The Rude Pundit: We Lose Because We Don't Just Lie Like the Right Does

[meegbear]

So the Rude Pundit was a-perusin' Ann Coulter's latest "column" (if by "column," you mean, "the dissonant squawks of a twitchy, mite-ridden cockatiel quickly losing its plumage") in which she compares the media's reaction to Oslo terrorist Anders Bervik to its treatment of Fort Hood shooter Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, and this line jumped out at him: "Despite reports that Hasan shouted 'Allahu Akbar!' as he gunned down his fellow soldiers at a military medical facility in 2009, only one of seven (New York) Times articles on Hasan so much as mentioned that he was a Muslim." And she claims, "Of course, that story ran one year after Hasan's arrest."

Huh. That doesn't seem right, the Rude Pundit thought, considering how often he had heard and seen Hasan's religion referenced since the November 5, 2009 attack. So, using the magic of the Nexis machine, which Coulter often cites for her "research," as well as the Googling thingamabob, the Rude Pundit quickly found the following:

There was the November 6, 2009 article that says, flat out, that Hasan was Muslim, as in he wondered "if he could get out of the Army before his contract was up, because of the harassment he had received as a Muslim." The article also mentions the mosque he attended. That'd be the day after the shooting, not a year. There was the November 9, 2009 article that ties Hasan to Islamic extremism. That'd be four days after the attack, not a year. There was a January 16, 2010 article by Elizabeth Bumiller which repeatedly references Hasan's religious views (by name) as the reason he went off the deep end. That'd be about three months after the attacks, not a year. You get the idea. The Rude Pundit worked hard and couldn't find an article that did not, in some way, refer to Hasan as Muslim.

In other words, Ann Coulter wrote a complete and utter lie, but it is the lie that is the foundation of her entire column. And you can bet, like many other lies she's spewed out like Sean Hannity's semen under the desk in his office, she will repeat it endlessly and it will probably show up in a book (if it hasn't already).

But the point here is not, as it often is, about Ann Coulter's finely-honed batshittery. No, it's about what we are actually up against in the rhetorical battle over the soul of the nation.

They lie, this awful, destructive right wing. Often. And repeatedly. And they lie with such brazenness and bravado that it's as if lies are steel-toed boots kicking in the teeth of truth. How do you fight that? Because, from experience, the Rude Pundit can tell you that you can say the truth is the greatest fuck you'll ever have and most conservatives would say they'd rather just masturbate.

Another example: the Rude Pundit was driving at night down here in Red State America, and he found Dennis Miller's radio show while scanning through the stations. Miller has never actually been funny, even when he was presumptively a less paranoid libertarian, but at least he sounded smart. Now he's just pompous and dull. A caller starts talking about raising taxes on the wealthy and the caller says something like, "Obama doesn't say that he's not raising taxes on himself, he doesn't say that he doesn't make enough money to pay higher taxes. It's everyone else that has to."

What Miller should have done was to say, "Whoa, whoa, there, Cletard, at every speech and press conference about the debt ceiling, Obama has said that 'people like me' have to pay their fair share. That motherfucker's rich, so he wants to raise taxes on himself." See? It's the truth and it's the exact opposite of what Cletard believed.

No, instead Miller agreed with Cletard and then blathered on about how any money Obama has ever made has been from the government, how we have supported him his whole life, how he always got breaks from people like Rezko, blah, blah, blah, never mentioning that he was a best-selling author, no, just making him seem like another black guy on welfare who wants to steal from rich whitie.

We good liberals look at this nonsense, recoil at the lies, and think, "Well, of course, it's just isolated. Most people don't actually believe that."

But the thing is that many people do. Many people will take Ann Coulter's word on the Times's alleged denial of Hasan's faith. Many people will merely dutifully parrot Miller on how Obama is taxing other wealthy Americans.

This land has abandoned the supremacy of facts, even at a time when almost all facts are quite literally at our fingertips. No, it's too, too difficult to care when you can merely become another paying audience member at the puppet show, not giving a damn if the wooden toys are real or not.

