The Resistance: Stop Letting Bullshit Beat Truth

The media won't do it.  We have to.  Don't let anyone get away with it.

The sun rises in the east, global warming is destroying human civilization and the Orange Loser is a dangerous clown.  That's the truth.

Eric Alterman at The Nation:

By relentlessly promoting this kind of false equivalence between truth and bullshit, thoughtfulness and stupidity, the press sowed the seeds of the unimaginable disaster that our country and the world are about to reap in the form of Donald Trump’s presidency.

Who You Callin' Extremist?

Tristero, at Hullabaloo:

Not a single elected Democrat has called for secession, as Rick Perry did. Not a single elected Democrat defied the Supreme Court to the extent of sending in the National Guard and provoking an insane confrontation with the local police, as Jeb Bush did during Schiavo. Not a single elected Democrat is so anti-reality and anti-science that they believe that if women are "legitimately raped," they will be protected from pregnancy as Todd Akin did.

Oh, sure there are leftwing extremists. Somewhere. But in the Democratic Party? Holding office or positions of power? Puhleeeze.

Adding: An unspoken assumption in this article is that there is a dichotomy between right and left viewpoints. In US politics today, that is an absurdly false dichotomy. The actual dichotomy is between the crazies (i.e. national Republicans and their rich enablers) and the reality-based rest.

Oh do I ever have my disagreements with Democrats (I'm an Independent), but I never doubt their grip on reality. I cannot say the same about Paul Ryan, Rand Paul, Chris Christie, Michael Huckabee, and the rest of the clown club. It truly is hard to take seriously someone who doubts evolution, human-based climate change, elementary economic theory, or basic civil rights.

Always Google Your Invitees. ALWAYS.

Ahiza Garcia at TPM:

A group of high school students in Kentucky was in for a shock this week when a political candidate with a history in the white supremacist movement took the stage as part of the University of Kentucky's "Constitution Day" celebration, radio station WUKY reported.

The celebration took place on Wednesday and was intended to "recognize and celebrate the U.S. Constitution." Local high school students were there along with students of the university, the radio station reported.

But it appears that many in the group didn't know what they were in for when Robert Ransdell, the write-in candidate for U.S. Senate from Kentucky who recently made news for his campaign signs that read "With Jews We Lose," took to the microphone as an invited speaker.

The radio station reported he ranted about the "Jewish-owned and controlled media" and emphasized "the need for this nation's white majority to recognize that they have ethnic interests" before he eventually had his mic cut.

The high school students in attendance were ushered out of the event and onto buses by their shocked high school teachers, according to WUKY.

University professor Buck Ryan of the Citizen Kentucky Project, the group that organized the event, told WUKY that a student of his invited Ransdell and that the write-in candidate called Ryan to apologize after the event.

As the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks hate groups, has noted, Ransdell has a long history in the white supremacist movement and used to be an organizer for a once-prominent neo-Nazi group called the National Alliance.

WUKY reported that the university released this statement following the event:

The University Of Kentucky hosted it’s 11th Constitution Day, a federally mandated program for all higher education institutions to recognize and celebrate the U.S. Constitution. Elected officials and candidates in this November’s elections were invited. One of the candidates for the U.S. Senate is Robert Ransdell. Mr. Ransdell was invited because he has registered and has been qualified as a write-in candidate for the U.S. Senate with the Kentucky Secretary of State Office. 

Constitution Day is not about politics, it is a celebration of the principles of the Constitution. All speakers are asked to focus on those principles. Unfortunately, Mr. Ransdell included his political beliefs and platform in his comments. Many of those in attendance felt his comments were inappropriate, especially for an audience that included high school students. The University Of Kentucky was not aware of the content of his remarks prior to him speaking and does not condone or endorse any political platform or agenda.

Wonkette caught this critical action:

Two high school journalism teachers attending the event with their students were outraged, particularly because there was no notice that the speaker was a genuine First Amendment Outlier. One of the teachers, James Miller, went onstage during Ransdell’s talk, took his mic away, gave an impromptu talk about the phenomenon of false balance in media, and apologized to his students for having brought them to the event. Let’s see if we can’t get Mr. Miller nominated for some kind of teaching award, can we?

 Kentucky students interested in journalism: get yourself into James Miller's class immediately.

Challenging the Haters and the Stoopits

It's almost enough to make up for Michelle Bachman.

TPM:

Sen. Al Franken (D-MN) took on a representative of the conservative group Focus on the Family for mischaracterizing a study on "nuclear families" at a hearing on a bill which would repeal the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA).

