When Truth Falls Apart-- How do we restore consensus in an age so divorced from fact?

by Maria Bustillos

If I have recognized the spread in drug warnings and financial doublespeak, where the corporate use of language approaches the absurd, where the shell of a communicative form is used to foreclose communication, I have also recognized it in forms of poetry that deliberately push us to confront the contingency and craziness of our culture’s use and abuse of words.
-Ben Lerner, Contest of Words, Harper's, October 2012

The lunatic notion of a “post-truth” or “post-fact” society gained traction during the administration of George W. Bush, whose lackeys lied their heads off so spectacularly and for so long, with the aid of the effectively state-sponsored Fox News Network. Mocked as “truthiness” by Stephen Colbert in 2005, and soberly analyzed in various books, the key idea of the “post-truth” society was this: if a given public utterance had sufficient appeal-- emotional, political or otherwise-- its empirical truth was immaterial. What we can be persuaded to wish to believe, in other words, is as good as the truth. How else to explain the long currency of such whoppers as the connection between Iraq and 9/11, the likely cost and duration of the “necessary” wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, “the smoking gun that would be a mushroom cloud,” the lawfulness of torture, and of domestic surveillance, etc. ad nauseam?

The peculiar mendacity of that catastrophic presidency left us with worse problems than a bunch of lies to put straight and reflect on. There’s a broken trust to restore-- to the extent that it’s possible to replace toxic cynicism with healthy skepticism-- in media and in government.

In 2004,a decorated Vietnam War hero ran for the presidency. This was an inconvenient fact for George W. Bush, his draft-dodging preppie opponent. It was vital, then, for the Republicans backing him to find a way to tarnish John Kerry’s service record while still noisily maintaining their “respect for the troops,” whom they were in the process of sending to the Middle East to be blown to bits by the thousand. The Republicans succeeded in discrediting Kerry through a new type of propaganda that effectively destroyed the obvious and instinctive assumption that a battle-hardened veteran and pacifist-- and not the soft rich boy-- would be better qualified to lead the country out of war.

The story of Kerry’s treatment in the media in the 2004 campaign provides a clear illustration of the cleverness and novelty of the Republican attack against him. Many politicians have resorted to the same playbook in the years since. As we enter the home stretch of this substantially more ghastly election, a review of their strategy, which I will call dismediation, is in order.

Dismediation is a form of propaganda that seeks to undermine the medium by which it travels, like a computer virus that bricks the whole machine. Thus, for example,

• Information: John Kerry is a war hero who was awarded three Purple Hearts, a Bronze Star and a Silver Star;
• Misinformation: John Kerry was never wounded in the Vietnam War;
• Disinformation: John Kerry is a coward;
• Dismediation: ‘Swift Boat Veterans for Truth’ are disinterested sources of information about John Kerry, equivalent in integrity to any other source that might be presented on the evening news.

These four narratives were distributed simultaneously across various channels during the 2004 election, though only one of them (the first) is true. To begin with, there was some criticism of how readily Purple Hearts were handed out during the Vietnam war. Two of Kerry’s wounds didn’t require time off duty, though that doesn’t matter a bit: the rules governing the award are quite clear that even the slightest wound sustained in enemy combat qualifies for the medal. That’s how the misinformation that Kerry hadn’t been wounded was spread, perhaps unintentionally giving a biased impression of his service. Accusations of cowardice followed, and these were disinformation-- false information planted by partisans for Bush.

When he came home, Kerry became one of the best-known protestors against the Vietnam War. He testified in 1971, at the age of twenty-eight, before the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations as a leader of the group Vietnam Veterans Against the War:

In our opinion… there is nothing in South Vietnam, nothing which could happen that realistically threatens the United States of America. And to attempt to justify the loss of one American life in Vietnam, Cambodia, or Laos by linking such loss to the preservation of freedom […] is to us the height of criminal hypocrisy, and it is that kind of hypocrisy which we feel has torn this country apart.

(Thirty-eight years hence, he would chair the committee he addressed on that day.)

The portion of the electorate predisposed against dirty hippie pacifists was as eager to hear criticism of Kerry then as it would be in 2004, but by the time of his campaign, many were unaware of either Kerry’s bravery in battle or his anti-war activism. This relative ignorance gave Bush Republicans an opening. The Swift Boat group was financed by Bob J. Perry-- a rich Republican donor and associate of Karl Rove’s-- and real estate tycoon Harlan Crow, a trustee of the George Bush Presidential Library Foundation. Together with Houston lawyer and former Swift Boat commander John O’Neill and conservative author Jerome Corsi, they cobbled together a book full of whoppers called “Unfit for Command.”

They also hired the guys who took down Michael Dukakis to make TV commercials attacking Kerry’s service. Swift Boater William Schachte shamefully insinuated that Kerry had deliberately wounded himself in order to secure a quick discharge. By the time the Kerry campaign realized people were paying attention to the Swift Boaters, the damage was done. Kerry had risked his own life in combat to save others, but a circus troupe of charlatans had sown the requisite doubts in the American electorate.

“Only in an election year ruled by fiction,” wrote Times columnist Frank Rich, “could a sissy who used Daddy’s connections to escape Vietnam turn an actual war hero into a girlie-man.” The lasting harm of this unfortunate episode, however, was not to Kerry’s reputation or to his candidacy. It was that afterward, millions of minds were uncertain as to what really constitutes “news,” or “reporting,” or “fact-checking.” This state of uncertainty hasn’t ever been adequately addressed, let alone mended.

