"Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin Are Insane, Right Wing Laughing Stocks" -
Eminent Political Scientists, Social Commentator and Black Economist
Thomas Sowell
Sowell knows everything and is never wrong.
Building a Nation of Gullible Right Wing Pinheads
By TIMOTHY EGAN
Having shed much of his dignity, core convictions and reputation for
straight talk, Senator John McCain won his primary on Tuesday against
the flat-earth wing of his party. Now McCain can go search for his
lost character, which was last on display late in his 2008 campaign
for president.
Remember the moment: a woman with matted hair and a shaky voice rose
to express her doubts about Barack Obama. "I have read about him," she
said, "and he's not - he's an Arab."
McCain was quick to knock down the lie. "No, ma'am," he said, "he's a
decent family man, a citizen."
That ill-informed woman - her head stuffed with fabrications that
could be disproved by a pre-schooler - now makes up a representative
third or more of the Republican party. It's not just that 46 percent
of Republicans believe the lie that Obama is a Muslim, or that 27
percent in the party doubt that the president of the United States is
a citizen. But fully half of them believe falsely that the big bailout
of banks and insurance companies under TARP was enacted by Obama, and
not by President Bush.
Take a look at Tuesday night's box score in the baseball game between
New York and Toronto. The Yankees won, 11-5. Now look at the weather
summary, showing a high of 71 for New York. The score and temperature
are not subject to debate.
Yet a president's birthday or whether he was even in the White House
on the day TARP was passed are apparently open questions. A growing
segment of the party poised to take control of Congress has bought
into denial of the basic truths of Barack Obama's life. What's more,
this astonishing level of willful ignorance has come about largely by
design, and has been aided by a press afraid to call out the primary
architects of the lies.
The Democrats may deserve to lose in November. They have been terrible
at trying to explain who they stand for and the larger goal of their
governance. But if they lose, it should be because their policies are
unpopular or ill-conceived - not because millions of people believe a
lie.
In the much-discussed Pew poll reporting the spike in ignorance, those
who believe Obama to be Muslim say they got their information from the
media. But no reputable news agency - that is, fact-based, one that
corrects its errors quickly - has spread such inaccuracies.
Stephen Lovekin/Getty Images Rush Limbaugh
So where is this "media?" Two sources, and they are - no surprise here
- the usual suspects. The first, of course, is Rush Limbaugh, who
claims the largest radio audience in the land among the microphone
demagogues, and his word is Biblical among Republicans. A few quick
"Tomorrow is Obama's birthday - not that we've seen any proof of
that," he said on Aug. 3. "They tell us Aug. 4 is the birthday; we
haven't seen any proof of that."
Of course, there is proof as clear as that baseball box score. Look
here, www.factcheck.org, for starters, one of many places posting
Obama's Hawaiian birth certificate.
On the Muslim deception, Limbaugh has sprinkled lie dust all over the
place. "Obama says he's a Christian, but where's the evidence?" he
said on Aug. 19. He has repeatedly called the president "imam Obama,"
and said, "I'm just throwing things out there, folks, because people
are questioning his Christianity."
You see how he works. He drops in suggestions, hints, notes that
"people are questioning" things. The design is to make Obama un-
American. Then he says it's a tweak, a provocation. He says this as a
preemptive way to keep the press from calling him out. And it works;
long profiles of Limbaugh have largely gone easy on him.
Once Limbaugh has planted a lie, a prominent politician can pick it
up, with little nuance. So, over the weekend, Kim Lehman, one of
Iowa's two Republican National Committee members, went public with
doubts on Obama's Christianity. Of course, she was not condemned by
party leaders.
It's curious, also, that any felon, drug addict, or recovering
hedonist can loudly proclaim a sudden embrace of Jesus and be welcomed
without doubt by leaders of the religious right. But a thoughtful
Christian like Obama is still distrusted.
"I am a devout Christian," Obama told Christianity Today in 2008. "I
believe in the redemptive death and resurrection of Jesus Christ."
That's not enough, apparently, for Rev. Franklin Graham, the partisan
son of the great evangelical leader, who said last week that Obama was
"born a Muslim because of the religious seed passed on from his
father."
Actually, he was born from two non-practicing parents, and his Kenyan
father was absent for all of his upbringing. Obama came to his
Christianity like millions of people, through searching and
questioning.
Finally, there is Fox News, whose parent company has given $1 million
to Republican causes this year but still masquerades as a legitimate
source of news. Their chat and opinion programs spread innuendo daily.
The founder of Politifact, another nonpartisan referee to the daily
rumble, said two of the site's five most popular items on its Truth-o-
meter are corrections of Glenn Beck.
Beck tosses off enough half-truths in a month to keep Politifact
working overtime. Of late, he has gone after Michelle Obama, whose
vacation in Spain was "just for her and approximately 40 of her
friends." Limbaugh had a similar line, saying the First Lady "is
taking 40 of her best friends and leasing 60 rooms at a five-star
hotel - paid for by you."
The White House said Michelle Obama and her daughter Sasha were
accompanied by just a few friends - and they paid their own costs.
But, wink, wink, the damage is done. He's Muslim and foreign. She's
living the luxe life on your dime. They don't even have to mention
race. The code words do it for them.
Climate-change denial is a special category all its own. Once on the
fringe, dismissal of scientific consensus is now an article of faith
among leading Republicans, again taking their cue from Limbaugh and
Fox.
It would be nice to dismiss the stupid things that Americans believe
as harmless, the price of having such a large, messy democracy. Plenty
of hate-filled partisans swore that Abraham Lincoln was a Catholic and
Franklin Roosevelt was a Jew. So what if one-in-five believe the sun
revolves around the earth, or aren't sure from which country the
United States gained its independence?
But false belief in weapons of mass-destruction led the United States
to a trillion-dollar war. And trust in rising home value as a truism
as reliable as a sunrise was a major contributor to the catastrophic
collapse of the economy. At its worst extreme, a culture of
misinformation can produce something like Iran, which is run by a
Holocaust denier.
It's one thing to forget the past, with predictable consequences, as
the favorite aphorism goes. But what about those who refuse to
comprehend the present?
***
The other problem, besides millions of people willfully going out of
their way to passionately believe in stupid lies: millions of people
thinking whether Obama is Muslim or Christian is even a meaningful
distinction. To me it's like arguing over whether he's psychotic or
schizophrenic? I'd really like it best if he was NEITHER.
And 'dismissal of scientific consensus' becoming the 'policy' of so-
called 'leaders'? Yeah, that's going off the rails on a crazy train.
It's like millions of Republicans are now happily choosing to go well
beyond their usual stance of merely being oblivious, selfish, and
mildly delusional. Now they're turning into full-blown fact-deniers
proceeding bravely on into the land of bat shit crazy.
So much crap like you've been bitching about has been going on since
politics were born. One guy spread the word that his opponent had
matriculated. Told as if it was some sort of sin did his opponent in.
That's politics.
The Obama thing has all the earmarks of "Obama the victim". The more
that is presented as dirty behavior, the more people wonder about it.
Especially, since all their questions have been waved away as if the
questions themselves were not worth explaining. With his life being
shown with his not releasing pertinent info, all you have is another
presidential contender claiming he fought in Cambodia during the war.
So your diatribe seems to be that those damn swiftboaters are out to get
him. Paranoia lives on.