Here is a fine piece from Rachel Maddow in which she reviews some of the recent "scandals" so incessantly harped upon by the right-wing noise machine, all of which have turned out to be wildly overblown, if not downright false. Which, sadly, has not prevented them from having had the effects desired by those who pushed them with such fury. As the old saying goes, "A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on."
Hat tip to Bh.tv commenter listener, whose post calling attention to the above deserves to be reproduced in full:
Let them eat Fake
I'd usually avoid linking in this forum to video from a popular cable news/opinion program, but this 8:50-long calling out by Rachel Maddow of the Republican party's nonstop "bull pucky" campaign is an exception (the segment having been sparked by the recently released California Attorney General's report stating that the charges against ACORN which led to its demise, were partly based upon a willfully fraudulent video). Maddow is not perfect, and sometimes her rah-rah liberalism takes her into territory I'm not entirely comfortable with, but this is Rachel at her finest -- relentlessly marshaling well-researched factual evidence with passion and intensity combined with intellectual rigor.
I'll take the further liberty of reproducing part of my response, since I was thinking of blogging about this as well:
I salute your ear for catching the turn of phrase you used as your post title. Here's another one from that vid that I liked: "the unmooring of politics from facts." On a closely related note: see this post by Steve Benen (via Instaputz) commenting on this article in McClatchy: "Not satisfied with U.S. history, some conservatives rewrite it."
4 comments:
I finally got around to watching it and it was great. How can they get away with so much lying?
Primarily because they don't get called on it. The larger organs of the so-called liberal media rarely say boo about Fox, let alone Rush and the rest of the AM radio crowd, and any group that does try to do watchdog work, like Media Matters and Think Progress, get written off as "the liberal watchdog group."
The second biggest part is that their target audience would rather hear comforting lies than the truth.
Brendan didn't you claim on Bloggingheads that the Acorn story was old news?
As for "Calling the cops" the Acorn worker did that 13 days later. Odd Rachel did not mention that.
She also overlooks that O'keefe did pose as a pimp instead of dressing like one.
As for the UK. Climategate report the My favorite Wing/Paul nut Vox found some interesting huge disclaimers in your absolute vindication of all things climate change.
they’d seen no evidence…as far as it was able to ascertain…did not cover all the issues and would not be as in-depth
...
Translation: we found nothing too terribly damning… mostly because we were careful not to look very hard. Please, please, please be sure to notice all the qualifiers we were careful to insert so we don’t look like we were covering anything up when more in-depth investigations reach opposite conclusions.
In addition to being dishonest Rachel is not very bright.
MADDOW (waving hands): Nnn, Constitution doesn't have a Preamble. Not. Nope. Stop it. That would be the Declaration of Independence. Ooh.
Brendan didn't you claim on Bloggingheads that the Acorn story was old news?
No, I don't think so. Perhaps you are remembering something out of context? I think at least this aspect is new, and is not getting enough attention: that a tsunami of anti-ACORN misinformation has resulted in a good organization being demonized, and worse, defunded.
As to your wish to repeat AGW denialism, meh. I've said what I have to say in the Bh.tv forums on the matter. I think you're flat-out wrong, and more to the point, not worth trying to persuade otherwise, at least in my current mood.
Ditto as far as Maddow's intelligence goes. You can disagree with her point of view, and you can make some legitimate critiques of the slant she put on the issues she touched upon in this piece. But to call her "not very bright" is not a claim worthy of respect or further attention.
Post a Comment