In other words, the problem with my Republican relatives isn’t what they think of Fox News; everybody knows it’s propagandistic. The real problem is what Fox News et al., over time, have made them think of NPR, or MSNBC, or the New York Times. The Swift Boat style of twisting the facts has poisoned the well of public discourse for a whole generation of American adults-- for all of us-- by persuading so many that the confected “news” peddled on Fox is more or less equivalent to that on any other channel.

Dismediation isn’t discourse. It doesn’t disinform, and it’s not quite propaganda, as that term has long been understood. Instead, dismediation seeks to break the systems of trust without which civilized society hasn’t got a chance. Disinformation, once it’s done telling its lie, is finished with you. Dismediation is looking to make you never really trust or believe a news story, ever again. Not on Fox, and not on NPR. It’s not that we can’t agree on what the facts are. It’s that we cannot agree on what counts as fact. The machinery of discourse is bricked. That’s why we can’t think together, talk together, or vote together.

The success of dismediation projects like Fox News, Drudge Report and Rush Limbaugh’s radio show set the stage for Donald Trump, a buffoon beyond the satires of Dr. Strangelove or Infinite Jest. Trump happened in part because some of my cousins are now literally incapable of identifying facts, let alone weighing them. They apparently still intend to vote for a man who describes himself as “a genius” and in the same breath proposes to commit literal war crimes, break treaties, and steal the resources of other nations.

Dismediation is hard to combat, as it distorts not the facts, but the means by which facts can be understood. It’s like trying to win a chess game when the board has been flung into the air and the pieces scattered; quite often the bewildered victim finds himself trying in vain still to play e5 Qxe5 or whatever.

It’s easier to see dismediation when it’s practiced abroad, because foreign blinders are different from our own. Adrian Chen wrote in the New Yorker of the Russian troll farms he has been studying since 2014--  outfits operating armies of sock-puppet social media accounts churning out an avalanche of fake posts in order to produce the appearance of pro-government grassroots movements. But the real point of the troll farms, Russian activists told Chen, isn’t to make anyone believe the trolls. “The real effect… was not to brainwash readers but to overwhelm social media with a flood of fake content, seeding doubt and paranoia, and destroying the possibility of using the Internet as a democratic space.” The point is to prevent dissidents from finding one another, and to prevent any given individual from standing up and raising his voice.

There’s credible evidence that the Chinese government is engaging in similarly deceitful propagandistic practices on social media such as Weibo through its so-called “Fifty Cent Party.” A recent working paper published by Gary King, a social scientist at Harvard, estimates that the Chinese government fabricates in excess of 448 million “astroturf” posts annually (more than one million posts, every single day). “The goal of this massive secretive operation is… to regularly distract the public and change the subject,” King writes; the goal is to alter what constitutes “common knowledge.”

The Trump campaign is a would-be dismediation project almost certain to fail, simply because it was bound to hit the adamantine wall of his dishonesty and stupidity. He is so manifestly a con artist, a racist and an incompetent gross creepo that it’s nearly impossible to blur, confuse or fudge his true nature. All but the most willfully blind and/or deranged Republicans have therefore deserted him, and self-described conservatives find themselves, for the first time in years, actively questioning their own leadership. It’s become near impossible for Republicans to say to themselves, “Trump is only saying these false things for expediency’s sake, until he can get elected; after that, he’ll be fine.”

Trump is a black cloud with a silver lining. It’s so easy to see where the lies are. He is a grotesque, small-minded man unbelievably posing as the savior of the nation. The curtain has been drawn aside, and there he is, a sad little bullshitter, grabbling and pointing with his mean little hands into the camera, always at the camera.

The mammoth amount of available media in the internet age almost guarantees that we will see everything through the pinhole of our own worldview. We can so easily choose to experience only what we wish, and too often it’s the things we already agree with and believe. The walls of our gardens are grown very thick. What does “trust” mean in this new atmosphere? What will it mean, on November 9th?

“In theory,” wrote Edward Bernays, Sigmund Freud’s nephew (“the father of public relations”) in Propaganda (1928):

[E]very citizen makes up his mind on public questions and matters of private conduct. In practice, if all men had to study for themselves the abstruse economic, political and ethical data involved in every question, they would find it impossible to come to a conclusion about anything… from some ethical teacher, be it a minister, a favorite essayist, or merely prevailing opinion, we accept a standardized code of social conduct to which we conform most of the time.

That is to say, we choose not to investigate and reason out every question, but to trust authorities in whom to place our confidence to do so for us. It is an old vulnerability become newly dangerous, as the sources of information and disinformation have spread and multiplied.

Dismediation isn’t limited to politics. Business is a past master at it; Thomas Frank’s The Conquest of Cool is particularly fine on that subject. More recently, Elizabeth Holmes proved herself a skilled dismediator, actively endangering people with faulty blood testing technology while ginning up a Silicon Valley fairytale around herself and her company, Theranos. It took government agencies and dedicated journalists who gave a shit about the truth to put a stop to her TED-talking baloney. What will you think, the next time a Silicon Valley triumphalist comes along bragging about “changing the world”?

The advent of Brexit in the United Kingdom, and of the presidential bid of Donald Trump-- two national campaigns characterized by the wholesale spread of disinformation in mass media-- resuscitated the concept of “post-truth” in a number of recent pieces. If anything good can be said to have come of this election, it may be that the Republican candidate has demolished what remains of the “post-truth” era by demonstrating the poverty and malignity of lying as a campaign strategy.

The most heartening comment on the election so far came from Wisconsin conservative Marybeth Glenn, who made her feelings limpidly clear in a seventeen-part tweetstorm, condensed here:

When I saw Republican men getting attacked I stood up for them. I came to their defense. I fought on their behalf. I fought on behalf of a movement I believed in. I fought on behalf of my principles while other women told me I hated my own sex.

