The backlash has finally begun!

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The backlash has finally begun!

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1clamairy
Modifié : Sep 13, 2008, 5:47 pm

From the New York Times:

"But I can’t think of any precedent, at least in America, for the blizzard of lies since the Republican convention. This year, however, the McCain campaign keeps making assertions that anyone with an Internet connection can disprove in a minute, and repeating these assertions over and over again.


http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/12/opinion/12krugman.html?em

From The Atlantic:

"If McCain were a blogger, he would have had to retract by now. But he's running for president of the United States, so he can say anything, lie about anything and not have to answer for it. Yesterday, John McCain lied on national television about something that no one disputes in the public record. - In the last month, McCain has become the biggest liar in the modern history of presidential politics."


http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2008/09/mccain-liar-who.htm...

But, you might ask, why does he lie so much in the first place? From the Assocaited Press:

"Major news outlets have written such fact-checking articles for years. "But in the last two election cycles, the very notion that the facts matter seems to be under assault," said Michael X. Delli Carpini, an authority on political ads at the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School for Communication. "Candidates and their consultants seem to have learned that as long as you don't back down from your charges or claims, they will stick in the minds of voters regardless of their accuracy or at a minimum, what the truth is will remain murky, a matter of opinion rather than fact."


http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5jMtvzhUJmkDwVPsjJ0vhp-MDl1-gD934RHCG0

So, while I'm thrilled he's finally getting called on, I really wish it mattered to more people.

2Amtep
Sep 14, 2008, 3:30 am

Perhaps they should simply be matched in the art of the vigorous assertion. Can "John McCain is a liar" become the catchphrase of 2008? We've already seen that there is no need for long-winded explanations or examples. Just say it loudly and often and make it stick.

3Jesse_wiedinmyer
Modifié : Sep 14, 2008, 6:04 am

So let's get this straight... Because McCain's repeatedly made assertions that can't be substantiated, we should believe that anyone that calls McCain is a liar is obviously just vigorously lying? Fuck this shit. I want David Foster Wallace back.

4Amtep
Sep 14, 2008, 9:09 am

Are you saying that John McCain is not a liar?

5clamairy
Sep 14, 2008, 11:42 am

#3 - Hmm, do you think he hung himself because he realized John McCain is willing to sell his soul to become PotUS?

6clamairy
Modifié : Sep 14, 2008, 12:05 pm

I just have to add I found a quote Wallace made about McCain in June:
"The essay quite specifically concerns a couple weeks in February, 2000, and the situation of both McCain and national politics in those couple weeks. It is heavily context-dependent. And that context now seems a long, long, long time ago. McCain himself has obviously changed; his flipperoos and weaselings on Roe v. Wade, campaign finance, the toxicity of lobbyists, Iraq timetables, etc. are just some of what make him a less interesting, more depressing political figure now—for me, at least. It’s all understandable, of course—he’s the GOP nominee now, not an insurgent maverick. Understandable, but depressing."


Source: http://www.cosmopoetica.com/blog/archives/2008/06/04/david-foster-wallace-on-joh...

7EmScape
Sep 14, 2008, 12:51 pm

Last week on The Daily Show, there was a clip mash-up comparing things McCain said during his 2000 campaign against W, and what he's saying now...completely contradictory. I feel like all the Obama people would have to do is borrow that clip mash-up from The Daily Show and make it their commercial. If you played it enough times during say....American Idol and NASCAR, possibly the would-be McCain voters would have a light bulb moment...

8clamairy
Sep 14, 2008, 1:07 pm

#7 - Great idea, lily. Have you got a link handy? I'm in desperate need of a laugh.

9clamairy
Sep 14, 2008, 1:18 pm

Well, I can't find the one you were talking about, but this one is a lot of fun:

http://www.thedailyshow.com/video/index.jhtml?videoId=185103&title=RNC-Cover...

10clamairy
Modifié : Sep 14, 2008, 1:33 pm

Ooops. Double posts...

11DevourerOfBooks
Sep 14, 2008, 2:17 pm

The video that clamairy posted has some clips from the one lily was talking about, but I think this is the full-length one: Reformed Maverick. There's another fairly hilarious one about Sarah Palin and the Gender Card, parts of which were on clamairy's video too.

12clamairy
Sep 14, 2008, 9:00 pm

#11 - The 'Sarah Palin and the Gender Card' clip is one of the best I have ever seen.

