Truth or Fiction, Take Your Pick

Right-wing hunters and gatherers of hardscrabble facts destined for the airwaves and gullible audiences are at it again. Questionable rationales receive media attention, perhaps to provide equal time for idiots. More likely, the networks and cable channels would be unable to fill their time allotments if they excluded unsubstantiated drivel.

That Nazi, Socialism stuff is especially annoying, and while it may serve some useful purpose to turn cameras on poster-wielding nuts and even to allow them occasionally to say ridiculous things into a microphone, they shouldn’t be mistaken for people who have something relevant to say. When a young woman asked Barney Frank how he could support a president who promoted “Nazi policies” he asked her “on what planet do you spend most of your time?” adding that “a conversation with her would be like talking to a dining-room table.” Unaccountably, some have suggested Frank’s retort was overly harsh but it seemed just right; besides it made me laugh.

The voices of unreason keep playing to a legion of dupes. Glenn Beck’s faithful audience, for example, embraces his gaping camera persona and absorbs his rhetorical flights with a desperate eagerness that inoculates them against a larger world vision and the rigors of logical thought. Nevertheless, phantom notions assert a demonic hold on the psyches of cultists and media devotees alike; no ill-conceived notion goes un-remarked or fails to be included in the lexicon of partisan fantasizers.

In a disturbing factually-strewn yet misleading interview on Washington Journal, Mike Evans discussed his book Jimmy Carter, The Liberal Left and World Chaos, in which he draws parallels between Carter and Obama. Although he has spent considerable time in The Middle East, Evans made some curious observations and continues to use the word Moslims rather than Muslims. He disputed the notion of Palestinian statehood suggesting that Jordan should take on the issue of their ethnic brethren. He also accuses Carter of being anti-Israel and said the Carter Center is a front for The Arab League.

When a caller pointed out that Carter received a Nobel Peace Prize, Evans countered by saying, well, so had Yasser Arafat who was responsible for murdering Leo Klinghoffer aboard the cruise ship Achille Lauro as well as the Munich Massacre of Israeli Olympic participants. In both cases, terrorist members of the Palestinian Liberation Front (PLF) committed the atrocities as distinct from Arafat’s Palestinian Organization (PLO). Some might call that a distinction without a difference, however the two groups did operate independently of one another at the time. Another caller asked if he ever appeared on Fox News and Evans replied that he is a regular Fox contributor on Middle East affairs. Ah.

Many callers from the ranks of the irrational and easily misled exhort Washington Journal viewers to “wake up” and realize that the president is leading us into Socialism if not Communism. People who can hardly put two understandable words together in a sentence insist they’ve read all one-thousand pages of the health-reform bill and by golly they don’t like it. On the other hand one woman said the president is a liar because he hasn’t addressed her specific problems - - a dying husband and a retarded adult child. And one caller insisted that Social Security and Medicare weren’t really socialistic government programs because payroll deductions provided retirement coverage, as if every aspect of medical care in an employee’s latter years were prepaid.

But the most factually-challenged statements of the week were those of former Vice President Cheney. In typical attack mode he said Attorney General Holder’s appointment of a special prosecutor to investigate possible abuses by CIA interrogators was politicizing the Justice Department. After the blatant manipulation of Justice during the Bush years his accusation was ludicrous beyond all measure. And his impassioned defense of “enhanced interrogation methods” makes it seem ever more likely that he played a major role in authorizing them, while questions remain about their effectiveness.

There are some defenders of the indefensible and others who just have a political bone to pick. But facts are still facts, no matter how difficult it can be at times to extract them from the constraints of the day’s prevailing claptrap, especially when it is promulgated by leaders and media ‘experts’ who specialize in deceiving the public.