Not only charges of sexism, but I defended @marcorubio during Go8, I fought in my state to stop the @ScottWalker recall, etc… Now some Trojan horse nationalist sexual predator invades the @GOP, eating it alive, and you cowards sit this one out?

He treats women like dogs, and you go against everything I --  and other female conservatives --  said you were & back down like cowards. Get this straight: We don’t need you to stand up for us, YOU needed [us] to stand up for us for YOU. For YOUR dignity. For YOUR reputation…

I’m sooo done. If you can’t stand up for women & unendorse this piece of human garbage, you deserve every charge of sexism thrown at you.

I’m just one woman, you won’t even notice my lack of presence at rallies, fair booths, etc., You won’t really care that I’m offended by your silence, and your inability to take a stand. But one by one you’ll watch more women like me go, & you’ll watch men of ACTUAL character follow us out the door. And what you’ll be left with are the corrupt masses that foam at the mouth every time you step outside the lines. Men who truly see women as lesser beings, & women without self-respect. & your “guiding faith” & “principles” will be attached to them as well. And when it’s all said and done, all you’ll have left is the party The Left always accused you of being. Scum.

Here is an opportunity to make our politics better and more honest. To repudiate dismediation, to promote nuance rather than dogma, and to find such goals and policies that all principled people can agree on and move forward. It was a great thing to be able to unite with @MBGlenn. I was so happy to be able to find some common ground at last. We agree about the need to respect women! And we can fight for that together. Who knows where this rapprochement might end? Because it’s not possible for dismediation to occur in an atmosphere of mutual respect among citizens, re-establishing that respect should be our first goal.

Contrary to conventional opinion, it’s neither necessary nor remotely okay to lie in order to participate in politics. You can be a passionate partisan, make the best case you can for your side; nothing wrong with that. But there is an incandescently bright line between making your best case, and saying things that you know to be untrue. The latter is no good, not in any cause, however just.

There’s a chance, for the first time in many years, of restoring at least the goal of consensus among people of varying politics. We should be able to distinguish between good-faith attempts to inform us-- partisan or otherwise-- and self-interested, lying charlatanism. If the above is any evidence, that process of healing has already begun.

Maria Bustillos is a journalist and critic living in Los Angeles. This piece originally appeared in The Awl.

The Staggering Hypocrisy of Republicans

Great Fuzzy Moments in Fuzzy Reagan History

November 13, 1986: Saint Ronnie testifies he din't know nuttin' 'bout no money from arms sales to Iran being used to fund guerrillas in Nicaragua. Well, it always could be tricky figuring out what His Saintliness knew and didn't know.

by Noah

Sure, hypocrisy often comes with being a politician of any stripe. It comes from choosing a lifestyle where pandering knows no bounds. Some humans want to be liked by everybody so much that they will willingly fall all over themselves to do so; never mind how foolish they may look to anyone with a fully functioning brain.

Personally, if I was so insecure that I based my self-esteem on how many ignoramuses liked me, I'd hate myself. Likewise, if I had to base my self-worth on how people thought about someone else, a rival for instance…well, my mind would be so full of utter, twisted misery that I'd either walk around screaming gibberish or become a mass murderer on a truly Olympic scale.

And there you have it: politics defined. And no one does politics better than republicans. While too many democrats sit back passively and don't respond to attacks either as quickly as they should or not at all, republicans are always running pedal to the metal. Attack. Attack. Attack. Don't discuss with reason or logic. Just shout over your rational opponent. Why bother being a persuasive policy wonk with an intellect when you can just be loud?

Hopefully, no one will notice that your shouting is really an expression of your contempt for not only your rival but the voting public. It's also an indicator that you don't believe your cause will stand up in a rational way if calmly detailed.

So, with this in mind, I've gathered some examples of masterful hypocrisy from the Republican Party. Nobody does hypocrisy better.


1. President Obama's Iran deal

Fixing the blame for Iran-Contra (Paul Szep, July 1987)

Who is the stated hero of all republicans everywhere? Ronald Reagan, of course! The saint! Saint Ronnie! Never mind that the republican image of the saint bears little resemblance to historical fact. It's the idea of Reagan. They chant his name as if they were dancing around a giant pot of burning poor people, preferably minority poor people, or at least gay ones.

With President Obama's Iran deal, it's a classic case of "If he's for it, I'm against it." They began their childish tantrums about the deal before they even got the details or read it. Why should we save the world? Why should we give the world a victory if it means also letting that socialist, Marxist you-know-what also look good to posterity. He wasn't even born here, you know!

The bottom line of the deal is that President Obama's deal reverses the growing wave of Iranian centrifuges that escalated under his predecessor. The deal would cripple, or at least drastically delay, Iran's ability to develop a nuclear bomb until a time when our spy technology will be even better at ferreting out any such endeavors. For this, in the repug mind, President Obama is to be condemned as siding with Iran as a manifestation of some sort of imaginary secret Muslim brotherhood, and that's just for starters.

Saint Ronald Reagan? The hero of republicans everywhere? The name they can't wait to praise with glory in any public setting at any time, like some sort of Tourette's syndrome? What did he do with Iran? His administration sold them weapons, including missiles, and used the ill-gotten profits to wage an illegal war in Nicaragua: all totally impeachable.

But, hey at least he didn't get a blowjob from an intern! Probably.


2. President Clinton's affair(s)

Anybody know anything about a blue dress?

