How the Liars Get Away With So Much, Part 4

A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.
-- Winston Churchill

Lies fight dirty. Facts take the high road.

Lies aren't afraid to scream at the top of their lungs, repeat themselves over and over again, refuse to be cowed by all evidence to the contrary. Facts think they are self-evident and obvious, and refuse to stoop to volume and repetition.

Lies will do anything to get and hold people's attention. Facts think if they ignore lies, the lies will go away.

Thus lies become what "everybody knows" and facts wither and die from lack of use.

What did you do the last time you heard someone spout one of the ludicrous lies most repugs believe? Admit it: you ignored it. Because explaining that President Obama is a corporatist, not a socialist, just gives credence to the lie. Besides, attempting to instruct people stupid enough to believe such lies is beneath us members of the reality-based community.

And thus the lies grow stronger in the absence of contradiction, the believers of the lies take our silence for assent, and the liars grow bolder with our failure to fight back.

What's the real reason Democratic leaders don't call out the motherfucking liars for lying about fucking their mothers?

Because we don't stand on the rooftops screaming our demand that they call out the motherfucking liars for lying about fucking their mothers.

And because we don't call out the motherfucking liars in our own towns, workplaces and families.

Yes, it's painful, but not as difficult as you might think. Don't play defense; play offense. "Why do you think President Obama is a socialist? What bill has he signed or policy has he announced that is socialistic? I don't remember him saying he would confiscate every gun - where did you hear that?"

It's great if you can marshal evidence to bolster your case, but it's not necessary. Just keep asking questions and asking them to provide evidence supporting their lies.

This can, I think, be the start of what Steve M. calls "creating more liberals." More conservatives and centrists who vote Democratic aren't going to get this country where it needs to be on jobs and health care and climate change and renewable energy and civil rights and ending the permanent war. Only creating more liberals will.

As Steve M. wrote in January:

But if the GOP is being pulled further to the right, where's the force that would help pull the Democratic Party in the opposite direction rather than the parallel direction? I agree with The Washington Post's Harold Meyerson about what's conspicuously absent:

...if there's a common feature to the political landscapes in which Carter, Clinton and now Obama were compelled to work, it's the absence of a vibrant left movement.

The America over which FDR presided was home to mass organizations of the unemployed; farmers' groups that blocked foreclosures, sometimes at gunpoint; general strikes that shut down entire cities, and militant new unions that seized factories. Both communists and democratic socialists were enough of a presence in America to help shape these movements, generating so much street heat in so many congressional districts that Democrats were compelled to look leftward as they crafted their response to the Depression. During Lyndon Johnson's presidency, the civil rights movement, among whose leaders were such avowed democratic socialists as Martin Luther King Jr. and James Farmer, provided a new generation of street heat that both compelled and abetted the president and Congress to enact fundamental reforms.

In America, major liberal reforms require not just liberal governments, but autonomous, vibrant mass movements, usually led by activists who stand at or beyond liberalism's left fringe. No such movements were around during Carter and Clinton's presidencies. For his part, Obama won election with something new under the political sun: a list of 13 million people who had supported his campaign. But he has consistently declined to activate his activists to help him win legislative battles by pressuring, for instance, those Democratic members of Congress who have weakened or blocked his major bills.... in the absence of both a free-standing movement and a legion of loyalists, Congress isn't feeling much pressure from the left to move Obama's agenda.

And the Democratic Party isn't feeling any popular pressure to move leftward.

The teabaggers and their fat-cat allies are in sync; we'd be at loggerheads with Democratic fat cats if we got organized and angry. But we could effect some pushback, at least. And we don't seem able to do that right now.

Creating more liberals starts with creating space in the public square for liberals to thrive.

Challenge the liars. Don't let any lie be heard without contradiction. You won't change the minds of the liars, but you will create doubt in the minds of the listeners.

And doubting the lies is the first step toward knowing the facts.

Read Part 1 here.

Read Part 2 here.

Read Part 3 here.

Cross-posted at They Gave Us A Republic ....