No Credibility

There are lies, damn lies, and the alternate universe of the extreme right wing. I have said before that the lunatics have taken over the Republican Party, and that that party is now pandering to the tea partiers’. I suppose there is a warm fuzzy feeling when you say what that crowd wants to hear and they cheer you. “Oh, ain’t I bitchen!” The problem is that in the dark world of the extreme right wing there are only beliefs, and facts do not matter. This means that you must feed their beliefs at the expense of your credibility. Most politicians are lawyers. As such they have been practicing a profession that is as unpopular as the profession of politician. The one thing you can say about attorneys, however, is that they are smart enough to know which lies to tell and which lies to avoid. In this regard their first rule is not to make any statement that is easy to disprove. Getting caught in one lie is damaging to your credibility, getting caught in many lies demolishes your credibility.

Telling lies by falsely claiming that the health care bills contained death panels and provisions to provide health insurance to illegal immigrants did not seem that bad to the Republicans. They knew that most people were not going to read those bills. They also knew that if they threw in the issue of abortion, a very large number of people would not look beyond that single issue. In other words, the Republicans thought their lies about health care reform would not hurt them even when responsible people revealed that those lies were lies. Joining the lunatics in accusing President Obama of not being a citizen of this country was a different matter. The lunatics loved it, but everyone else denounced it as crazy. The brighter Republicans down played the citizenship issue from the beginning and the other members of that party are now avoiding the issue. The problem is that the Republicans are now telling lies that are more ill advised than the ones about President Obama’s birthplace.

Here you have prominent Republicans saying that President Obama is not serious about the war against the terrorists because he does not use the word terror or call that war a war on terrorists. The remarkable thing about this is that some Republicans even said it on the same night that Obama talked about the attempt of the underpants bomber being a terrorist act and re-iterated his commitment to carry on the war against the terrorists. Furthermore, some prominent Republicans are insisting that there were no terrorist attacks against this country when George W. Bush was President. One of the Republicans who recently said that was Rudy Giuliani. One would expect such nonsense from Sarah Palin or Dick Cheney, but Rudy Giuliani? How could he possibly forget when the nine-eleven attack took place? Giuliani said it was a slip of the tongue and that he meant no attacks took place after nine-eleven. I guess he forgot about the shoe bomber, Richard Reid, and other attacks that the good people at MSNBC were all too happy to point out, all of which occurred during Bush’s tenure in office.

It is tempting to believe that Republicans are suffering from alzheimer’s disease or that they think we are. There is actually something far more cynical involved. Sarah Palin is fond of referring to voters as Joe six pack. The connotation is that voters are only interested in drinking beer and watching ball games. This being the case, it is highly unlikely that they will watch Obama’s speeches or even the news broadcasts that play excerpts from those speeches. Who cares about people who think facts matter and pay at least some attention to what is happening? Who cares if those people know that the Republican Party is so intellectually and morally bankrupt that it has no credibility? If Joe six pack is representative of the independent voters, all that matters is what he thinks and how he will vote. If ignorance is bliss, he is very happy and so are the Republicans.

This brings up questions about the news media and journalistic integrity. Forget about Fox News. Fox news is an oxymoron. The Fox organization is not a news organization; it is a propaganda machine, and it has absolutely no concept of journalistic integrity. In all fairness, I have to admit that there is a bias in most news organizations. It stems from the fact that news organizations are businesses. As such their profits depend on how large of an audience they can draw. Since most people like to hear things that confirm their opinions, news organizations keep an eye on the demographics. If the country swings to the right, so does the media. If the country swings to the left, the media follows in that direction. This, however, does not mean that the responsible ones throw away their journalistic integrity. I grew up watching the likes of Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite. They had both worked as reporters gathering the news before they went into television, and they had a strong sense of journalistic integrity. Facts mattered to them. They were not content to simply report what someone said; they would also point out the obvious lies. In those days, the media tried to confine the bias to their editorials, but they tried to accurately express the facts even in their editorials. They felt a responsibility to inform the public. Today the main stream media still tries to accurately state the facts and what people say. What is missing is the sense of responsibility to inform the public by pointing out the obvious lies.

I watch MSNBC, which is really more about editorials than straight news. I also watch CNN and the news broadcasts of other networks. I am a liberal and proud of it. What I try to avoid is becoming an ideologue. I look at different news sources in order to consider different perspectives. I also try to do some fact checking. I enjoy discussing issues with people who do not share my opinion if those people do not misrepresent or ignore the facts. I have very little tolerance for the opinions of people who do misrepresent or ignore the facts. The reason why right wingers continue to insist that there is a liberal media bias is because the facts do not conform with their beliefs. Fortunately, there are some conservatives who do care about facts. It is a pity that we cannot hear them over the screams of the lunatics. I do not think I would agree with the opinions of those conservatives, but I do think we should listen to them.