I wasn't even going to bring this one up, but I will since it makes clear a distinction between the meekness of democrats compared to Republicans which I referred several paragraphs ago. To put it simply: To democrats, Reagan's impeachable illegal arms deal wasn't worth fighting over. To republicans, a blowjob? Well, now that's impeachable. After all, no republican would ever partake in such activity. No siree! (Don't look at "The Shameful Record of Republican Sexual Misconduct.")


3. Donald Trump's big faux pas about Sen. John McCain

"What me worry?"

Don't you find it revealing that republicans got a lot more ticked off about Trumpy's glib comment about McCain than his all too seriously racist comments about Mexican immigrants being rapists?

A few days ago, Trumpy blithely said John McCain wasn't a war hero just because he was captured. Then he said he was. Rambling on and on as he does, like he's some sort of Twilight Zone Borscht Belt comedian, Trumpy then said he had supported McCain's 2008 presidential campaign. Then he called McCain a loser and he doesn't like losers. It's sort of like he was saying I was for him before I was against him while saying I'm against him before I'm for him. He did John Kerry at least one better.

So, what about John Kerry? When Kerry ran for president in 2004, virtually every republican in the known universe stated not only that he was not a war hero -- in the same war as McCain -- but that he faked his wounds, maybe even inflicted them on himself to get a free pass home, that he didn't deserve his Purple Heart, blah, blah, and more blah. It begat the term "swiftboating."

Mike Keefe (click to enlarge)

Now, these same republicans and their protégés are jumping all over The Donald for doing to war hero McCain what they did to war hero Kerry. In Republican World, you really can have it both ways. It's a wonderful life! Not only that, but Kerry is now the secretary of state in the Obama administration and he negotiated Obama's deal with Iran! It's a two-for-one superjackpot. If you're a stone crazy party of total hypocrites, that is.


DAMN, NEXT THING YA KNOW --

we'll have a whole party of republican politicians in Washington railing against a Democratic president's healthcare legislation while they avail themselves of essentially the very same thing at our expense.

Or maybe they'll even start saying, along with their media lackeys, that Obama won because he gave certain voters "free stuff." Hell, they might even do it while voting themselves some nifty taxpayer-funded farm subsidies and additional tax breaks for their corporate backers, which can then be kicked backed to them in the form of "campaign contributions."

Oh, and don't forget giving Exxon and the like billions in subsidies -- all at our expense, despite their even more billions in profits. Now that's socialism! But, as a real louse of a man once said, "That would be wrong."

A real louse of a man

#

Band Of Brothers? That Isn't How Republican 1%-ers See It

I asked David Mcavoy from Blue Arkansas to help me get my heard around the story breaking in his state regarding reactionary 1%-er Rep. Steve Womack and his bizarre attack on a former enlisted man-- a decorated active duty former enlisted man-- who, as one point, served under him. That ex-soldier is Ken Aden, Blue America's most recently endorsed Democratic candidate for Congress. David agreed and here's the post he put together over the weekend which brings everyone up-to-date:

Sleazy 1% Womack Attacks Progressive Democrat Ken Aden And His Military Record

-by David Mcavoy

“If Ken was a dynamic leader and outstanding soldier in every respect, I probably would have had reason to have crossed paths with him during that deployment, but honestly I don’t remember him,” said Womack.

Aden said they did cross paths and spoke to each other on several occasions.

“He had to cross paths with me because I was on the Force Skills team,” said Aden. “He knew who I was.”

When asked about the Force Skills Competition, the congressman compared it to “intramural sports” that gave the soldiers something to do.

“Bless his heart, Ken Aden does not need to over-embellish being a member of the Force Skills Competition,” said Womack, who at 54, is 20 years older than Aden.

“The primary mission over there was not related to what I call kind of an intramural sport. … It’s surprising that anyone would try to make some hay out of being on the Force Skills team,” said Womack.

The background on this, if you didn’t already know, was that Aden served under Womack at one point in his extensive military career. Womack could have simply said that he met a lot of people and didn’t remember Aden, but he couldn’t resist going the extra distance and dissing Aden’s service as a soldier. What’s more, Aden wasn’t touting the Force Skills Competition as service, he was just saying that’s where he shook hands with Womack. So yeah, Steve Womack is a dick. I’m sorry, that’s just the only way to say it.

So I placed a phone call to Aden today and asked him a little bit more about his service and recognition from the military. The first thing he said was:

I didn’t want to get into this as I think there are more important issues facing this district, but if this is the hand I’m dealt then I’m going to play it and win.

From there, I asked him to detail his military service, and learned that he’d received:

A Combat Infantry Badge, which you only get when you’re shot at on three separate occasions.

Airborne Wings for jumping out of planes.

4 Army Commendation Medals.

3 Army Achievement Medals.

3 Overseas Service Ribbons

2 National Defense Service Medals 

1 Army Service Ribbon
 
A Global War On Terrorism Expeditionary Medal

Iraqi Campaign Service Medal 

A Global War on Terrorism Service Medal

An Armed Service Reserve Medal

A Multinational Forces Observer Medal

3 Good Conduct Medals

An Arkansas Federal Service Ribbon

2 NCO Professional Development Ribbons, which you only get if you have troops under your command.

A Military Outstanding Volunteer Service Medal

A Presidential Unit Citation Award

A Joint Meritorious Unit Award
Regimental Affiliation with the following units 5/73 Cav and 39th Inf Brigade 

I was taken aback by all this, especially as Aden had to sit down and double check the list to make sure he’d gotten everything. On top of all that, Aden said he had performed a number of jobs in the military including airborne infantry, airborne reconnaissance, special forces weapons sergeant, peace keeping in Sinai, and, my personal favorite, airborne mortar-man, which from the way Ken described it amounts to jumping out of a plane with a big cannon strapped to your body.