[renate]

1. I wish I could use a month's worth of rec's on this

It is SO true, and it's so frustrating because 1) they're wrong to lie and 2) we don't get any brownie points at all for refusing to do so. (Not that we should--telling the truth is the right thing to do--but it means we're kind of hamstrung right out of the gate.)

[Pacifist Patriot]

5. I feel the same way!

[bullwinkle428]

2. The right lies their ass off, and the media pushes these lies as gospel.

[arbusto_baboso]

3. And the problem with us liberals is that we DON'T scream "LIARS!" at the tops of our lungs!

Instead, we calmly think "The truth will out", forgetting that the truth will actually be buried by those sympathizing with (or even funding) the liars.

We're not much different from Obama in that regard.

[MilesColtrane]

6. The problem is worse than that.

Shoving the truth in the faces of Teabaggers only makes them double down and dig in deeper like a tick.

http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2010/07/11/how_facts_backfire/

It’s one of the great assumptions underlying modern democracy that an informed citizenry is preferable to an uninformed one. “Whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government,” Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1789. This notion, carried down through the years, underlies everything from humble political pamphlets to presidential debates to the very notion of a free press. Mankind may be crooked timber, as Kant put it, uniquely susceptible to ignorance and misinformation, but it’s an article of faith that knowledge is the best remedy. If people are furnished with the facts, they will be clearer thinkers and better citizens. If they are ignorant, facts will enlighten them. If they are mistaken, facts will set them straight.

-snip-

Maybe not. Recently, a few political scientists have begun to discover a human tendency deeply discouraging to anyone with faith in the power of information. It’s this: Facts don’t necessarily have the power to change our minds. In fact, quite the opposite. In a series of studies in 2005 and 2006, researchers at the University of Michigan found that when misinformed people, particularly political partisans, were exposed to corrected facts in news stories, they rarely changed their minds. In fact, they often became even more strongly set in their beliefs. Facts, they found, were not curing misinformation. Like an underpowered antibiotic, facts could actually make misinformation even stronger.

This bodes ill for a democracy, because most voters — the people making decisions about how the country runs — aren’t blank slates. They already have beliefs, and a set of facts lodged in their minds. The problem is that sometimes the things they think they know are objectively, provably false. And in the presence of the correct information, such people react very, very differently than the merely uninformed. Instead of changing their minds to reflect the correct information, they can entrench themselves even deeper.

[FiveGoodMen]

7. Agreed!

[Pacifist Patriot]

4. Just yesterday I felt like tearing my hair out with my otherwise intelligent mother-in-law.

We do try to avoid political discussions because my husband's conservative-leaning family knows I'm an unabashed liberal. But at one point my mother-in-law brought up the intrusiveness of government by pointing out Congress banned bake sales at schools. What?! She told me to look it up so I did.

Not hard to find the whole thing was a Fox morning show spin of the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act. I emailed her the Media Matters article on the hack job. A few hours later she brought it up again after having exchanged an email with a brother in Texas. Who reminded her it was a de facto ban because it prohibited foods not prepared in commercial kitchens at school fundraising bake sales. So I got the actual legislation. Less than ten minutes of work on my part proved all of this was total bullshit. At this point I'm not bothering with the mother-in-law on this point. She's proven the meme of an intrusive government is stronger than truth.

It drives me insane because she is actually a caring, sweet, intelligent lady. This is why the right-wing media machine is so bloody dangerous. It works!

[hifiguy]

8. Kick for the Rude One

who always hits the bullseye.

[treestar]

9. Rec'd

It is so frustrating to see them get away with it! And on top of that, Ann Coulter, as one can see from that complaint of hers, wants it to be Muslims against Christians, and to blame every Muslim or the religion of Islam itself for the bad acts of any individual Muslim. While doing the exact opposite for Christians.

[Fuzz]

10. I run into this ALL the time. I ask what lead them to that conclusion and hear back something that

isn't true, just demonstrably false, and realize that's why! I try to tell them that isn't true, prove it to them, yet they still think their conclusion, which is based on lies, is still correct because there must be some truth to the story or another one just like it because it 'feels' right to them.

Crazy shit.