At a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing Wednesday, Sen. Franken noted that the group's testimony listed the benefits of children "living with their biological and/or adopted mothers and fathers" as surpassing those of children "living in any other family form." He observed they listed a Department of Health and Human Services study as backing that up.

"I actually checked it out," Franken said in reference to the study FOF's Thomas Minnery has cited. He then observed it uses the term "nuclear families" without specifically mentioning "opposite sex married families."

"Isn't it true, Mr. Minnery, that a married same-sex couple that has had or adopted kids would fall under the definition of a nuclear family in the study that you cite?" Franken asked.

"I think that the study, when it cites nuclear families would mean a family headed by a husband and wife," Minnery said.

"It doesn't," Franken said, getting laughs from the audience.

"The study defines a nuclear family as one or more children living with two parents who are married to one another and are each biological or adoptive parents to all the children in the family," Franken continued. "And I frankly don't really know how we can trust the rest of your testimony if you are reading studies these ways."

The hearing came a day after President Barack Obama signaled his support for the repeal of DOMA. The Justice Department has already stopped defending the law in court because it found that the law is discriminatory and unconstitutional.

Once upon a time, children, politicians didn't have to do this kind of basic fact-checking because newspapers and the broadcast news did it as a matter of course. No, seriously.

Back in September, Steve Benen wrote about the epidemic of false equivalence:

It's been one of the most glaring flaws in major American media for far too long -- news outlets can tell the public about a story, but they won't tell the public's who's right. Every story has to offer he-said/she-said coverage, and every view has to be treated as entirely legitimate. ("Republicans today said two plus two equals five; Democrats and mathematicians disagree.")

To tell news consumers about a controversy is fine. To tell news consumers who's objectively correct is to be "biased."

For the public that wants to know who's right, and not just who's talking, it creates a vacuum filled by online outlets. For journalists who want to "tell readers directly what's going on," it creates an incentive to abandon news organizations that demand forced neutrality.

Liberals put facts before ideology.

No, "both sides" DON'T do this.

The false equivalence has already started, with Village analpundits bleating about "both sides" needing to dial down the rhetoric.

What they refuse to admit is that only one "side" repeatedly uses violent, eliminationist language and images to attack the other.

Threats of violence are the province of conservatives, teabaggers and rethuglicans, and always have been. Digby has the facts:

This is an astonishing list of violent rhetoric and political violence over the past two years. In fact, it's almost unbelievable.

Here's just one week last summer, which culminated a week later with this shoot out with police:

July 2, 2010—The Wyoming Department of Revenue suspends sales tax collections at the state's gun shows because of "increasing animosity" toward field tax agents. Dan Noble, director of the department's Excise Tax Division, cites one particular incident at a gun show that "crossed the line" and says, "We tend to have more trouble at gun shows than any place ... I have 10 field reps throughout the state, and every one of them has experienced some animosity ... I don't want to put my people at risk."

July 3, 2010—Joyce Kaufman, a conservative radio hosts on WFTL in Florida, tells a crowd of supporters at a Fort Lauderdale Tea Party event, “I am convinced that the most important thing the Founding Fathers did to ensure me my First Amendments rights was they gave me a Second Amendment. And if ballots don’t work, bullets will. This is the standoff. When I say I’ll put my microphone down on November 2nd if we haven’t achieved substantial victory, I mean it. Because if at that point I’m going to up into the hills of Kentucky, I’m going to go out into the Midwest, I’m going to go up in the Vermont and New Hampshire outreaches and I’m going to gather together men and women who understand that some things are worth fighting for and some things are worth dying for.”

July 6, 2010—Herb Titus, a lawyer for Gun Owners of America, tells Religion Dispatches, "If you have a people that has basically been disarmed by the civil government, then there really isn't any effectual means available to the people to restore law and liberty and that's really the purpose of the right to keep and bear arms—is to defend yourself against a tyrant." Titus goes on to cite the "totalitarian threat" posed by "Obamacare" and "what Sarah Palin said about the death panels."

You won't believe how much of this there is out there. It's swirling throughout the ether. It's real.

And it's right here in Kentucky. Check out what Media Czech found on the facebook and twitter of a prominent republican political operative.

Steve Benen cites George Packer in the New Yorker:

This relentlessly hostile rhetoric has become standard issue on the right. (On the left it appears in anonymous comment threads, not congressional speeches and national T.V. programs.) And it has gone almost entirely uncriticized by Republican leaders. Partisan media encourages it, while the mainstream media finds it titillating and airs it, often without comment, so that the gradual effect is to desensitize even people to whom the rhetoric is repellent. We've all grown so used to it over the past couple of years that it took the shock of an assassination attempt to show us the ugliness to which our politics has sunk.

