOODWARD: Well, I'm not going to say.

BLITZER: Was it a senior person at the White House?

WOODWARD: A very senior person. And just as a matter -- I mean, it makes me very uncomfortable to have the White House telling reporters, 'you're going to regret doing something that you believe in, and even though we don't look at it that way, you do look at it that way.' I think if Barack Obama knew that was part of the communication's strategy, let's hope it's not a strategy, that it's a tactic that somebody's employed, and said, 'Look, we don't go around trying to say to reporters, if you, in an honest way, present something we don't like, that, you know, you're going to regret this.' It's Mickey Mouse.

Woodward has been a hero to liberals for nearly 40 years since he and fellow WaPo legend Carl Bernstein helped take down the Nixon administration during the Watergate scandal.  But even Woodward's icon status is not enough to protect him from the savagery of the Obama Media Group, which has dutifully leaped to Obama's defense and targeted Woodward for treatment normally reserved for Republicans.

The reason for the mockery by the JournoList crowd is that Woodward is ruining the Obama strategy of demonizing the Republicans.  Obama wants all of the blame for sequestration to fall on the House GOP.  Having been taken by surprise that John Boehner and the House GOP have finally chosen to stand and fight rather than cave yet again to Obama, the media have been forced to run interference for Dear Leader in an unexpected way.  

While Obama has been pointing fingers at Republicans, they have been pointing out again and again that sequestration was originally proposed by Team Obama.  Woodward's book and subsequent articles and TV appearances provide the proof that the Republicans are correct.  And Woodward's liberal street cred is so unassailable that when he says the sequester was Obama's idea, people take it very seriously.

On Tuesday of last week, Michael Tomasky of the Daily Beast admitted that sequester was Obama's plan but still managed to blame Republicans for it.

So fine, the White House proposed it. It did so only after months of Republicans publicly demanding huge spending cuts and refusing to consider any revenues and acting as if they were prepared to send the nation into default over spending. In other words, this was the administration's idea in much the way that it's a parent's "idea" to pay ransom to a person who has taken his child hostage. There was a gun to the White House's head, which was the possibility of the country going into default.

On Thursday, Chuck Todd of NBC echoed that sentiment:

CHUCK TODD: So, Republicans, they spent the day yesterday passing around this video of a Montana Democratic senator, Max Baucus, by the way who's up for reelection in 2014, who was saying this about the sequester.

SEN MAX BAUCUS (D-Montana): The President is a part of this, the sequester. The White House recommended it, frankly, back in August of 2011. And, so, now we're feeling the effects of it.

CHUCK TODD: Of all the dumb things Washington does, this "who started it" argument has proven to be one of the dumber ones, especially since we're so close to the actual cuts going into place.

It's easy to see how the sleight-of-hand works.  In his last statement Todd complains about how dumb it is for the politicians to argue over "who started it."  He says it as if he thinks maybe both sides are to blame. In reality, the context makes it clear that he thinks it's really only the Republicans who are dumb.  But undoubtedly if asked, Todd would claim that he wasn't taking sides.

The very next day, Todd provided this little soundbite:

Alright, the President has been using his outside game to sell his position on sequester, talking to local TV affiliates, and there's radio shows, surrounding himself with first responders. Meanwhile Republicans have been playing, well, an inside game, the inside the Beltway game, trying to build support for their position against the cuts and begging the media to say it's Obama that started the sequester, not them.

Woodward's article was published on Friday.  He appeared on TV over the weekend.  And this week suddenly he's a target.  Obama campaign adviser David Plouffe has insinuated that Woodward is a has-been.

Breitbart has a round-up of the various comments made by Obama's apologists about Woodward:

It began with Politico itself, which downplayed the entire incident, even as it acknowledged that Woodward's "play-by-play is basically spot on" with regard to reporting the sequestration. "White House officials are certainly within their rights to yell at any journalist, including Bob Woodward," said official Obama buddies Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei. Allen and VandeHei merely suggested that the battle with Woodward was "a major distraction at a pivotal moment for the president." They added, "Watching and now having interviewed Woodward, it is easy to see why White House officials get worked about him." Poor Obama, having to deal with such issues.

