by The other day someone said something he knew wasn’t true about President Obama. I knew it, I know he knew it, and yet he said it. (IE, the claim that it’s Obama and not the republicans who support ending Medicare.) Paul Krugman wrote an op-ed about this.
Not long ago, Rick Santorum got angry when a New York Times reporter did something similar when asking Santorum a question about a speech Santorum had just made. Santorum had said Romney was the worst republican in the country to go up against Obama on the health case issue. He phrased it in an awkward manner, but it was clear what he meant. But the reporter asked him about saying Romney was the worst republican in the country, period. The thing is, the reporter was doing what Santorum does probably a dozen times every hour, and a mild version of it.
Santorum and others don’t just routinely mischaracterize Obama or spin his words in a direction they know isn’t true, they make things up and encourage people to believe outrageous things about him. When did we come to this? People care more about winning than the good of the country. I mean if they had real issues with what Obama was doing they would refer to the things he is actually doing and not resort to making stuff up.
You could argue that both sides do it, but nothing to the extent that one side is guilty of.
This is looking towards the World Trade Center site from the burial ground of St. Paul’s Chapel.
Hi Stacy,
if you can find any truthful political statements during campaign season, from any source, then you are indeed a resourceful person.
Right now Ann Romney has been excoriated and mischaracterized by the left. This has been done simply because she is being an effective campaigner with women now that her husband is presumably the nominee. Therefore there is a political attempt to demonize her so that her effectiveness will be diminished.
Regrettably, this is all business as usual in a campaign season.
When people talk about the left and right, what they are unknowingly speaking of are television spokesmen and political editorial writers.
These people all get paid for producing another article to fit in with their publication schedule. Often they simply have to come up with something to justify their job.
The fact is that these spokesmen seldom speak accurately for all of the people in flyover country. In real life it is foolish to imagine that all of America can be stampeded into these two abstractions referred to as the “right” and “left”.
In real life I have never met anyone so far to the right that they did not share some views that are characterized as left. And after close questioning, I have never met anyone on the left who did not share some opinions that are characterized as right.
As we have a two-party system, everyone has to be influenced so that their vote can be secured. Today this is done primarily by demonizing the other side. I am sometimes surprised that so many adults pay any attention to it. Frankly, I find the two bubbles as rather banal.
As far as what is responsible for all this, I would recommend a book called The Crisis of the Modern World by Rene Guenon.
Hi!
I think the Rosen/Romney incident is exactly like the Santorum/New York Times reporter example I just used. Please note in my example I am sticking up for Santorum. He worded his point badly, but everyone knew what he meant. The New York Times reporter knowingly misrepresented Santorum’s words. He was in the wrong.
In this recent episode, Rosen is the one being mischaracterized. She worded her point badly, but she wasn’t dismissing the work of stay-at-home moms. She was saying that Romney, as someone who hasn’t held a job outside the home, couldn’t speak for women who did, and especially for women who are mothers and who might like to stay at home, but must take jobs to support or help support their children.
You might disagree with Rosen, but you are disagreeing about a very different point. Rosen was not saying that what stay-at-home mothers do is not work.
I pay attention to the demonizing because it has gotten far worse over my lifetime, and people take it very seriously. There’s too much hate, and some politicians are using that and feeding it.