LIAR LIAR!

The Romney campaign continues to perpetuate a multitude of lies claiming that they are not going to allow their campaign to be dictated by fact checkers. There seems to be a hint of (we are above the truth) in Neil Newhouse’s comment.

I’m troubled that they’re using the phrase “fact-checker” in the same way they use “conspiracy theorist”. Basically, they’re saying that facts are a matter of perspective, and if you’re a fact-checker and the facts you present don’t match their talking points, you’re a liberal stooge. So actually they are saying they’re above the truth. Or, worse, they actually believe the lies they’re telling, making them far too intellectually challenged to be trusted with a leadership role in this country.


Many will say “well both sides do it so what’s the difference?”

Well, actually “both sides do it” doesn’t really work here. What the Republicans are doing is largely unprecedented in our history. Political spin has always been a part of partisan history but this is a first, where a major political party has been peddling outright lies, knowing full well that they’re lies and belittling and dismissing anyone who points out those lies. Just 10 years ago the mountain of lies that have been peddled by Romney and his surrogates would have seen someone run out of politics. It’s one thing to spin an issue to compliment your point of view (which both parties have certainly been guilty of). But it’s another thing to just make stuff up (which has thus far been the theme of the Republican Party).

They pelt us with misrepresentations and complete falsehoods because they know they can get away with it. Their supporters will believe anything they tell them. And the folks in the middle think “Well, both sides do it”. But in reality the breath-taking scope of the lies the Republicans have been telling us so far during this election is largely unprecedented. They’re lying. They know they’re lying. We know they’re lying. And they don’t care. Facts don’t matter.

They’re literally practicing cognitive dissonance, the Big Lie propaganda technique that was advocated by Adolf Hitler, which was summed up more succinctly by his Propaganda Minister, Joseph Goebbels – “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.”

The best thing we could do politically would be to re-establish the Fairness Doctrine, strengthen the Equal-Time Rule section of the Communications Act of 1934, bar all corporate donations to political campaigns, abolish Super PACs and 527 groups, require candidates to accept a spending cap on how much can be spent on a campaign (in other words, ensure that all parties have only the same amount of funding to spend on the election) and require campaigns to publish full lists of all political donors. Full transparency and an equal financial footing for all campaigns, with unlimited corporate funding abolished and lobbyists and political donors required to put their name beside their endorsement, would keep campaigns honest.

 The problem with our political system is that it’s been turned into a reality show style popularity contest with unlimited marketing funds provided by corporations and special interest groups. Literally, the party with the most money can turn the propaganda hose upon the American people and simply drown out any ideas they disagree with. If everything else was equal, campaigns would be more about positions and ideas than propaganda and misinformation. Unfortunately, we would have to rely upon the people who benefit from the existing system to change it from within, and that’s not likely to happen anytime soon.