{"id":2895,"date":"2010-11-14T15:26:44","date_gmt":"2010-11-14T22:26:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bspcn.com\/?p=2895"},"modified":"2010-11-14T15:26:44","modified_gmt":"2010-11-14T22:26:44","slug":"16-of-the-dumbest-things-americans-believe-and-the-right-wing-lies-behind-them","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/localhost\/wordpress\/2010\/11\/14\/16-of-the-dumbest-things-americans-believe-and-the-right-wing-lies-behind-them\/","title":{"rendered":"16 of the Dumbest Things Americans Believe & the Right-Wing Lies Behind Them"},"content":{"rendered":"
Written by Sarah Seltzer<\/a><\/p>\n Americans are often misinformed, occasionally downright dumb, and easily misled by juicy-sounding rumors. But while the right wing is taking full advantage of this reality, the Left worries that calling out lies is “rude.”<\/p>\n Remember when Congressman Joe Wilson stood up<\/a> during Obama\u2019s State of the Union address and shouted \u201cYou lie\u201d? He was chastised soundly by the pundit class. But mostly he drew heat for being impolite, and was compared to Kanye West and other famous interrupters.<\/p>\n Revisiting Wilson’s foolish tirade underscores the state of our upside-down political world. Wilson shouted \u201cyou lie\u201d in the face of truth, but President Obama is hesitant to speak up when he\u2019s being slandered with bald, glaring untruths. The dark irony will continue as the Republicans take over the House this winter and the rumors and insinuations from extremist right-wing pundits keep circulating. It feels like no one with a loud enough megaphone has the courage to call a spade a spade, or more accurately a lie a lie.<\/p>\n We\u2019ve gone far beyond Stephen Colbert\u2019s \u201ctruthiness<\/a>\u201d into a more \u201ctruth-be-damned\u201d environment; what Rick Perlstein described in the Daily Beast<\/a> as a \u201cmendocracy. As in, rule by liars.\u201d<\/p>\n Here are some examples of recent ways we have made inroads in ignorance:<\/p>\n The scary thing is, these kinds of rumors have a way of taking root in the popular consciousness. Just as the election season began heating up earlier this year, Newsweek <\/em>published a list of \u201cDumb Things Americans Believe.<\/a>\u201d While some of them are garden-variety lunacy, a surprising number are lies that were fed to Americans by our leaders on the far-Right. This demonstrates that media-fed lies can easily become ingrained in the collective memory if they\u2019re not countered quickly and surely. Newsweek<\/em>\u2019s list included the following 12 statistics taken from recent and semi-recent polls and surveys. The first half are directly related to right-wing rumormongering.<\/p>\n So what to do in a political and cultural landscape in which well-told lies have more validity than fact-based truth? Perlstein explained <\/a>how this environment gets created by explaining what happened on Election Day this year:<\/p>\n \u201c…by a two-to-one margin likely voters thought their taxes had gone up, when, for almost all of them, they had actually gone down. Republican politicians, and conservative commentators, told them Barack Obama was a tax-mad lunatic. They lied. The mainstream media did not do their job and correct them. The White House was too polite\u2014”civil,” just like Obama promised\u2014to say much. So people believed the lie.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n We\u2019ve entered a bizzarro world in which calling out lies is considered rude, says Perlstein, so liars are allowed to sit tight and dominate the discourse. This gels with Bill Maher\u2019s critique of the Rally for Sanity, that calling for \u201cbalance for balance\u2019s sake\u201d ignores two important aspects of news reporting: facts and evidence.<\/p>\n Blaming Americans for being ignorant unwashed masses–or taking potshots at an education system that doesn\u2019t teach critical thinking– would be the easy answer to this conundrum.<\/p>\n But the reality is that if messaging has such a big effect on Americans, then messaging matters. Folks on our end have to counter the lies with well-told, unabashed unironic, truth-telling. And we have to demand that our media, and our politicians, call out the other side. As Perlstein notes<\/a>, \u201cWhen one side breaks the social contract, and the other side makes a virtue of never calling them out on it, the liar always wins. When it becomes ‘uncivil’ to call out liars, lying becomes free.\u201d<\/p>\n Even worse, once lies begin to spread, they become more than rumors–they become permanent beliefs.<\/p>\n\n
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