Trafficking in lies

I happened on this compendium of wingnut lies about President Barack Obama.

In our debased media culture, as filled with bullshit as Pakistan's with secret right-wing "knowledge" and conspiracy theories, conservatives are so credulous and incapable of critical thinking that they will believe anything bad about their domestic political adversaries. Anything. It doesn't matter if a rumor calls on them to believe that the duly elected President of the United States, who by all appearances is a tepid centrist, wants to destroy the very political system that chose him for the top office!

Gray lady catches up

Snopes gets an overdue star turn in the New York Times. It's immensely amusing to me that the Mikkelsons understand the foundational and factual role of journalism when so many of their so-called professional competitors do not. Ironically (itself used ironically), Snopes is profitable.

This also amused me:

“[E]ven when there were Republicans in the White House, the mail was still overwhelmingly anti-liberal,” Mr. Mikkelson said.

Wingnuts really, really want their beliefs to be true - even if they're visibly not. Pointing out to them that they're wrong will get you accused of liberal bias. If you're a journalist who's not regularly accused of having a liberal bias, you're probably a right-wing propagandist.

The magic lie

The Velvet Revolution began with a lie, so the New York Times says:

On Tuesday, thousands of Czechs marched through the streets here, to the sound of wailing sirens and the growls of police dogs, eerily replicating a nonviolent student march on Nov. 17, 1989, in which the police rounded on demonstrators and rumors spread that a 19-year-old university student named Martin Smid had been brutally killed. Scores had indeed been violently beaten. But no one, in fact, had died.

...

“Until that day, there had been a deal between the Communist regime and the people: ‘You shut up and we will take care of you,’ ” [Jan Urban] said. “But the moment people had the impression that their kids were being killed, the deal was off. As a journalist, I am ashamed of the lie because it was a professional blunder. But I have no regrets because it helped bring four decades of Communism to an end.”

Wingnuts are looking everywhere for the lie that will bring liberalism down. They send around emails that Snopes refutes but could never kill off in the fevered fear-driven conservative imagination. None of the lies they allege that Barack Obama has told are cited. They are all bullshit intended to appeal to people who will eagerly believe them without proof.

Wingnuts see themselves as heroic. They see themselves as guardians of the values that made the past so much better than the present. But it's fear that drives them.

The Times gets the interpretation of the story wrong. A single lie, no matter how motivating, won't have a butterfly effect on a political system. The Czechs and Slovaks - like all people in the Soviet Bloc - had already known for decades that communism was a system of lies. Their countervailing lie may well have broken the camel's back, but history had already prepared them to change. The police brutality alone might well have been enough.

Wingnuts who hope their lies will bring a reactionary sea change in America make four characteristic mistakes:

• The U.S. is badly polarized (thanks to them), but it is not prepared for a mass movement to their side. Maybe they want another civil war, some in order to "correct" the results of the first.
• Wingnuts are targeting their lies at their base, even though they think they're targeting people they might persuade.
• The sheer volume of wingnut lies and deceits is so large that they have no credibility left. They "know" that they're righteous - God tells 'em, I guess - but we perceive them as habitual liars who are unconcerned with truth and only care about attaining the power that the Bushists so thoroughly abused.
• The Velvet Revolution was a liberal revolution, not a conservative one. The fact that wingnuts can't tell the difference between liberalism and the political views farther left doesn't mean there's no difference.

Update (11/25): Digby smacks Rush on this.

Why don't liberals fall for glurge?

What the hell is glurge, anyway? Snopes says this. My experience is that glurge never comes from liberals. Instead, conservatives forward it on, breathlessly attesting to its truth. Sometimes I write them back (somewhere on the Internet someone is wrong!), and they often express their first skepticism at my debunking. Their friend who sent it to them checked it out. I guess they miss the handy link to real skepticism that I provide.

It's not just glurge; it's also warnings about the danger of gang wannabes following you home and putting your lights out if you flash your headlights to get them to turn theirs on. Or it's warnings of danger to women, who might be taken advantage of somewhere in an unnamed city. No matter how often you point them to Snopes.com, even after it becomes part of their vocabulary, their first impulse is to believe.

