The London News Review had this bit of unbiased reporting . . . Cheney and Bush: using NLP to hoodwink America . . . while I am certainly not a big fan of Bush and Cheney . . . ultra-not . . . this article is wrong in some very key areas. First, yes, while they are using simple conditioning and boiling things down to fear in many of their speeches (“If you don’t vote for us we will be attacked” and “there will be another attack”), this only indicates a fear appeal, it does not mean they are using neurolinguistic programming (NLP). Yes, NLP, does use anchoring and trigger-responses but so does a lot of basic psychology. The fear appeal currently being used is pretty much the same as used in any time of crisis, manufactured or real. Adoph Hitler made similar speeches and while he was a master of persuasion and influence, he certainly didn’t know anything about NLP.

The author is using faulty inductive reasoning. If one particular method A has similarities to one particular technique B, this does not mean A is B. It just means they have subparts that overlap. Some Asians are Dentists does not mean all Asians are Dentists or that all Dentists are Asian.

Cheney and Bush are scary . . . I will grant you that . . . big time . . . but this does not mean they are masters of NLP, or even if they were, this would not mean that NLP is somehow an evil thing. The line about women must learn NLP is a throw-away implying that a significant number of guys are using it to get woman to part with their panties without their knowledge . . . uh, yes, there are guys teaching that this sort of thing works but that really has nothing to do with Cheney and Bush . . . and there’s a whole lot on this blog that already discusses that anyway.

This was a non-news story and belonged in the 1984, Brave New World, fantasy fiction section . . . albeit, there certainly are folks on Bush and Kerry’s staffs who do know NLP and who have mastered other influence patterns (read Cialdini). Yes, sometimes, these guys may be using NLP . . . but so is everyone else. We all use psychological influence forces whenever we wish to communicate and especially when we endeavor to persuade. This is not in itself a bad thing. It is only a bad thing when we are using these forces incongruently to exploit others . . . Bush’s constant fear appeals are exploitative, yes, the Iraq-Terror links were manipulations and half-truths arranged to deceive us, yes, but that doesn’t make them NLP . . . it just makes them wrong.