Sounds pretty remarkable to me. But seriously, what kind of a Judas do you have to be to swiftboat someone you served in the military with like this? Now to be fair I’m sure there’s no way Womack could know about all of Aden’s accomplishment after their service together ended, but did he really have to go that extra mile and attack Aden’s service like that? Of course he didn’t, but he’s a miserable excuse for a human being and so he couldn’t resist doing what was uncalled for.

So, if you think that attacking a veteran’s service is the most rotten thing on the planet and should disqualify anyone who goes that route from public service, donate to Ken’s campaign either on ActBlue or through his website. This kind of thing has no place in our politics, and if Womack wants to pick this fight then we’ll show him that he’s bit off more than he can chew.

I’m thinking Steve Womack probably regrets opening up his mouth and dissing Aden’s military service.

In response to Womack’s diss Ken Aden’s campaign released documentation showing that he was not only awarded while he served under Womack, but that Womack personally signed off on it.

According to documents released by the campaign, Womack approved the awarding of an Army Achievement Medal to Aden. According to the commendation documents, Aden was recognized for his leadership that “motivated others by setting the example,” and for being “a vital asset to Alpha Company.” The Army Achievement Medal is awarded for outstanding achievement or meritorious service and is generally awarded to junior Army personnel.

Womack’s office is now backpedaling as fast as they can on the military service smear.

More from Beau Walker after he talked to Womack. He said Womack signed a large number of commendations as the officer at the top of the chain of command and doesn’t remember all those either. He reiterated that it would not be unusual not to remember someone except for an unusual reason. “He did not intend to belittle or condescend,” Walker said. “He served his country. That’s an honorable thing. He didn’t mean to demean his service.”

Bullshit! How the hell is this not belittling or condescending?

“If Ken was a dynamic leader and outstanding soldier in every respect, I probably would have had reason to have crossed paths with him during that deployment, but honestly I don’t remember him,” said Womack.

Aden said they did cross paths and spoke to each other on several occasions.

“He had to cross paths with me because I was on the Force Skills team,” said Aden. “He knew who I was.”

When asked about the Force Skills Competition, the congressman compared it to “intramural sports” that gave the soldiers something to do.

“Bless his heart, Ken Aden does not need to over-embellish being a member of the Force Skills Competition,” said Womack, who at 54, is 20 years older than Aden.

“The primary mission over there was not related to what I call kind of an intramural sport. … It’s surprising that anyone would try to make some hay out of being on the Force Skills team,” said Womack.

If there’s anything to take away from this, it’s that Womack sees a reason to attack Aden. Last year, I don’t think he ever even vaguely alluded to David Whitaker. Hell, for all intents and purposes, Womack’s campaign ended after he won the nomination against Cecile Bledsoe. For that matter, I don’t recall Boozman ever getting into the mud with one of his opponents. In other words, Aden has managed to get under the invincible Mr. Womack’s skin enough that he felt the need to attack him.

What’s more, he picked the worst possible thing he could hit Aden with and lost the scuffle. And that is a better bit of news than we’ve gotten out of the third district in a long time. So throw Ken Aden some change on ActBlue. No one, no matter how “safe” their seat is deemed to be, should be allowed to get away with this kind of rotten smear. And if Ken can best Womack like this in their first scuffle, imagine what he can do if he ends up with the resources to run a fully charged campaign. Contribute!

There was a lot of stuff that disgusted me about Womack’s attack that his staffer swears wasn’t an attack on Ken Aden’s military service. But I want to draw your attention to one of the many revolting aspects of it:

When asked about the Force Skills Competition, the congressman compared it to “intramural sports” that gave the soldiers something to do.

“Bless his heart, Ken Aden does not need to over-embellish being a member of the Force Skills Competition,” said Womack, who at 54, is 20 years older than Aden.

“The primary mission over there was not related to what I call kind of an intramural sport. … It’s surprising that anyone would try to make some hay out of being on the Force Skills team,” said Womack.

Keep in mind, that’s in addition to claiming Aden must have been a mediocre soldier or Womack would have remembered him. But anyway, following that attack and Womack’s non-apology that he didn’t even have the guts to deliver himself, this image from Womack’s 2010 campaign was brought to my attention:

Now look, I have never once in the past taken a shot at Womack’s, Griffin’s, Crawford’s, or anyone else’s military service, and I never will, nor will I allow anyone that writes or may someday write for this blog to do so. It’s wrong, pure and simple. I have gone after Tim Griffin for running on his service after working to disenfranchise soldiers serving overseas and I have gone after all three of our GOPer congressmen for voting to protect their pay in the shutdown but not that of troops serving overseas (Crawford pretty much called me a liar for that one. But what’s that the teabaggers shrieked about last cycle? Oh yeah, read the damn bill, Congressman.) But in those cases, it wasn’t their service I was attacking, but their treatment towards soldiers while waving their own uniforms at us.

See, Womack, to my knowledge, was pretty much a part time soldier who’s overseas service amounted to his six month trip to the Sinai Peninsula in 2001 where Ken Aden served under him.

That’s still admirable service and I’m not attacking him for it. (And if I inadvertently said something uncalled for or untrue I’d own up to it and not send La Voix running out to cover for me the way Womack hid behind his staffer.) But Womack started this by dissing Aden’s service, and after suggesting that Aden, a decorated veteran who saw combat in two countries, was exaggerating his service to get votes, you’ve got to admit that it’s pretty hypocritical of Womack to have run on “the courage to lead” based on his short stint in Egypt and then dis Aden for supposedly exaggerating his service. Again, any service is admirable, but trying to attack a decorated combat vet for supposedly exaggerating his service.


