Help me find a Scott Adams blog post/quote

April 11, 2007 4:41 PM

Need info regarding a past blog post to dilbertblog.typepad.com by Scott Adams of Dilbert fame.

I was discussing with a friend a blog post I read a while back on Scott Adams' blog. He had mentioned that he had been consulted by a political party to help them write a slogan or catch-phrase or sound bite for them to use to bury/overshadow some other negative item that had come out recently. He said he had come up with one, and that it was used heavily, and was present across a great deal of media for a number of days. He went on to suggest that most of his readers would have heard or read the slogan. We would be familiar with it. He was cryptic however, and wouldn't give details.

My friend and I wanted to investigate, and see if we could figure out what the slogan or whatever was. The problem is, I can't find any reference to the original post. The archive on the site doesn't go back far enough, best I can tell. I also couldn't find anything on the web about other people discussing his claim and trying to figure out what it was.

At this point, I'd just be happy to be able to read the original post to get me headed in the right direction trying to discover the slogan.

Problem is, do I search for slogan, sound byte, sound bIte, media byte, scott adams, dilbert, political party, politics, etc... I been doing it all. I've even spent the last hour on the Wayback Machine trying to find the post with no luck (that doesn't mean it isn't there) I'm out of ideas. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.

posted by gummo to computers & internet (5 comments total)

Posts on Scott's blog sometimes disappear into the abyss, never to be seen again. I have noticed this because I am a somewhat regular reader, and sometimes a post is in my RSS reader, but no longer on the weblog.

This happened, for example, when Scott made some rather crude jokes right after the death of Steve Irwin. I was outraged (and stopped reading for months after), and I guess a lot of other people were, because the post was already gone from his site by the time I looked for it.

Which leads me to this suggestion: Add his RSS feed to a popular online RSS reader, set the reader to show you all posts (not just unread ones), and see how far the history goes back.

You may also try searching on Google.
posted by qvtqht at 6:18 PM on April 11, 2007

I'm familiar with the anecdote you mention, but I'm not absolutely certain it's from Scott Adams.
posted by adamwolf at 6:52 PM on April 11, 2007

Definitely Scott Adams, as I remember it myself. Just scouring my Google Reader archives now.
posted by joshnunn at 1:00 AM on April 14, 2007

October 11th 2006, I think. It's gone now, but I've 'shared' the item at joshnunn's shared items. The post is long and rambly, so if you want to skip ahead, it's in three paragraphs about half way through:

Several years ago I was approached by some advisors for people in high places. I can’t give you the details of this story, or even tell you why I can’t give you the details. But the gist of it was that they needed help squelching some bad ideas that had taken hold in the public consciousness. They thought humor might be one part of the solution, and they were Dilbert fans, so they tracked me down. The challenge was that the bad ideas sounded terrific to the uninformed person. You couldn’t kill these particular bad ideas with logic because the arguments against them would be too complicated. You had to go in through the back door.

I suggested a few cleverly designed, hypnosis-inspired phrases that were the linguistic equivalent of Kung Fu. They were simple (that’s my specialty), and once you heard these phrases, they made any competing ideas seem frankly stupid. Think of Johnny Cochran’s famous refrain “If the glove doesn’t fit, you must acquit.” In my opinion, O.J. is a free man largely because of that phrase. My phrases worked the same way.

The people in high places tried my phrases. The phrases became world headlines the next day. I could tune the TV to any news channel and hear my words coming out of pundits’ mouths. The phrases smothered the competing ideas and just maybe changed the course of world events. (One can never know for sure.)

Can't say for sure he wasn't talking out his ass though.
posted by joshnunn at 1:24 AM on April 14, 2007

Or Google's cached copy.
posted by joshnunn at 1:29 AM on April 14, 2007