Don't let anybody get away with pretending violent rhetoric and images is something "both sides" do. It's not. It's a right-wing, conservative, republican phenomenon, as David Neiwert documents in his book The Eliminationists.

Have you talked to your Democratic neighbors today?

Nutjob False Equivalence

Perhaps nothing distorts political debate in this country more than the insistence of the mainstream media on faking objectivity by drawing false equivalence.

Once of the worst examples last year was the repug apologists who justified the death threats against Barack Obama made at Sarah Palin's rallies by pointing to the Obama supporters who cheered the Democratic candidate's criticism of repug policies.

"Kill him!" "Failed policies!" Yep, just the same.

Now it's happening again, this time to justify the death threats being made against members of Congress for supporting health care reform.

Steve Benen and Kevin Drum take on the false equivalence gremlins.

BUT WHAT IF MY OPPONENTS ARE CRAZY?.... James Joyner, a conservative I find to be both thoughtful and reasonable, had an item today reminding political observers not to assume "that your opponents are crazy."

James concedes that there are "a lot of angry nuts on my side of the aisle," but adds that there's "plenty of crazy to go around." He points to some liberal conspiracy theories we heard during the Bush years, and suggests it would unfair to "judge the left by the whackos."

That sounds a like an entirely sensible approach to modern politics. But I think James is making an important mistake, which I hear/see frequently, especially from major media outlets. The conventional wisdom is that the left has some nutjobs, and the right has some nutjobs, but this is unrelated to political mainstream of both major political parties. Wacky liberals said ridiculous things under Bush; wacky conservatives are saying ridiculous things now. Move along; nothing to see here.

Kevin Drum noted some of the flaws in this.

Now, obviously there's some truth to this, but there are a couple of things that have struck me about the recent surge in conservative nutballs. First: there's just a whole lot of them. The Diebold folks couldn't even get a hearing at Daily Kos, let alone anywhere more mainstream. The 9/11 truthers have always been a tiny band. And most of the people who believed Bush "knew about 9/11" just thought he had been warned something was coming down the pike. There was never more than a trivial handful who thought he literally knew the details and deliberately let the plot go forward.

Second: the conservative lunatic brigade appeared so goddamn fast. It's true that some precincts on the left went nuts over Bush, but anti-Bush venom didn't really start to steamroll until late 2002 when he was making the case for war against Iraq. Nobody drew BusHitler signs after he signed NCLB or called him a war criminal for signing a tax cut. It took something really big to create a substantial cadre of big league Bush haters.

Conversely, the conservatives who think Obama is a socialist, or think Obama was born in Kenya, or think healthcare reform is going to kill your grandma, or think Obama is going to take all your guns away -- well, that stuff started up approximately on January 21st, if not before. And it's not just a weird 1% fringe. There's a lot of conservatives who believe this stuff. And there wasn't any precipitating cause other than the fact of Obama's election in the first place.

I agree wholeheartedly with all of this, but I'd add something else -- the mainstreaming of Republican radicalism. In the Bush/Cheney years, the Democratic establishment and prominent center-left outlets wanted nothing to do with 9/11 truthers and/or Diebold folks. It was unheard of to see a Democratic member of Congress call Bush/Cheney "fascists," or encourage the Democratic Party to emulate the Taliban.

Conversely, the line between fringe right-wing stupidity and the Republican/conservative mainstream has all but disappeared. Vile nonsense may start on a Freeper thread, but it won't stop there -- the same garbage is invariably found on major far-right blogs (Malkin, RedState), prominent conservative magazines and newspapers (National Review, Weekly Standard, WSJ), talk-radio shows with huge audiences, Fox News, and far too often from elected Republican officials.

Whereas Dems kept the fringe at arm's length, Republicans embrace the fringe with both arms. Both sides have nutjobs; only one side thinks their nutjobs are sane.

Another huge difference: only repug nutjobs get a respectful hearing and positive coverage from the mainstream media.

Remember just two years ago, when wingnut crazies calling for summary execution of reporters who exposed illegal acts by the bush administration were the darlings of the cable news shows, but solid citizens holding protest signs miles away from a Smirky speech were condemned as un-American liberal dupes at best and terrist symps at worst?

A habit of false equivalence leads to obscenities like describing waterboarding as "throwing water on his face," and calling a doctor who saves women's lives a murderer.

Don't let them get away with it.