UPDATE

Like Ken, John Waltz fought in both Iraq and Afghanistan. And like Ken, he's running for Congress against a ruthless 1%-er. in his case, Fred Upton, the Whirlpool heir, one of America's worst job outsourcers. Waltz is a longtime veteran's rights advocate. I sent him some of the reporting on Womack's insult to veterans and early this morning he send me this statement:

It is bad enough when someone disrespects a veteran considering the slap in the face they get from the underfunded Veterans Administration, but from a sitting Congressman? Quite frankly he is not fit for office if this is the disrespect he holds for veterans.

You can find Ken and John on the same ActBlue page... if you're so inclined. Even $5 and $10 contributions go a long way towards building effective grassroots campaigns against two characters with loads of corporate money flowing in and with big donations from the Koch brothers and their front groups.

Real patriots will defend to your death the God-Blessed American Right to Lie -- and Americans' inalienable Right to Be Lied To

Pat Bagley, in the Salt Lake Tribune

by Ken

Okay, I admit it. Even I was taken aback by the scale of the lying the opponents of health care reform, or the warriors of the I Hate Obama movement generally, have engaged in.

Death panels???

In retrospect, though, I shouldn't have been surprised. After all, I'm the one who spent the entire presidential campaign jumping up and down screaming, "But every word out of the Republicans' mouths is a lie!"

I even articulated on several occasions the worry that all those lies being dumped into the innocent minds of impressionable Americans couldn't be good for the future health of the republic. What I had in mind, though, was mostly the increase in the quantity of sludge lodging in those minds, which seemed inevitable given the breathtaking amount of what was being heaved out. Say only a certain percentage of it stuck, you've still got that much more gunk mucking up people's brains, and in my darker moments I wondered whether we weren't being naive about just how high that certain "sticking" percentage might be. How many Americans still believe that Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11, or that there were links between Saddam and Al Qaeda?

Swiftboating as a way of political life

The risk factor I paid less attention to was the steady wearing down of resistance to the habit of lying. In retrospect, the Swiftboating of John Kerry can be seen as a sort of trial run, whether that was the intention or not. The immediate objective was strategic: to neutralize any potential advantage that a war hero might have in a national election against a draft doger-turned-deserter. I wonder whether even Karl Rove imagined that you could befuddle the public to the extent of blackening the reputation of the war hero in the eyes of the people to whom that credential should have mattered most. If you're a political strategist, or at any rate a poliical strategist of a certain sort (Karl Rove, for example), you notice things like that, and you surely begin to wonder just how far you could push it.

Here we are in 2009, and we still don't know the answer to that. We still haven't found the limit. The process whereby a provision to make end-of-life counseling available to people who might otherwise never give any serious thought to preparing for the one stark reality we all face is twisted into "death panels" that decide who will live and who will die truly boggles my mind, which is highly boggle-resistant. (The fact that in the American health care system so beloved by people like Sen. Max Baucus, we have insurance-company bureaucrats making such decisions every day, and not just with regard to the elderly, really ought to be mentioned but isn't strictly speaking relevant to our discussion of political .)

What's intriguing is that the right to lie applies only to the Right. Remember when Bill Clinton got caught lying about the blowjobs he got from Monica Lewinsky? For months we had to listen to those sanctimonious GOP hypocrites on the House Judiciary Committee whine, "But he l-i-e-d." (They went into kind of chant mode for "lied," so that the word was stretched out to about 10 seconds.) That was all they needed to justify the president's impeachment -- and, they hoped, his conviction. Now every Republican lies every time he/she opens his/her mouth, and there is never any price to pay. They're heroes! Meanwhile your average "Christian values" conservative seems to be engaged in sexual escapades i doubt our Bill would have dared dream of.

Lying to them for their own damned good?

Obviously it's important here to tell the right kind of lies, and to tell them in the right kind of way. So what are "the right kind of lies"? They're the lies that many people not only don't mind but prefer to the truth, indeed may even insist on. That's right, brothers and sisters, the American people stand by their God-given right to be lied to!

Someimes these are lies that make them feel good, but more often they're lies that make people feel bad, but bad in a special kind of way. People like to be outraged, especially if they get to play the victim of malevolent forces whose villainy relieves them of responsibility for all that sucks in their lives. Back in the good old days, when "Tiny George" Bush and "Big Dick" Cheney were doing their best to scare the bejezus out of their fellow Americans, those fellow Americans gobbled up every lie they were fed, and the more it made their juices flow, the more alive they felt. God, that War on Terror was great! We didn't actually know who we were fighting, or how we were fighting them, but we spent money on it like it was going out of style, and nobody we knew was getting hurt, and it just felt great to be afraid -- it gave us a reason to live! By gosh, it was more exhilarating than this week's episode of Dancing With Big Brother. And best of all, it was all the libruls' fault, and the towelheads', and the homos' -- let's vote them all off of the island.

In a sane society, the first time somebody mentioned the nonexistent "death panels," the response of any normal person with an undamaged brain would have been, "Huh? That really doesn't sound likely." But the Right has worked hard for decades now to minimize the presence in the population of undamaged brains, and so the utterly insane response was, "The libruls wanna kill Gramma!"

In reality, I suspect there are few families that don't have at least one story of a relative or friend who went through the agony -- for all concerned -- of a grueling final leg of life's journey made worse by failure to anticipate its grim realities. I can thank my mother, now enduring a lengthy version of that final leg, for having the foresight to make her wishes known clearly in a living will: She wanted no extraordinary measures taken. She made this clear in conversation as well as the living will, and while I would never decline any medical procedure that offered her some genuine hope, I know -- and all the health care professionals involved in her treatment know -- that that's all she wants.

