“Crap and mendacity, that’s what Big Daddy says”, wrote Tennessee Williams and boy was he on target. It is the major tenant of all our current communication networks. I keep getting emails from my Right wing friends filled with accusations against the President and his commie/liberal followers. The volume has grown to a point where I have to wonder if anyone on the Right ever bothers to check what their pundits are saying for factual content.
It seems that if you are a Right leaning communicator, and I use that word loosely, you have long ago decided that facts mean nothing and the truth is something that is to be twisted to your own ends until it screams for mercy.
Of course the leading progenitor of this less than accurate approach is Rush Limbaugh but no one takes the mouth that talks like a urinal seriously because we all assume he’s stoned. It’s when something like the not so dearly departed Andrew Breitbart’s much read but little respected blog or Michael Goldfarb’s even less renowned Free Beacon spews around “facts” like the existence of an organization called Friends of Hamas, which isn’t even a fictional entity, as the financial backer of now Secretary of Defense, Chuck Hagel and the dummies interrogating him at him Senate hearing don’t even bother to check out who has promulgated this farce, before questioning the Secretary about how much he got from Friends of Hamas, that the whole problem of not understanding the concept of truth rolls over the Right like a tsunami in the South Pacific.
I have a friend in my old town of Warren, CT who keeps sending me stuff that his nuttier compatriots send him, simply because he figures it will get a rise out of me. One of the creators of the material that he sends me is a local guy who I really like but whose sanity I constantly question. Today the piece was about how the President is responsible for the high price of gas. It seems that he and his informers don’t understand that gasoline is a byproduct of oil, which is an international commodity over which the President has no control, unless, of course, he’s George Bush and is willing to start a war over it.
How do you explain to a true believer that everything he has been fed from the Right Wing or their religious extremist friends is either a downright lie or a faith-based fantasy.
I read statements from Ted Cruz, the new GOP Senator from Texas, railing about Communists in the Harvard faculty and I think I’m back in the ‘50s listening to Joe McCarthy and his crusade of self aggrandizement. Cruz, in a speech before the Koch brothers sponsored, American’s for Prosperity, (I love that name. It means another yacht for the Koch’s and screw everybody else.), stated that Marxists who believe in a Communist overthrow the US, have infiltrated the Harvard Law School.
Now I’ve always believed that if you want to promulgate a bizarre idea you should make it as far out as possible, after all, we’ve all heard about the big lie, but this concept is the monster lie. Maybe if he’d said Cal Berkley or possibly even Columbia but to accuse Harvard where Acquiring Wealth 101-2, 3 & 4 are required courses, of harboring revolutionary Communists is so absolutely ridiculous that even Tail Gunner Joe would have rejected it as a Stalinist wet dream.
But not Cruz. This is a guy who sits around at night praying to an uncharitable God for the most outlandishly bizarre ideas that he can come up with and then is dumb enough to blurt them out,
in public. Congratulations Texas, you have now elected an even more idiotic politician than Rick Perry. Must be the oil in the water.
The basic problem is that most people have too much to do in their lives and too much outside interference with their communication to bother to check out even the most outlandish statements by the confirmed liars of the Right Wing propaganda crusade. So they just accept what they are told. Then the rest of us wonder why they vote for people who are clinically insane like Michelle Bachman or Jan Brewer. Then, of course, after the lie is told and uncovered, the propagator simply falls back on that old reliable cop out of a different interpretation. “I did not have sex with that woman.” No, Bill, your dick in her mouth had nothing to do with sex. Yes, even an occasional Democrat does lie, but the serious volume, the big game championship is the personal property of the GOP.
But what to do about it? Not much until our real media, not Fox News or any other Murdoch property, but what’s left of the serious media, decides that it isn’t partisan to call a lie a lie; that it isn’t partisan to recognize the difference between propaganda and news; that it really is their job to call a spade a spade and to do the same with a liar or any other disseminator of false information. If our media wants to be taken seriously as reporters, and they certainly try very hard to look that way when they are on the talking head shows on Sunday morning, then they have to stand upon their hind legs and call to task the liars and frauds that also appear on those shows.
I know they have sponsor problems and I know that the corporate entities that own the shows are the same organizations that stand to lose when the truth comes out about the lies of their lobbyists and I know that they stand to lose old friends who have left congress or some paper and are now the paid lobbyists (read liars) of the corporations that own the networks and the newspapers, but the reason we have a free press is so it can deal in transparency and if it doesn’t then there is no reason for its existence. The free press isn’t free if it is the slave of the corporate oligarchies and democracy cannot long sustain without a free press.