Next, the White House went to its favorite outlet, Buzzfeed, and their favorite BenSmithing reporter, Ben Smith, to leak the source of the Woodward "regret" email. It’s clear why they did it – Smith spun the entire incident for the White House. After announcing that the email came from Gene Sperling, director of the White House Economic Council, he proceeded to pretend that the threat email wasn't a threat email at all – actually, Woodward was making a rookie mistake by misinterpreting a kindly tip as a threat: "Officials often threaten reporters that they will 'regret' printing something that is untrue, but Woodward took the remark as a threat." Nothing to see here. Move along. Just to clarify, Smith later added via Twitter, "Am I crazy to read 'regret' here as 'regret being wrong'? This is something flacks yell at reporters a lot."

That meme was picked up by the White House's favorite palace guards, including Dave Weigel at Slate (he retweeted Smith, tweeted, "Theory: Woodward is trolling," then added via retweet that the whole situation was "boring"); BuzzFeed’s Andrew Kaczynski, who mockingly tweeted, "Every reporter who deals with flacks/campaign advisors/politicos/ on a daily basis finds that less than threatening"; Justin Green, who edits David Frum's blog at The Daily Beast, tweeted, "I rarely rarely report, and I've had flacks say worse. Not that rare"; Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic tweeted, "As a reporter, I don't think this was a threat"; Dylan Byers of Politico tweeted, "tweets, I'm no Woodward but broadcast/cable TV PR reps use that 'regret' tactic a lot"; Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo tweeted, "Who goes birther first, Scalia or Woodward?" The messaging was universal from the leftist Obama-supporting media: Woodward hadn't been threatened, and was an amateur or a crazy old coot to think he was being threatened. Matt Yglesias of Slate summed up the general Palace Guard Media take: "Woodward's managed to make me suspect Nixon got a raw deal."

If I had to guess, I would say that Sperling's hostility and the threats he made are proof that he was one of Woodward's original sources (keeping in mind that Woodward has steadfastly tried to protect the names of his sources for the book).  It would make sense that Sperling is feeling quite a bit of pressure from inside the White House if he was a source.  That kind of thing would make a man start issuing threats to the person he blames for his predicament.

Notice the common theme in the above tweets.  Rather than focusing on the spectacle of a White House staffer issuing threats of any kind to a legendary investigative journalist who had been given access to the White House precisely because of his impeccable reputation, the JournoList brat pack claims that Woodward is crying wolf and that the "threat" was really just a figure of speech and not really "threatening" at all.  That, of course, completely (and deliberately) misses the point.

It's bad enough that Team Obama has long waged a cold war against Fox News.  But when a liberal icon like Bob Woodward finds himself on the enemies list simply for accurately reporting the facts, the increasing paranoia of Obama and his minions becomes impossible to dismiss.  And Woodward isn't the only one.  Lanny Davis, another solid liberal and Clintonista, has now come forward to say that the White House threatened the Washington Times because of columns written by Davis.

Keep in mind that these same propaganda units of the Obama Media Group went so far as to promote the notion that Bill and Hillary Clinton were "racists" prior to the 2008 South Carolina Democrat primary.  So naturally even well-known liberals in the media are not immune from attacks if they dare speak truth to power with regards to the Dear Leader in the White House.

As Juan Williams, yet another liberal, stated recently:

"I always thought it was the Archie Bunkers of the world, the right-wingers of world, who were more resistant and more closed-minded about hearing the other side ... In fact, what I have learned is, in a very painful way — and I can open this shirt and show you the scars and the knife wounds — is that it is big media institutions who are identifiably more liberal to left-leaning who will shut you down, stab you and kill you, fire you, if they perceive that you are not telling the story in the way that they want it told." 

Meanwhile, the mockery of Woodward in the Obama Media Group continues today.  As you can see in the clip below, Obama's Kool-aid intoxicated defenders are deliberately missing the point. It's not about Woodward being "scared" of the "little White House aide."  Is anybody really saying that Woodward is in actual physical danger?  No, of course not.  This is about a White House that is panicking and issuing threats, verbally as well as in writing.  Who cares whether the threats are credible?  The fact is, threats are being made by this administration because it's credibility is being shredded and The Narrative is being disrupted!

