A Case Study In Right Wing Lying
Some of you may have seen stories about the release yesterday of the CBO report on Obamacare. Twisting a sentence to imply something that it was never meant to, Republicans immediately started crowing about an alleged (and nonexistend) loss of two million jobs because of Obamacare.
Numerous people were quick to rebut this belligerent nonsense, but did that stop Conservatives? At the end of the day, I started looking for how this matter was reported in wingnut world. Here are a few things I found before I couldn't stand it any more:
Town Hall
"Democrats Spinning Madly on Devastating CBO Report"
"Thanks Obama! Care- Now with 25% Fewer Jobs!"
Red State
"The NYTimes Touts 2.5 Million Full Time Job Losses as a Win"
"ObamaCare Will Cost America More Than Two Million Jobs"
PJ Media:
"Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said the Congressional Budget Office report that shows Obamacare will make the labor force lose 2.3 million full-time workers by 2021 is positive because it lets Americans be “free agents.”
Gateway Pundit
"Shocking: CBO Director Admits Obamacare ‘Creates a Disincentive for People to Work’
"Dingy Harry Reid: CBO Report Doesn’t Cost Jobs – It Means 2.3 Million Americans Can Be “Free Agents”
World Net Daily:
"The new healthcare law will slow economic growth over the next decade, costing the nation about 2.5 million jobs"
National Review Online:
"CBO’s Obamacare Scorecard Fewer jobs"
Riehl World View:
"Obama-Careless: Health-care law will lead to 2 million fewer worker"
Breitbart:
"NYT: CBO's Obamacare Projection of 2.5 Million Jobs Lost 'A Good Thing'
"WH Spin: Obamacare Will Save People 'Trapped in a Job'
Hot Air:
"White House: When you think about it, 2.5 million fewer people working because of ObamaCare is good news"
And here's the thing: even though there is exactly zero truth to this story, Republicans are going to go on repeating it for years- just like Benghazi, just like the IRS "scandal," just like the birth certificate stories, just like the absolutely absurd claim that the Obama administration is the most corrupt in history, just like a thousand other stories. And the Koch brothers and their associates are going to continue pumping billions of dollars every year into their campaign to make people believe this sort of thing. And that's why we have two major political parties in this country today, instead of one and a whole lot of seditious criminals in jail.
Update: Paul Krugman, as usual, with a devastating takedown of the Republican lies about this claim.
Numerous people were quick to rebut this belligerent nonsense, but did that stop Conservatives? At the end of the day, I started looking for how this matter was reported in wingnut world. Here are a few things I found before I couldn't stand it any more:
Town Hall
"Democrats Spinning Madly on Devastating CBO Report"
"Thanks Obama! Care- Now with 25% Fewer Jobs!"
Red State
"The NYTimes Touts 2.5 Million Full Time Job Losses as a Win"
"ObamaCare Will Cost America More Than Two Million Jobs"
PJ Media:
"Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said the Congressional Budget Office report that shows Obamacare will make the labor force lose 2.3 million full-time workers by 2021 is positive because it lets Americans be “free agents.”
Gateway Pundit
"Shocking: CBO Director Admits Obamacare ‘Creates a Disincentive for People to Work’
"Dingy Harry Reid: CBO Report Doesn’t Cost Jobs – It Means 2.3 Million Americans Can Be “Free Agents”
World Net Daily:
"The new healthcare law will slow economic growth over the next decade, costing the nation about 2.5 million jobs"
National Review Online:
"CBO’s Obamacare Scorecard Fewer jobs"
Riehl World View:
"Obama-Careless: Health-care law will lead to 2 million fewer worker"
Breitbart:
"NYT: CBO's Obamacare Projection of 2.5 Million Jobs Lost 'A Good Thing'
"WH Spin: Obamacare Will Save People 'Trapped in a Job'
Hot Air:
"White House: When you think about it, 2.5 million fewer people working because of ObamaCare is good news"
And here's the thing: even though there is exactly zero truth to this story, Republicans are going to go on repeating it for years- just like Benghazi, just like the IRS "scandal," just like the birth certificate stories, just like the absolutely absurd claim that the Obama administration is the most corrupt in history, just like a thousand other stories. And the Koch brothers and their associates are going to continue pumping billions of dollars every year into their campaign to make people believe this sort of thing. And that's why we have two major political parties in this country today, instead of one and a whole lot of seditious criminals in jail.
Update: Paul Krugman, as usual, with a devastating takedown of the Republican lies about this claim.
Comments
You and I, and most of the people who comment here… we live in the real world, where a thing is not true just because you heard it, or because you said it, or because you want it to be true. And no amount of repetition will make something true if it isn’t. The politicians we don’t detest we accept to be imperfect. They do their flawed best, much of the time. Those we do detest are not the anti-Christ or comic book super villains - they’re just sleazy criminal drecks who for all we know DO love their momma.
These people that drive us crazy do not have that view of truth or humanity. Their arrogance is so great, their selfishness so deep, their ignorance so vast that at some level they never grew out of the child’s view of a universe that revolves around them. And their need for simplistic theories is absolute. “It’s just gotta be…. Because Obama is a Muslim”. And equally their answers are simplistic, absolute and endlessly vindictive… “all you gotta do is…. nuke Mecca”.
And I know it’s a hoary old comparison… but Hitler and his cronies were much the same - somehow everything is the fault of THOSE OTHER people.
Saw a child fall off his bicycle once and immediately blame the child standing nearby for pushing him over, even though that other kid had nothing to do with it. When called out on this lie by an adult the kid on the bicycle was dumbfounded… He SAID it… therefore it had to be true. Never forgotten that, as an example of how the human mind can work.
The Murdochs of our world and the pundits of vileness... Even if they’re smarter than that, they nonetheless intuit that that’s how a lot of people operate, and as their own character is either completely or borderline sociopathic, they immediately grab the levers to manipulate and dominate. The truth can become whatever they say it is, if they say it loud enough and often enough. Demagogues unbound.
What I think really turns the screws with it in America, is sheer pervasiveness of religious influence, coupled with an oddly soulless consumerism. (All those odd pictures that appear on the internet depicting strange and often obese people in Walmart… after the initial WTF? reaction there is also a terrible sadness)
If you really believe that things started with Adam and Eve and a fucking snake, or that God sets bushes on fire just to speak through them, or that two wombats swam across the Indian Ocean to get on Noah’s ark …
I mean… what part of your brain have you not left in the car park? You are primed for manipulation. You are primed to operate at a disconnect to reality.
Like these clowns who expect 10 million people to show up to their pathetic rallies in Washington DC… they never seem to learn by experience. Their delusions of relevance are shattered over and over and over but they cannot see it. The dirt poor people who vote Republican over and over even though it has never made their lives better. It really is ‘a special kind of stupid’. Perhaps the manifest truth of how stupid they have been all this time is just too terrible to confront, and then it becomes AGAIN, all the fault of THOSE OTHER people.
And we know what that had led to in the past…