I just spent about an hour writing and rewriting, crumpling the virtual notepad pages, a post about all sorts of loosely connected thing. I'm supposed to painting the house today, so I'm pretty addle-brained. One idea taking shape was about how we implicitly trust facts that are reported to us by people who agree with us on other issues, and we don't demand proof to back up their statements. This is good and bad, like so many other things. With that in mind, I'm going to post without much to explain myself. I'm going to let those of you who trust my posts digest them at your leisure.
And, since I can't manage to write a coherent paragraph (see above), I'm just going to throw out some statements and we can come back to any that seem worth developing.
The Swift Boat Vets controversy is ugly and disgusting. When disgruntled and disingenuous people get together to cast aspersions based on lies, half-truths and opinions, it should not be treated as news. We shouldn't even be talking about it.
The so-called mainstream media has been emasculated by charges of liberal bias, to the point of ineffectualness. While it's traditionally been conservatives who disparage liberals for "moral relativism" and the death of the truth, from my vantage point one side is benefiting much more from the inability of the press to say something is a lie when, in fact, it is a lie. The Daily Show, typically, distills this sentiment into a
simple segment.
How long before political junkies from opposite sides of the ideological spectrum can't even talk to each other anymore because they live in completely different worlds where 95% of the information they receive supports only their worldview? Luckily for the country these people are a tiny minority.
Time to paint. Anything pique your interest?
Subscribe to A Cry for Help
I’ve been very critical of the Swift Vets’ attacks on Sen. Kerry but I have yet to find anyone on the left willing to debunk or condemn some of the more over-the-top allegations in the MoveOn commercials or, indeed, in Michael Moore’s “please help make me fatter” conspiracy flicks. (I think that’s the world’s longest run on sentence…)
It’s hard to have sympathy on either candidate because they’ve both used surrogates to do their dirty work. And, that’s just fine with me. This is America and MoveOn and the Swiftvets both have a right to be heard. If Kerry or Bush take issue with an ad, then let them counter it with one of their own.
Negative ads have always been a part of the American political process and no campaign that includes Democrats and Republicans is ever going to be ‘positive’.
So we’d better just deal with it. As Mr Dooley said, “Politics ain’t beanbag”
I’m trying to remember which MoveOn.org ad that was full of people with a big enough chip on their shoulder that they’d lie about something from 30 years ago and also got the left-wing pundits in such a tizzy of faux-outrage that they forced coverage of the ad on news programs and in the papers…
Someone said the following about pundits, but I think it’s true of these issue-ad people too: those on the left are liberal, but not necessarily Democrats; those on the right are Republicans before they are conservatives.