A few months ago, Bob Cesca offered an interesting article entitled Debunking the Top 10 Most Egregious Republican Lies. It was a litany of the same, tired nonsense viewed from a multitude of sources on almost any given day. It’s an excellent summary and well-worth a read.
The list itself:
10) Obama Doubled the Deficit.
9) Man-Made Climate Change Is a Hoax.
8) Cold Weather Disproves Climate Change
7) Tax Cuts Do More to Stimulate The Economy Than Food Stamps and Unemployment Benefits.
6) Cars Kill a Lot of People and No One Wants to Ban Them Like Guns!
5) The Affordable Care Act Covers Abortion-Inducing Emergency Contraception.
4) Obamaphones!
3) It's Safer to Have a Gun in the House, or a Concealed Weapon on Your Person.
2) Exhaling Releases "Dangerous" CO2.
1) Voter Fraud Is a Serious Issue That Requires Strict New Voter ID Laws.
For each of the items on this less-than-honorable scoreboard, Cesca offers a solid refutation—the kind with facts and everything!—providing the public with yet another fact-based foundation demonstrating the startling lack of character and decency foisted on the public by those with interests and motivations not even close to representing the best interests of the public.
Unfortunately, that effort, like most others—this one, too—will fall on the deaf ears of those most in need of truth. Psychological studies simply confirm what is evident just by peeking in to any political debate: facts don’t matter nearly as much as they should.
How long does this last without inflicting permanent and irreversible damage on democracy and any reasonable hopes for a peaceful and prosperous future for us all?
Why are we even approaching that point? What exactly did happen to the public good, and elected officials actually working on behalf of the nation’s best interests—which more often than not required compromise and mutual respect?
Is anyone on the Right paying attention to what happens as the nonsense and the misleading messages play themselves out? Try as they might to ignore this critical factor, it’s inevitable: ideology enacted has benefits as well as consequences. It may be preferable to focus on the former, but the latter carries the potential for much greater and enduring impact.
That’s not really a good thing.
The strategy of hammering home the same messages is certainly a successful one. But shouldn’t the standards be a bit more stringent … perhaps requiring honesty and integrity, for starters? Should that consideration be on anyone’s list of ideals, or shouldn’t we be at a point now where honest exchanges of information directed to problem-solving is Motivation # 1?
Why isn’t it? What’s to be gained by repeating lies to the public beyond scoring political points? If cheating in any venue is the only way to “win”, what kind of victory is it, and what kind of person seeks that out as the measure of success?
Can’t we be better than this? What’s the answer when our children ask that question of us when they bear the burdens of polarization, misrepresentations, and political extremism?
What kind of a nation and what opportunities for collective well-being should we leave to them? Who thinks that the current trends of deceit, blind opposition, disrespect, and obstruction are going to lead to anything other than the only consequences those tactics are capable of producing?
Shouldn’t we consider that more carefully?
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