13clamairy
Sep 15, 2008, 8:32 am

I'm loving this website, too: Count the Lies

14Jesse_wiedinmyer
Sep 16, 2008, 8:05 pm

Another David Foster Wallace quote, this time from a 2003 interview with David Eggers in The Believer -

The reason why doing political writing is so hard right now is probably also the reason why more young (am I included in the range of this predicate anymore?) fiction writers ought to be doing it. As of 2003, the rhetoric of the enterprise is fucked. 95 percent of political commentary, whether spoken or written, is now polluted by the very politics it’s supposed to be about. Meaning it’s become totally ideological and reductive: The writer/speaker has certain political convictions or affiliations, and proceeds to filter all reality and spin all assertion according to those convictions and loyalties. Everybody’s pissed off and exasperated and impervious to argument from any other side. Opposing viewpoints are not just incorrect but contemptible, corrupt, evil. Conservative thinkers are balder about this kind of attitude: Limbaugh, Hannity, that horrific O’Reilly person. Coulter, Kristol, etc. But the Left’s been infected, too. Have you read this new Al Franken book? Parts of it are funny, but it’s totally venomous (like, what possible response can rightist pundits have to Franken’s broadsides but further rage and return-venom?). Or see also e.g. Lapham’s latest Harper’s columns, or most of the stuff in the Nation, or even Rolling Stone. It’s all become like Zinn and Chomsky but without the immense bodies of hard data these older guys use to back up their screeds. There’s no more complex, messy, community-wide argument (or “dialogue”); political discourse is now a formulaic matter of preaching to one’s own choir and demonizing the opposition. Everything’s relentlessly black-and-whitened. Since the truth is way, way more gray and complicated than any one ideology can capture, the whole thing seems to me not just stupid but stupefying. Watching O’Reilly v. Franken is watching bloodsport. How can any of this possibly help me, the average citizen, deliberate about whom to choose to decide my country’s macroeconomic policy, or how even to conceive for myself what that policy’s outlines should be, or how to minimize the chances of North Korea nuking the DMZ and pulling us into a ghastly foreign war, or how to balance domestic security concerns with civil liberties? Questions like these are all massively complicated, and much of the complication is not sexy, and well over 90 percent of political commentary now simply abets the uncomplicatedly sexy delusion that one side is Right and Just and the other Wrong and Dangerous. Which is of course a pleasant delusion, in a way—as is the belief that every last person you’re in conflict with is an asshole—but it’s childish, and totally unconducive to hard thought, give and take, compromise, or the ability of grown-ups to function as any kind of community.

My own belief, perhaps starry-eyed, is that since fictionists or literary-type writers are supposed to have some special interest in empathy, in trying to imagine what it’s like to be the other guy, they might have some useful part to play in a political conversation that’s having the problems ours is. Failing that, maybe at least we can help elevate some professional political journalists who are (1) polite, and (2) willing to entertain the possibility that intelligent, well-meaning people can disagree, and (3) able to countenance the fact that some problems are simply beyond the ability of a single ideology to represent accurately.

Implicit in this brief, shrill answer, though, is obviously the idea that at least some political writing should be Platonically disinterested, should rise above the fray, etc.; and in my own present case this is impossible (and so I am a hypocrite, an ideological opponent could say). In doing the McCain piece you mentioned, I saw some stuff (more accurately: I believe that I saw some stuff) about our current president, his inner circle, and the primary campaign they ran that prompted certain reactions inside me that make it impossible to rise above the fray. I am, at present, partisan. Worse than that: I feel such deep, visceral antipathy that I can’t seem to think or speak or write in any kind of fair or nuanced way about the current administration. Writing-wise, I think this kind of interior state is dangerous. It is when one feels most strongly, most personally, that it’s most tempting to speak up (“speak out” is the current verb phrase of choice, rhetorically freighted as it is). But it’s also when it’s the least productive, or at any rate it seems that way to me—there are plenty of writers and journalists “speaking out” and writing pieces about oligarchy and neofascism and mendacity and appalling short-sightedness in definitions of “national security” and “national interest,” etc., and very few of these writers seem to me to be generating helpful or powerful pieces, or really even being persuasive to anyone who doesn’t already share the writer’s views.

My own plan for the coming fourteen months is to knock on doors and stuff envelopes. Maybe even to wear a button. To try to accrete with others into a demographically significant mass. To try extra hard to exercise patience, politeness, and imagination on those with whom I disagree. Also to floss more.

15DevourerOfBooks
Sep 16, 2008, 8:09 pm

Jon Stewart took on Palin last night. It was totally hilarious. Sarah Palin Won't Blink.

16krolik
Sep 17, 2008, 2:51 am

>14 Jesse_wiedinmyer:
Thanks--this is very interesting.

17Jesse_wiedinmyer
Sep 22, 2008, 4:13 pm

DFW's '07 piece, "The Future of the American Idea" from The Atlantic.

18KidSisyphus
Sep 23, 2008, 1:29 pm

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