The depressing prevalence of smear tactics.

[LAS14]

A thread in this forum was entitled Chelsea: Mom will do something to address “the crushing costs of Obamacare.” The actual quote was:

"She thinks either of those will help solve the challenge of kind of the crushing costs that still exist for too many people who even are part of the Affordable Care Act,"

To put a misquote in the subject is one more example of how "Hillary haters" will twist the truth. Notice I didn't say "Bernie supporters." I don't live in a black and white world the way the Hillary haters do. They even twisted the Fox news slanted report. Fox news was bad enough, although not strictly mis-quoting, 'Chelsea Clinton laments 'crushing' health care costs despite ObamaCare' and accompanies it with a really unflattering picture of Chelsea.

These misquotes and slanted reports can make even a dedicated Hillary supporter gasp a little. And it's work to find out the truth. Most responding to the thread in question didn't. How can we expect the average overworked undecided voter to fight back? Very depressing for American democracy.

[noamnety]

1. It goes both ways.

Many of us spent a fair amount of effort this weekend trying to convince a Bernie hater that in fact Bernie got more than 400 votes in Alaska. (!)

That assertion got enough votes to be voted to the greatest page in the HRC group - despite at least one Hillary supporter trying to correct it.

In other words - I feel your pain!

[CalvinballPro]

2. I never expected to see people who think themselves "progressive" fall back on so many lies.

This is no different than when they were all running around yelling "Super-predators" with zero attempts at providing context.

Libertarians in progressive clothing, is what these people are. Pretending to be leftists because there's no one named "Paul" left on the ballot anywhere.

[randome]

3. Unfortunately, that sounds too close to the truth.

[hr][font color="blue"][center]Everything is a satellite to some other thing.[/center][/font][hr]

[karynnj]

4. I wish everyone would see distortions as counterproductive to the candidates and to civil discussion

I ignored that thread because it is toxic. My own view on changing Obamacare for this or other reasons is that in reality both would do very close to the same thing -- and that will be whatever is the best thing that Congress can pass. This is not to say that their goals are different, but that Congress will be willing to do so much less than either, the result will be the same.

I agree that this is very depressing for our democracy -- and that is ignoring that the Republicans have gone to completely insane. I was here in 2008, and what seems different is the level of bullying going on. I seriously doubt that anyone here has changed sides because they were attacked - unless the attack was from the side they actually were on!

The nastiness is so bad, I wonder how many of us will still be here after November's election. In 2009, I considered leaving -- but for a good reason. That with our wonderful new President, there would be less reason to be on a site that, in reality, in 2008 had accomplished what would have seemed impossible goals 4 years before. I stayed mostly because of friends and the ability to engage in conversations on various issues.

If a Democrat wins the Presidency, they will not come in with a healthy majority in the House and 58 or 59 Senate seats as Obama did. They will have a much tougher environment. (58 - 59, depended on if Franken or Coleman was seated - and it was Spector changing parties that made it 60 for a very brief time.) Our help might be needed almost immediately to try to turn the Senate further towards the Democrats in 2 years. The question is whether this year will kill this site's ability to welcome a range of Democrats.