 

SO GOD MADE A FARMER

On a night when Twitter crushed Facebook and Google+ in the social media free-for-all, this was my favorite moment of the entire Super Bowl.  The commercial that stood out to most viewers and received the most online buzz didn’t have models, nerds, babies, or rapid-fire jump cuts, but it did celebrate our nation's agricultural heritage and the virtues found within the culture.  AdWeek declared it to be the best Super Bowl ad.  

By combining powerful images with the poetry of the late Paul Harvey the commercial provided viewers with an emotionally satisfying two minutes of advertising.  The beauty of the ad all but eclipsed the product itself.  But....who cares!?

Chrysler had the inspired idea to make two minutes of his speech at a 1978 Future Farmers of America convention into the soundtrack for an ad for the Ram truck while affecting still photos of American farm life scrolled on the screen.

The spot stuck out for how thoroughly un–Super Bowl it was. It’s a wonder that CBS didn’t refuse to air it on grounds that it wasn’t appropriate for the occasion. It was simple. It was quiet. It was thoughtful. It was eloquent. It was everything that our celebrity-soaked pop culture, which dominates Super Bowl Sunday almost as much as football does, is not.

All the fantastic glitz and sometimes hilarious vulgarity that define the events around the Super Bowl — the halftime shows and the ads — can’t make up for a desperate poverty of expression. No one has anything to say and, in any case, wouldn’t know how to say it. Not Paul Harvey. His speech is a little gem of literary craftsmanship. It shows that words still retain the power to move us, even in a relentlessly visual age driven from distraction to distraction.

Alexis Madrigal

Julio Varela

Of course, the Left didn't miss an opportunity to kick dirt on the ad.  For city-slickers Alexis Madrigal of The Atlantic and Julio Varela of NBCLatino there were simply too many white folks represented in the depiction of rural America.  And one of MSNBC's top in-house proglodyte race hustlers, Melissa Harris-Perry, took the opportunity to get her social justice on.  I'm sure there were plenty of atheists who howled at the moon because of the repeated use of the word GOD.  This is to be expected since cranks and trolls will always be cranky and trollish.

I think part of the reason progs felt the need to respond was the effectiveness of the ad.  Mary Katherine Ham categorizes it as sweet:

There are four kinds of Super Bowl ads. Shock ads (encompassing both sexy and gross-out shock), Joke ads, Stunt casting ads, and Sweet ads. They sometimes overlap– gross-out Shock + Joke (the Doritos oeuvre) or Joke + Stunt casting, etc. It’s Shock, Joke, and Stunt that get the pre-game coverage, with the networks threatening to ban certain ads and companies happily riding the wave of publicity (the Go Daddy strategy).

But I’d argue it’s the Sweet ads that win the day. One of the few memorable ads of the last several years is the VW Darth Vader ad, in which a mid-class German sedan becomes a way to fulfill your six-year-old’s childhood fantasy. One of the best Super Bowl ads of all time is the Coca-Cola jersey toss. As the Shock, Joke, and Stunt ads up the ante every year, requiring more and more shocks, laughs, or stars to impress, Sweet ads gain a unique ability to cut through the noise.

Last night, you saw that power most notably in the Dodge Farmer ad. I was watching the Super Bowl with a group of 30-something couples, and the place went silent as Paul Harvey’s beautifully resonant, retro voiceover came on. Dodge understood its customers, respected rural America (and those who feel an affinity for it), and connected with them on a deep, emotional level.

Here is the speech in its original form as delivered by Harvey in 1978:


And on the eighth day, God looked down on his planned paradise and said I need a caretaker- So God made a farmer.

God said I need somebody willing to get up before dawn, milk the cows, work all day in the field, milk cows again, eat supper then go to town and stay past midnight at a meeting of the school board – So God made a farmer.

I need somebody with arms strong enough to wrestle a calf and yet gentle enough to deliver his own grandchild; somebody to call hogs, tame cantankerous machinery, come home hungry, have to await lunch until his wife's done feeding visiting ladies, then tell the ladies to be sure and come back real soon, and mean it - So God made a farmer.