Lacking a shred of human decency

Counseling of this sort is precisely what that obscure provision buried in the health leigslative drafts seeks to make sure is available to everyone. You would think, who could possibly object?

Unfortunately, in our present political situation we have an entire political movement -- not at this point a large movement, but one that by virtue of its very shrunken state has nothing to lose -- dedicated to telling Americans lies they will like, and pressuring its band of (almost literally) confederates to keep the faith. Was there a sorrier spectacle than Georgia Sen. Johnny Isakson, caught by the archdemon of the Shithead Right, President Obama, as having sponsored legislation to do just this, having to back off the only evidence I've encountered that he actually has a shred of decency?

I don't know how a creature like Sarah Palin is able to look in the mirror without feeling an urge to blow her diseased brain out. Even she isn't stupid enough not to know she's lying her putrid guts out. But she is part of a political movement that thrives on, almost exists only for, boiling hatred, and I guess she figures somebody's gotta keep that blood boiling. The people demand their lies.

The final crushing irony is how much of this is done in the name of Jesus. Jesus, of course, would forgive them all, because that's what he did. But I've got to think that even Jesus would have a moment there when he felt despair at the evil being wrought in his name.

Hmm, I've been going on awhile now (I do get worked up, as you may have noticed), and still haven't gotten to the specific lies that set this particular round of philosophizing in motion. In our 6pm PT post I promise to try to shut up so you can hear some answers to some of the health care lies.

#

What's really at stake in Swiftboat-style propaganda assaults like the Obama hatchet-job books? Oh, it's just the health of our democracy

Liar Jerome Corsi and lie-debunker Paul Waldman last night
on Larry King Live (thanks to Media Matters)


"This book and books like it destroy our political culture, undermine fair elections, inhabit the slippery space between politics and slander. . . .

"These books destroy civic debate on purpose -- and are fundamentally at odds with democracy. The goal of Corsi's project is not to discuss facts -- it is to destroy the very possibility of discussion by implying that a Presidential candidate is a sleeper-cell terrorist -- and doing so in the context of a huge broadcast media effort to convince the country of the same thing.

"That is not just factually wrong. It is wildly immoral. Whether or not Corsi published lies is not even half the discussion we should be having."

-- Jeffrey Feldman, in a Frameshop post today,
"What America Needs to Hear About Jerome Corsi"

by Ken

Every now and then a writer articulates a point that makes a whole bunch of swirling phenomena come into focus for me. Today our Frameshop colleague Jeffrey Feldman (most recently author of Outright Barbarous: How the Violent Language of the Right Poisons American Democracy) did it with some comments on the debate on last night's Larry King Live between noted liar Jerome Corsi (of the Swiftboat liars) and noted lie-debunker Paul Waldman (of Media Matters, most recently co-author with John Dean of Free Ride: John McCain and the Media).

If you don't immediately recognize Corsi's name, it first came to our attention when he helped orchestrate the Swiftboaters' lies to demolish John Kerry's 2004 presidential bid. Now he has dipped into his grab bag of snares and delusions to produce an alleged book (well, it's got covers, and pages with type on them between the covers, and it comes from a company formerly known as a publisher of actual books) that sets out to assassinate the character of the 2008 Democratic presidential nominee, Barack Obama.

PARENTHETICAL DIGRESSION: WOULD YOU BELIEVE
SIMON & SCHUSTER IS PUBLISHING THIS CRAP?

I really didn't pay much attention when I heard that there were two book-form hatchet jobs on Senator Obama coming out. Well, of course there are, I thought. Why wouldn't there be? That's one of the things the Right-Wing Noise Machine does: publish book-form piles of crap to stroke the prejudices of the wingnut faithful and, with any luck, hoodwink a few lazy or gullible readers outside the tent. They've got their own little publishing industry, and their own publishers, like Regnery. Then I gave it as little further thought as possible.

So I was kind of stunned to hear that Jerome Corsi's Obama hatchet job is published, not by Regnery or one of those other make-believe publishers, but by Simon & Schuster! Well, not Simon & Schuster exactly, but an imprint crated by S&S for celebrated right-wing propagandist Mary Matalin.

I don't know what was in the S&S folks' minds. Oh wait, I do. I'm sure some genius reading Publishers Weekly noticed one day that make-believe publishers like Regnery sell a shitload of books to their gullible and brain-challenged readers. And I guess that turned into a mandate: How can we get us some of that boodle? And somebody thought of Mary Matalin, and nobody thought to wonder whether her business plan would be to bring shame upon a publishing house with a long and honorable tradition. Or maybe nobody at S&S cared about that possibility. Heck, there's probably nobody affiliated with the company with any awareness of its history.

I would suggest a vigorous campaign to heap shame upon the current custodians of S&S, except that I doubt there's anybody on the job there who's capable of shame.

From the people I know who watched the Larry King extravaganza, while liar Corsi bombarded viewers with gobs of his made-up "facts," and kept challenging his adversary to answer his "facts," lie-debunker Waldman avoided the trap of debating phony facts and went after the kind of work Corsi does. My sources were all aglow over the job Paul did showing the phony up.

All my sources except Jeffrey Feldman, that is. Oh, he was filled with admiration for the job Paul did standing up to the liar. However --

It saddens me to have to acknowledge that, even though Paul did a great job on Larry King, I think Corsi won the debate -- unfortunately.

Why?

