Making a Dent in Liberal Disinformation: Don't Confuse Me With the Facts
Written by Lester Dent
Friday, September 24, 2004
http://www.chronwatch.com/content/contentDisplay.asp?aid=9930
I have an online friend who recently retired as a professor of history at a prestigious international university. He is a scholar of impeccable credentials, the author of numerous highly-regarded and painstakingly-researched volumes of history. He is, unsurprisingly, quite liberal, and over the years we have debated a number of issues. As some may note from my style, I like to wade into facts and draw my conclusions from them (or at least buttress my opinions with some facts). Often he would say, ''I don’t have the command of the facts as you seem to on this issue, but I believe…'' He would then go on to state some superficial generalization about politics, such as ''As we all know today, there was no need to go to war in Iraq.''
Last week I sidestepped the issue we were currently debating, acknowledging that we would probably never see eye to eye on it. But I posed the following question to him: Why are you willing to form political opinions based upon a lack of facts that you would never accept as an historian? Here is a scholar that I respect immensely, and have no qualms about deferring to in matters relating to his expertise. Yet he fails to apply even a modicum of the same rigor to supporting his fundamental beliefs about politics, society, and economics.
When you survey the debate in the United States today, you see this repeated wherever liberals state their case. They parrot positions that don't stand up to the simplest factual test.
You hear about how the USA PATRIOT Act is behind military tribunals (not true) and has no judicial or legislative oversight (not true)
How ''One million African-Americans were denied the right to vote in 2000'' (not true)
How there were no ties between Saddam and Al Qaeda (not true, according to both the 9/11 Commission and the Senate Select Intelligence Committee)
How the ''Swift Boat Veterans for Truth'' have been ''completely discredited'' (not true--at best, some allegations have been disputed, and indeed the Democrats have been forced to admit on at least three major issues the Swift vets were correct and that Kerry… 'misspoke.'')
They point to job losses without acknowledging the massive impact of 9/11, the economic recession that started before Bush came into office, two wars, heightened terrorism precautions, and the accounting scandals from the 1990s that caused distrust when prosecuted under Bush
Can you imagine the Republicans in 1944 blasting FDR for the fact that women were being forced to leave their families to work in factories, or about the scarcity of automobile tires and gasoline, or the rationing of sugar? ''Are you better off today than you were in 1940?'' ''This President has overseen the destruction of the American Family--wrenching mothers from their children, fathers from their homes.'' ''This war in Europe is the wrong war, in the wrong place, at the wrong time.'' Such political statements would have been rejected and condemned, because people were aware of the facts, of how their lives were intertwined with history.
I have a hard time understanding the ignorance of (or the refusal to acknowledge) facts that underpins liberal thought today. Liberals constantly call for more money for education when every statistic shows that money is not the answer (just look to Washington, D.C.’s schools and the $13,000 per child spent to achieve some of the nation’s lowest test scores). Libs talk down the economy when indices like home ownership, real income, and unemployment are better than the average in any of the past three decades. They claim that we are no safer today, ignoring the fact that we have not had the expected major terrorist attacks since 9/11/01 and the government has thwarted dozens of plots. They ignore the disclosure of Libyan WMD programs and the dismantling of the Pakistan nuclear proliferation cabal. They ignore how terrorist have struck even those countries who tried to block Coalition efforts in Iraq.
I have a theory that I am not willing to test--that people who exhibit such willful blindness to reality are simply making decisions based upon what they hear from the main stream media. While I admit that science would be served if I limited my news intake to the New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, and ABC/CBS/NBC, I simply cannot steel myself to do so. We have tremendous news assets available today, from the cable networks to talk radio to internet news sites to the pajamahadeen bloggers. There is no excuse for ignorance. Yes, it consumes time to get a decent grasp of facts, but we waste so much time on trivial pursuits (Survivor or The Apprentice, anyone?) that we really have no excuse.
Most liberal opinion that I hear or read is based upon ignorance of facts that gets repeated ad nauseum. There was a time when I attempted to debate liberals in the contentious newsgroup soc.culture.usa--but the silence was deafening. There was a lot of bomb throwing and chest-beating, but when I staked out factual positions and called for rebuttal, all that could be heard were crickets chirping. Satisfied to post their rants against the administration (or capitalism, or the United States in general), when challenged these intellectual girlymen slipped silently into the night.
The events of 9/11 thrust factual reality into the faces of many Americans (I among them). Many learned the lessons and stripped the liberal burkas from their minds, seeking to understand the world as it really is. Those who faced the facts became impatient with an intellectual orientation supplied by John Lennon’s ''Imagine.'' The world became uglier and more complicated, but the alternative was deadly--enough of us needed to come to grips with the world as it is or we would literally be buried. Too many slipped back into a lazy liberal mindset where ''should be'' replaces ''is.'' The Democratic Party is home to those who prefer to dismiss the inconvenient realities of life. Fortunately, there appears to be enough of us who think differently to protect them and their fantasies for the time being.
It is ironic that the liberals who dominate education in this country insulate themselves from the facts and seek to silence others who disagree (witness the attempts recently at U.C. Berkeley to prevent Michelle Malkin from speaking). My father would attribute the following philosophy to these folks:
''Don’t confuse me with facts, my mind is made up.''
Doug,
hehehehehe... haahahahahahahah.... HOHOHOHOHOHO!!!!!!!!!! HHAHAHAHAHHAHH!!!!!!!!!!!!
...and my parents... DEMOCRAT LIFERS!!!!!!!!!!!!! ARE VOTING FOR BUSH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! They say the Democrats have lied to them and cheated the country into ruin!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
WWWOOOHHHHAAAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!!!!! I can't stand it anymore!!!!!!!!! My gut is going to split I am laughing so hard!!!!!!!!!!!
Red
Rhetorics are what the 'intelligensia' teach to those whose mind would be confused by the facts.....