God said I need somebody willing to sit up all night with a newborn colt, and watch it die, then dry his eyes and say maybe next year. I need somebody who can shape an axe handle from a persimmon sprout, shoe a horse with a hunk of car tire, who can make a harness out of hay wire, feed sacks and shoe straps, who at planting time and harvest season will finish his forty hour week by Tuesday noon and then, paining from tractor back, will put in another 72 hours – So God made a farmer.

God had to have somebody willing to ride the ruts at double speed to get the hay in ahead of the rain, and yet stop in midfield and race to help when he sees first smoke from a neighbor's place - So God made a farmer.

God said I need somebody strong enough to clear trees and heave bales, yet gentle enough to wean lambs and pigs and tend to pink combed pullets; who will stop his mower for an hour to splint the broken leg of a meadowlark.

It had to be somebody who’d plow deep and straight and not cut corners; somebody to seed, weed, feed, breed, and rake and disk and plow and plant and tie the fleece and strain the milk and replenish the self-feeder and finish a hard week’s work with a five-mile drive to church.

Somebody who would bale a family together with the soft, strong bonds of sharing; who would laugh and then sigh, and then reply with smiling eyes when his son says he want to spend his life doing what dad does...

So God made a farmer.

REDSTATE'S ERICK ERICKSON < ANDREA SAUL

So Romney press secretary Andrea Saul made a mistake while responding to a question about the latest outrageous ad put out by an Obama superpac in which Mitt Romney is essentially accused of killing a woman. 

For the record, I think that Andrea Saul should lose her job over it.  Or at least be reassigned.  She should have handled the response much better and if this is where her head's at, then she needs to go.

Having said that, however, I find Erickson's ridiculous response to her mistake to be even more damaging to the Romney campaign.

Then the Romney campaign decided to sabotage itself with a mind numbingly bit of spin that may mark the day the Romney campaign died.  

Are you kidding me?  

Yes, Saul stepped on the message and failed to maximize the blowback to Bill Burton's shameless ad.  But in my opinion the embarrassing hysteria demonstrated by Erickson is so over the top that it can only be understood as a veiled threat to withhold support for Romney, which can only help Obama get reelected. Talk about sabotage and giving aide and comfort to the enemy! It's almost as if Erickson is HOPING it's true. I would think that Erickson would be a little more concerned about his OWN credibility.  He's the one playing Obama's game...

Why is Erickson's statement worse than Saul's gaffe?  Because it's based on the false premise that Conservatives would and should stay home on election day because of dissatisfaction with Romney.  Or at least withhold their support for him and focus on other races.  The fact is that it's every Conservative's duty to support the only man who is in the running to defeat Barack Obama.  All of this "Ooo, please Mitt Romney, say something that will 'inspire' us because otherwise we are just incapable of coming up with any reason to vote if you don't" sentiment is pointless, dishonest and harmful to the effort to get regime change in November.  The people who think like this should be ashamed of themselves.

Furthermore, it plays right into the hands of the Dim-o-crats, far more than anything Saul said.  They would love for Republicans to fight each other rather than fighting together against Obama and the Dims.  So even hinting that "the base" (whatever that means) would not fully support the GOP nominee only encourages the Dims to find other ways to create division.

So I unfollowed Erickson on Twitter earlier and I now award him the Private William Hudson Award for his pathetic whining and chicken-little attitude (if not actual sabotage) in the face of adversity.

 

TWITTER AS TEACH-IN: MAXIMIZING THE POTENTIAL OF SOCIAL MEDIA

It should be quite obvious from the very title of this blog that I'm an advocate for appropriating the language of the New Left as a way of highlighting the fact that in many areas of our culture they themselves long ago became the New Reactionary Establishment and that the methods they used as young people in the 1960s was not unique or exclusive to them and can be used to bring them down in their turn.

In furtherance of this goal, I will now present my case for the Conservative "teach-in" for which I think Twitter is a particularly useful social media tool.

The essential purpose of a teach-in is to provide information and raise awareness about subjects that the mainstream media and/or academia either refuse to cover at all or cover with such outrageous subjectivity that the reporting cannot be trusted.  The teach-in is, therefore, an alternative method of educating people on certain issues that are uncomfortable or even damaging to the Establishment.