From the very start of the broadcast, Corsi made the debate about 'the facts' and kept returning back to that idea. 'I'm getting out the facts,' 'MM makes ad hominem attacks, but cannot refute the facts,' etc., etc. Paul did a great job pulling back the curtain (amazing job). But King never let the conversation come up to the real issue: this book and books like it destroy our political culture, undermine fair elections, inhabit the slippery space between politics and slander.

Left unsaid here is that it would have been futile, even fatal, for Paul to try to debunk Corsi's fake facts, and if he had tried, he would have ceded the ground to the liar. This is, of course, exactly what the professional liars of the Right-Wing Noise Machine count on.

I don't know that there's anything to be done about it, but I think it's desperately important that those of us who are able and willing to understand what Jeffrey is saying here at least become aware of the nature of the assault on democracy represented by the Swiftboating school of right-wing demagoguing.

At this point I should yield the floor to Jeffrey, who -- it turns out -- has a vision of how last night's debate might have gone differently:

Americans from all over the country have talked about this problem before--the problem of shady right-wing groups that assemble huge private backing and then wade into elections with the purpose of bullying a candidate off the national stage--so this is nothing new. But the media ignores us. Saps like Larry King choose instead to debase the hard work of researchers like Paul Waldman, and to willfully ignore the larger issue here: the wholesale undermining of our civic culture by deep-pocketed right-wing groups with a history of breaking election laws.

What America needs to hear from Larry King about Jerome Corsi is something like,"This book is filth. It goes against everything we believe in about honest, healthy civic debate. Don't buy it. Jerome, you are obviously part of a shady organization that uses money to sell lies with the goal of undermining serious debate in the 2008 Presidential election. The only reason your book is atop the best-seller list is because you have a giant political marketing machine working behind the scenes. Caveat emptor -- buyer beware."

Yeah, yeah. I know. It is hard to imagine someone like Larry King saying that on his show -- hard to even conceive of an America in which journalists use their broadcast power to protect our civic culture rather than promote shadowy figures who seek to destroy it. But imagining it is the first step.

Demanding it is what comes next.

Now this is a fantasy, but it's a pretty fantasy, and I'm afraid -- as Jeffrey suggests -- a necessary one. There's a line in there that's so potent, I think we all need to hear it again, so I'm going to pull it out, with just a tad of elision:

"It is hard to conceive of an America in which journalists use their broadcast power to protect our civic culture rather than promote shadowy figures who seek to destroy it. But imagining it is the first step."


BRAVE NEW FILMS GOES AFTER FOX'S PERENNIAL OBAMA SMEARS

One important weapon we have now against the Right-Wing Noise Machine which we didn't have in 2004 is Robert Greenwald's truth-telling team at Brave New Films. They've issued a new appeal:

The FOX smears are continuing and we need to stop them from spreading to the rest of the media. Watch FOX's laughably inaccurate distortions, as they smear Barack Obama on everything from the economy to race to patriotism to flag pins.

In the coming weeks, FOX will escalate its gross misrepresentations of Obama, and we know from painful past experience that some in the corporate media will spread FOX's canards by presenting them as fact. We must stop the spread.

At the link, along with the video there's a petition to sign, declaring:

"Fox is a Republican mouthpiece, not a legitimate news organization. Real news organizations must reject Fox's smears of Barack Obama and get the real facts out."

#

An afterthought, or maybe two, on the Media Infotainmenteers' preposterous assault on Wes Clark for telling the plain truth about McCranky

So, again, here is retired General Clark on Face the Nation Sunday expressing unstinting admiration for Young Johnny McCranky's courageous military service but insisting that none of that service is relevant to the job of presiding over the national security of the U.S. And then here's the howling horde of Media Infotainmenteers, braying that McCranky the war hero has been swiftboated!

Over there in the corner is candidate Obama whistling "Yankee Doodle" while General Clark is kneecapped, but that's not the part I want to come back to. Let's go back to the Infotainmenteers.

As everyone knows who is aware of what the general actually said, he never impugned McCranky's courage, military service, or patriotism, and there is no conceivable way that his actual comments can be twisted into any such thing. And yet all those shrunken TV heads babble away, and the Inside the Beltway pundits blogurgitate, with the result that from all sides we hear shocked demands for an apology and/or ridicule for the ludicrous or demonic (depending on your particular slant) political naivete required to attack McCranky's military service.

So, for example, we have ABC News political director Rick Klein blogurgitating:

Find me a single Democrat who thinks it’s good politics to call into question the military credentials of a man who spent five-and-a-half years as a prisoner of war.

.
As we know, the assumption behind this snotty imbecility is simply false. Now, my fantasy is to require Mr. Klein -- and all the other shrieking shrunken heads -- to answer two questions:

(1) Are you: (a) too lazy or (b) too stupid -- please specify -- to know that your statement is untrue, or (c) too dishonest to care?

(2) Four years ago, when Karl Rove promoted a band of ex-military pathological liars who really and truly swiftboated (hence the name) the naval combat hero John Kerry, were you expressing comparable scorn and/or outrage?

Think of Gerald Seib and Sara Murray blithering in the Wall Street Journal: "“The one certainty of the 2008 campaign, it might have seemed, was that Sen. John McCain would be acknowledged all around as a war hero for his service in Vietnam -- but apparently not.” Can we presume that this is an ironic recycling of the exact sentiment the duo voiced in 2004, except of course with "McCain" erroneously substituted for the real victim, Kerry.

So tell us, Mr. Klein, Mr. Seib, and Ms. Murray --

Do you chalk up your journalistic ineptitude primarily to: (a) laziness, (b), stupidity, or (c) dishonesty? With -- in any case -- a heaping helping of hypocrisy.

#