Liberals aren't taken in by these just-so stories, or so it seems to me. I'm sure we have our blind spots, too; they just aren't so glaring.

I think that an elemental conservatism is the default response of a social animal habituated to a tribal environment. The reflex to believe what one's prejudice shouts loud and clear is socially useful to keep the tribe united.

Liberals have a different more modern approach. We engage our brains to test our beliefs. This makes us amenable to learning, liberal arts, and the compromises of democratic government.

Conservatives once had some of these characteristics, too, but they've given them over. I think it happened about the time the Wall Street Journal started common cause between its core readers, the wealthies, and the fundies it thought it could co-opt to the great Bushist cause of obtaining more money for the already rich and powerful.

Of the acreage, by the acreage, for the acreage

This is bar none the stupidest thing I've seen this year among items pretending to be smart. There's a reason no one outside the garment district has ever heard of Hemline school of law.

Driving around Cades Cove, Tennessee, I used to enjoy seeing startled woodchucks bolt for their dens. Now I have them living in my back yard, where they're still likely to bolt for the shelter of the nearest juniper in response to any unusual noise. I suspect that Vermont Woodchuck, over amid the Beavis and Butt-head entertainment of New England Republican (we're laughing at you guys, not with you), may wish he had a hole to bolt to:

Professor Joseph Olson of Hemline University School of Law St. Paul, Minnesota points out some interesting facts concerning the Presidential election...

Here's the Preamble to the Constitution, as taught at this non-existent law school:

We the Acres of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Land Mass, establish Empty Space, insure domestic Fatuity, provide for the common sagebrush, promote the general Lack of Human contact, and secure the Blessings of Wide Open Spaces to no one and no one at all, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of Sparsely Populated Counties.

Acres and counties vote Republican because, you know, they're dumb as dirt. Look for this report on Fox, if it hasn't been there already.

Oh, by the way, 'Chuckie has been Snopesed. Open mouth, then engage brain. If ever. This is why he's a conservative.

(Hamline University? Yeah, that's real.)

What we're up against

A couple of weeks ago, a guy I work with forwarded me an email. He's a smart guy, cynical even, but he believed what it said after removal of the zillion-point type:

NBA OR NFL?
VERY SURPRISING ANSWER BELOW

36
Have been accused of spousal abuse

7
Have been arrested for fraud

19
Have been accused of writing bad checks

117
Have directly or indirectly bankrupted at least 2 businesses

3
Have done time for assault

71,
Repeat
71 Cannot get a credit card due to bad credit

14
Have been arrested on drug-related charges

8
Have been arrested for shoplifting

21
Currently
Are defendants in lawsuits, and

84
Have been arrested for drunk driving
In the last year

Can you guess which organization this is?

NBA or NFL? Give up yet? ... Scroll down.


ITS Neither,
it's the 535 members of the United States Congress.

The
Same group of Idiots that crank out hundreds of new laws each year
Designed to keep the rest of us in line.

You
Gotta pass this one on!


AND THEY JUST VOTED THEMSELVES $15,000 PER MONTH PENSION FOR LIFE AFTER SERVING ONLY ONE TERM IN CONGRESS!

Doesn't that make you enjoy payng taxes?

I looked at this and immediately knew that, at the very least, large parts of it were bullshit. Snopes.com confirms.

It's not that I'm smarter than my correspondent. I'm just confident enough that if I haven't heard through the media of at least a handful of specific cases of, say, spousal abuse, it's impossible for there to have been thirty-six of them.

These scandals are the bread and butter of today's tabloid media. Unless they were all Republicans (say, I wonder...), Fox would be all over them.

Yet, as I think about the parlous state of American news-gathering, I have to wonder: Will my confidence continue to be justifiable? My confidence is threatened from both ends:

• Source validation is a dying practice. After all, this urban bullshit sort of had a source. It's just that Capitol Hill Blue didn't have a real source. We live in the age of Matt Drudge, who as far as I know has only gotten one thing right and early in his whole life - Monica Lewinsky's blue dress.
• The press doesn't much look at the world anymore, when there are catered press conferences to be had.
  

Count me as not looking forward to further idiocracy.

Update: One Congressman arrested for drunk driving, and it's national news.