As I have stated on more than one occasion the Establishment in academia, the news media and Hollywood entertainment is in the business of promoting and, when necessary, protecting a narrative that is at best "liberal" in outlook and frequently full-fledged Leftist in ideology. To promote and protect the narrative means making highly subjective decisions as to which news stories will be covered and how they are covered, as well as what constitutes "normal" and what constitutes "fringe" activity and thought. 

For instance, the media narrative regarding high-profile Conservative women is that they are either ignorant, crazy, racist or frequently all the above.  "Liberal" women, on the other hand, are well-meaning, intelligent and perfectly "PC" in their thinking.  Understanding the often extreme bias of the Establishment media will cause a thinking person to question the validity of the content produced by so-called "journalists" who harbor such bias.  The same is true of the tenured radicals who constitute the Academic Establishment in our schools and on college campuses across the country.  It's also true of the Left-wing propagandists in Hollywood who churn out one travesty after another in an effort to herd the people into a certain politically correct point of view.

The first major teach-in was organized by Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor on March 24–25, 1965. The event was attended by about 3,500 (including student radicals/future domestic terrorists Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn) and consisted of debates, lectures, movies, and musical events aimed at protesting Lyndon Johnson's escalation of the war in Vietnam.  Similar events were held in New York City at Columbia University, in Washington D.C. and the largest of them all, in Berkeley at the University of California.

It was at these events and others like them that students, faculty members and others became radicalized and were given the talking points they would need to recruit their peers into the movement. Because they mostly occurred on college campuses and included faculty participation, the indoctrination sessions maintained a veneer of intellectualism and academic propriety that afforded the movement a significant measure of credibility.  They helped to discredit the Johnson administration to the point where he eventually refused to run for a second full term.

I.F. Stone (right) at the UC-Berkeley Vietnam Day teach-in, May 1965

So now here we are in 2012, faced with a Democrat in the White House whose policies have failed and whose extreme Left-wing ideological viewpoint is hostile to the cherished tradition of American exceptionalism.  He has proven willing to govern by fiat whenever the Legislative or Judicial branch does not kowtow to his demands.  He cannot be trusted to play by the rules since he is a product of both the corrupt Chicago Democrat political machine and an upbringing that was corrupted by Marxist anti-Americanism.  He is motivated by bitterness, resentment and all the negative aspects of Marxist ideology.

And yet while the 2008 Democrat primaries offered glimpses of the real Barack Obama (mostly because Hillary Clinton, an Alinsky afficionado herself, was perfectly aware of it and used it), thanks to the remarkable (and deplorable) efforts of the Establishment Media it was effectively glossed over, minimized and occasionally defended to the point where it was buried beneath an avalanche of bogus "hopey changey" rhetoric designed to bamboozle the middle class. 

Glenn Beck recognized what was going on and was disturbed by it.  On his daily show on FNC he would conduct what I would call teach-ins.  The famous chalkboard sessions are classics and even though he is no longer on FNC they still aggravate the Left to a remarkable degree.

The real reason the Left despises Beck so much is not because he's a "crazy bigot" or "racist" but because they know that he was exposing them in ways that they never thought anybody in the media would dare to do.  Why would the Left assume that nobody would dare to expose the inner workings of the Democrat Party and it's Left-wing agenda?  It's because they assumed that the tactics of marginalizing, ridiculing and demonizing individuals or organizations that threaten the narrative had put the fear of God (or whatever) into them so that they'd never dare try it.  

It's intimidation, pure and simple and it's because of the educational efforts of Glenn Beck and a handful of others that we now know that there's a word for it: Alinsky.  The danger of being portrayed as extreme, unstable, ridiculous or hateful by the media is part of a strategy promoted by the late Saul Alinsky.
 

Glenn Beck's chalkboard sessions functioned as teach-ins

Of course, Alinsky didn't invent any of the tactics that are associated with his name.  They are as old as politics and culture itself.  What he DID do, however, is to capture and crystallize the techniques and the mindset behind them in an easily-digestible book that could be passed around from person to person among impressionable, naive baby-boomers who were anxious to find new ways to urinate on the legacy for which their parents, the Greatest Generation, had worked so hard and sacrificed so much to provide them. 

