Quote:
Originally Posted by MsDemeanor
THIS is how you choose to evaluate a presidency? Comments like this - stupid ass dribble put forth by the Repugs and Faux Newz and then repeated by all thier little followers until people think that it's true - show so clearly what is so very wrong with this country - that too many people get caught up in nonsense shit instead of paying attention to what matters. I understand judging him on policy and stuff that matters, but to go all high and mighty over where he spent a holiday? Give me a fucking break.
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One of the things that gets me about where our politics are now is that they are almost COMPLETELY divorced from facts. It's not just that right-wing talk show hosts or FOX news say things that are factually untrue. It's that they know that for many people it does not *matter* if things are factually true or not. Most people, on hearing "President Obama isn't going to Arlington", wouldn't even *think* to Google "how many times have Presidents been out of Washington DC on Memorial day". This might seem trivial but it's not.
What this means is that our politics are no longer at all fact-based or fact-biased. If someone says that, for instance, Reagan was POTUS from 1968 until 1988 it no longer *matters* whether or not that is even possible! Let me repeat that--it no longer matters, to a non-trivial portion of the American body politic--whether or not some statement X is true or not, or even if the statement is *plausible*. When a culture reaches that point, they have a serious problem on their hands because politics stops--or more poignantly politics becomes nothing *but* scoring political points.
Were 'Death panels' in the HCR bill? No. Did it matter? No. All that mattered is that people *said* that they were in the bill. The facts were irrelevant and it was considered perfectly acceptable to vote against the bill based upon *false* information. Does it matter that other Presidents missed Memorial Day at Arlington? No. All that matters is that people say that Obama is the *first* POTUS to miss that holiday at Arlington.
So here we are with a slate of problems on our plate, any ONE of which is difficult but taken together appear overwhelming and we have both a political class and a body politic that, it appears, are no longer interested in making decisions based upon facts and, in fact, seem to be rapidly losing the ability to distinguish between a fact and an opinion or to acknowledge that there is a non-trivial difference between the two. The Gulf oil spill is going to be yet another example of this. In six months or a year, when clean-up operations are still proceeding someone--probably at FOX--is going to make a statement along the lines of "the shrimp catching industry wasn't big along the Gulf Coast, why enviro-whackos are making this big deal about shrimp when there were no shrimp there..." and people are going to react *as if* it were true. Very few people will actually take the 30 seconds it would take to Google 'shrimp industry Gulf coast' to see if, in fact, there was ever a thriving shrimping industry in Louisiana. They will vote for some politician who takes up what is said on FOX and parrot it even though it is demonstrably untrue. That person will go to Washington or their state legislature or governor's office or what-have-you and make decisions based on something but not based on facts. And then, when the next election cycle rolls around, that person will not be punished for making non-fact based decisions and pushing non-fact based policies.
How we get out of this problem I have no idea. The people who repeat these non-factual assertions aren't stupid. Some of them are quite intelligent. It's just that as a *culture* we have lost the ability or willingness to think critically and can no longer make a useful distinction between fact and opinion.
Cheers
Aj