MICHAEL DAVIS WORLD

You can't make this stuff up, so we don't!

Liar! Liar!, by Martha Thomases – Brilliant Disguise | @MDWorld

April 25, 2015 Victor El-Khouri 0 Comments

Yesterday, I was having a conversation with a group of people, as one does.  We were talking about the weird stuff that’s been happening — drought in California, earthquakes in Texas and Oklahoma — and I said that fracking might have something to do with it.  One person asked what fracking was, and I started to answer.

Midway through my description, I realized I had forgotten the real definition.  I paused, said I was probably saying it wrong, and it should be Googled (we were not near a computer).

Anyway, as a private person having a private conversation, there is no real consequence to my brain fart.  I made a mistake of fact, and tried to correct it.  It wasn’t the first time, and it won’t be the last.

Unfortunately for the quality of our public discourse, this isn’t true about our politicians and partisans.  Candidates say all kinds of things on the stump, and our news media only occasionally asks them for evidence.  I don’t mean a “Gotcha” moment, such as Obama saying there are 57 states, or Jeb Bush telling the Census Bureau he’s Hispanic.

According to new research from the American Press Institute, there are more fact-checking organizations available to us than ever before.  This is a good thing.  Facts are important.  Policies should be based (and modified, as necessary) on facts.

Unfortunately, our electorate is not taking advantage of these fact-checking resources in equal measure.  To quote, “But there are some partisan differences in public perceptions of the practice: Republicans don’t view fact-checking journalism as favorably as Democrats do, especially among people with high levels of political knowledge.”

There is a parallel news story to this, and it concerns Hillary Clinton.  Ever since she first came to national attention (which I’d peg at 1992, but if you were paying attention to her before that, congratulations), she has incited a hatred that goes way over the line into paranoia.  She’s a secret lesbian.  She had an affair with Vince Foster.  She only married Bill because she wanted to be president (no one has yet explained how being Arkansas was known to be a ticket to the White House in the 1960s).

Most recently, I’ve seen the news media and bloggers reporting that Clinton is such a liar that she was fired from the Watergate investigation. This is not true.  To quote from the link:

“A pair of articles published during Hillary Clinton’s run for the presidency in 2008, one by Northstar Writers Group founder Dan Calabrese and one by Jerry Zeifman himself, asserted that Zeifman was Hillary’s supervisor during the Watergate investigation and that he eventually fired her from the investigation for “unethical, dishonest” conduct. However, whatever Zeifman may have thought of Hillary and her work during the investigation, he was not her supervisor, neither he nor anyone else fired her from her position on the Impeachment Inquiry staff (Zeifman in fact didn’t have the power to fire her, even had he wanted to do so), his description of her conduct as “unethical” and “dishonest” is his personal, highly subjective characterization, and the “facts” on which he bases that characterization are ones that he has contradicted himself about on multiple occasions. “

There are plenty of good reasons not to vote for Hillary, as well as persuasive arguments to vote for her.  We don’t have to make shit up.

As long as I’ve been paying attention to politics (and probably centuries before that, as well), a good rumor will intrigue the public.  It’s human nature.  My personal favorite, from The Realist, was about Lyndon Johnson.  According to Wikipedia:

“Krassner’s most successful prank was The Parts That Were Left Out of the Kennedy Book, a grotesque article following the censorship of William Manchester’s book on the Kennedy assassination, The Death of a President. At the climax of the short story, Lyndon B. Johnson is on Air Force One sexually penetrating the bullet-hole wound in the throat of JFK’s corpse.  Krassner acknowledged Marvin Garson, editor of the San Francisco Express Times and husband of Barbara Garson (author of the notorious anti-Johnson play MacBird! ), for coming up with that surreal image. According to Elliot Feldman, ‘Some members of the mainstream press and other Washington political wonks, including Daniel Ellsberg of Pentagon Papers fame, actually believed this incident to be true.’”

(Comic book fans might remember Garth Ennis using this story in an issue of Preacher.  I always wonder if he knew where it came from.)

As we head into the campaign silly season, I will try to hold myself to the standard of checking my facts, or, at the very least, citing my sources.  I would ask for the same from you, Constant Reader, so that our discussions might take place in the real world.

Media Goddess Martha Thomases sometimes thinks the real world is overrated.

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Comments

  1. Jesus
    September 2, 2015 - 9:26 am

    Hi CaptainWell I have spent about six months doing the rcarseeh into all the aspects of being a Freeman and I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s not for me.I quite enjoyed the rcarseeh and I like reading your blog and other sites but I’m just an observer. I no longer have the desire to do anything with what I’ve learnt.I can’t see the Freeman movement going anywhere ultimately although I can forsee a rounding up and shooting of those who participate. Of course OH’s addition to your cause will provide a more ascerbic take on things which can only add to the circus.Stay safe out there.

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