Nowadays, we don't have to literally pass a book hand to hand among our circle of friends.  We have the internet and social media. Which brings me back to Twitter.

THE VALUE AND IMPORTANCE OF RETWEETING

When a new tweet lands in your timeline, there are several things you can do with it.  You can read it, obviously.  You can read it and look at the attached article, photo or video.  Then you can favorite it, which can be seen by the person who originally tweeted it and also by anybody else who “expands” the tweet.  This is all well and good.  Certainly the tweeter would like to see the appreciation or at least acknowledgment that the tweet was noticed.  You can reply to the tweet which, depending on whether or not the tweet was appreciated and agreed with or unappreciated and objected to, could lead to further interaction and thus additional tweets. 

Maximizing means doing it all! But especially ReTweet!

But if you value the tweet and whatever it contains then the best thing you can do is to RETWEET IT!  There’s a reason why the bio blurbs of well-known tweeters often indicate that a “retweet does not necessarily mean endorsement.”  It's because a retweet has intrinsic value.  In other words, when a tweet is retweeted it’s usually a sign of approval by the retweeter.  But it could also mean that it is not appreciated to such a degree that the person thinks his/her followers should see it for themselves.  However the “retweet” feature is used there is no disputing that it is the single most effective way to utilize twitter.

For instance, if you have 1,000 followers and each of your followers also has 1,000 followers of their own, just think of the impact your great tweet can have when all of your followers and all of their followers ect. retweet it.  The more people that see what you’ve tweeted the more impact it can have.  If you merely “favorite” it then that’s essentially an interaction between two people, you and the person you follow.  If you reply to the tweet then it is between you, the person you follow and whoever might follow both of you or just happens to spot it in their timeline.  But when you retweet you are theoretically sharing it with every single one of your 1,000 followers, which then gives them an opportunity to share it with all of theirs.  Think of the ripple effect when you drop a pepple into the water.  This is the principle behind a video going “viral” on the internet.  It’s not merely the number of people who stumble across the video by chance; it’s how many times the video is shared with others via Facebook, Twitter, ect.  

And the best thing about all of this is that it never has to be simply one thing or another.  You can do “all the above” for any tweet.  You can favorite a tweet, retweet it and also reply to it directly.  That would be a case of maximizing the effectiveness of the tweet.

Of course, the impact of the tweet is also tied to how many followers a person has.  If you have only 50 followers and they mostly have a similar number of followers then the impact will be less than if you have 3,050 followers and many of them also have large followings.  Top celebrities and athletes have the most followers and it can be hundreds of thousands.  Writers, journalists, politicians and others who have some independent way of gathering followers will also have considerable numbers of followers.  The average anonymous internet user will never have those kinds of eye-popping numbers. But I know from my own experience that it is possible to build up a nice-sized number of followers by maximizing your tweets. 

And how does one maximize a tweet?  Make it a tweet that people will find interesting enough to share with others.  It could be a quote, a witty observation, a photo, a video or a useful, instructive article.  If you produce a tweet that can entertain and/or inform others then you will have produced a tweet that will be retweeted, possibly many times.  This should be everybody's goal because anybody can do it.  Read articles online and then tweet them to your followers.  If somebody you follow tweets an article, read it and then RETWEET IT!  The same goes with humorous photos, campaign ad videos...anything that helps raise awareness, promotes solidarity or otherwise helps the cause. 

The more times your tweet gets retweeted the more followers you will have.  People will follow someone whom they believe will provide further excellent tweets. And these followers will be like-minded and serious about helping the cause as well.  And now you are building a useful and supportive online community.  Solidarity, like knowledge, facilitates praxis, which is an old Greek word that simply means "the practice of" or "action."  And in this election year the ultimate praxis is to argue with the other side, to promote our views, to motivate the electorate to get out and vote; all of which - hopefully - will result in regime change in November.

IT IS ESSENTIAL THAT YOU KNOW EXACTLY WHAT YOU ARE DEALING WITH!