We were on the road all day, so all I have tonight is this odd item from long ago, in which goldfish bowls were banned in Monza, Italy. Apparently, according to the town council’s Giampietro Mosca, a fish kept in a curved glass bowl “has a distorted view of reality … and suffers because of this.”
Nonsense. The same could be said about most of my liberal friends, and they seem perfectly happy.
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Conservative “reality:”
If we invade Iraq, it will be a “cakewalk” and “our troops will be greeted as liberators.”
Global warming is non-existent and is a “hoax.”
If you slash taxes for the rich (sorry, “the job creators”), the extra money in their bank accounts will “trickle down” and lead to boom times for all.
Lower marginal tax rates always lead to economic growth.
If you cut taxes, the government brings in more income.
The Bush tax cuts, the war in Iraq, Medicare Part D, and interest payments from the accumulated debt from them have nothing to do with the deficit.
2003: if the financial markets are deregulated, “the magic of the markets” will make sure that everything turns out fine.
2011: If we gut legislation to regulate the financial industry, we’ll never have another problem again.
If we disband the EPA and let companies who drill oil, burn coal, create chemicals, manufacture plastics, and build cars operate without meaningful regulation, nothing bad will happen to the environment.
Barack Obama is not an American citizen. He “goes around the world apologizing for America.” He increased taxes. His “war on the military” has slashed defense spending. Under his watch, illegal immigration has gone up. He is protected by media which give him a free pass while placing his rivals under unrelenting scrutiny. We don’t know where he’s from. “Have you ever heard from anyone he grew up with?”
The economy is collapsing, growth is slowing, and unemployment is rising.
“Reagan inherited a much worse economy than Obama.” (Hannity)
A trifecta: ““We’re headed to a Greece-type collapse, and [Obama] adds another trillion on top for Obamacare and for his stimulus plan that didn’t create private-sector jobs.” (Mitt Romney yesterday)
Each of these statements is demonstrably false, yet they are so central to right wing dogma that they are not even questioned. Those who espouse them are deeply attached to the ridiculous and the absurd. As a member of what a Bush administration official famously described as “the reality based community,” I find this puzzling. We’re long past the point where the curtain is pulled back and the Wizard is revealed to be a poor schlub pulling a lot of ropes. (Starring Romney as the Cowardly Lion, Gingrich as the Tin Man, and Rick Perry as the Scarecrow) While conservative types are perpetually aggrieved about one thing or another, they seem perfectly content with being completely untethered to reality. As we say in New York: go figure.
Q.E.D.
Do you have ANY unexpressed thoughts?
Sure.
Romney: I can balance the budget, raise defense spending, and cut taxes all at once.
All that the country needs to achieve fiscal prudence is to pass a balanced budget amendment, without having to specify where the cuts will come from or how the budget will be balanced.
Changing Medicare to a voucher system where seniors have to negotiate individually with insurance companies does not “end Medicare as we know it.”
Voter fraud is such a pervasive problem that it would be worthwhile to disenfranchise millions of Americans to prevent it.
But this is like shooting fish in a barrel: you could Google a googol of examples. Andy Borowitz today expresses it better than I possibly could:
http://borowitzreport.com/
That is one twisted, conservative straw man you just imagined One Eyed Man. I’m sure Malcolm could create a similarly stupid, liberal straw man.
I think we can agree that we all live in a curved glass bowl with a distorted view of reality.
Malcolm will refrain. Life is short.
Dr. S: not twisted at all, and certainly not a straw man. Watch the next Republican presidential debate, and I guarantee that you will hear most (if not all) of these memes repeated without being challenged.
While I’m sure there’s nothing quite so exhilarating as lashing out with a feverish tu quoque riposte, I don’t recall saying anything about conservatives in the original post…
You asserted that liberals have “a distorted sense of reality” without a single example, as though it is an a priori truth. It isn’t.
On the other hand, memes which are obviously false are espoused numerous times every day, from conservatives ranging from Rush Limbaugh to Willard Romney, as though simply asserting these things repeatedly makes them true.
As a self-described conservative who seeks the truth, one would think that you would examine the underpinnings of your ideology before snarkily insinuating that liberals – by which we mean responsible actors such as Barack Obama, the New York Times editorial page, and so forth, not bloggers or the OWS crowd – and their views are divorced from reality.
It falls under the rubric of stones and glass houses. If you believe that these memes are true, then have at it. If not, then you ought not to criticize others whose views are informed by reality and not fantasy.
Yeah, and of course that only happens on the Right.
Jesus, lighten up for once, Peter. I could get into yet another endless harangue with you, rebut your silly straw-man caricature, and point out destructive liberal delusions until my keyboard wore out — but frankly, the game isn’t worth the candle. We’d be at it for days, again, and get nowhere.
Earth to One-Eye: Liberals think conservatives are batty, and leading the nation to perdition; conservatives think liberals are. Here’s a news flash: Every so often there will be some humorous ribbing. This is one of those times.
Grow a skin. You’ll need it one of these days, when things really get ugly.
Not going to happen. As we used to say in grade school, “He can dish it out but he can’t take it.”
And please don’t come back with “Yeah, but you see, conservatives really ARE batty…” We don’t disagree about theorems, we disagree about axioms.
Save it for November. Anyway, the way things are going, if you wait another ten or fifteen years, you guys might even get your own country to run into the ground.
As I’ve said before, the political problem in America these days has gone way, way beyond bickering over this or that matter of policy. It’s that the fundamental visions of America on the Right and the Left — of what liberty is, of what creates prosperity, of what constitutes a strong, cohesive, healthy society, and of what the proper role of government is — have diverged so much that they are now completely incompatible.
The real problem in America now — and it’s a very serious problem — is simply that the Right and Left can’t get away from each other. And history teaches us that when a society reaches that point, people eventually DO find a way to pry themselves apart. History also suggests that it will not be pleasant.
Except it’s not a case of “they both do it” or a difference on axioms or theorems. It’s about simple and verifiable facts.
Reasonable people can disagree about whether Keynesian economics is good or bad, whether environmental regulations are reasonable, or whether we should have invaded Libya. However, what reasonable people cannot disagree about is, for example, Romney’s repeated assertion that Obama has slashed defense spending, when it fact it has steadily increased. Or his statement yesterday when he was able to fit three verifiably false assertions into a single sentence. And this is the guy who will probably end up running for President.
This is not to say that Democrats or liberals never exaggerate or use language to shade meaning. However, while I’ve named quite a few examples of conservative leaders unapologetically making statements which are flat-out wrong, I am hard-pressed to think of a single statement Obama has made which is demonstrably false. Can you? You can challenge him on plenty of his agenda, but has he ever said that up is down? I don’t think so.
It was not like this when leading conservatives included people like Bob Dole or Bush I, who were reasonable and level headed statesmen. It’s not your father’s Republican party any more. The above examples of conservative unreality are not only repeated ad infinitum, but they are core principles. There are plenty of elements of the liberal agenda which are up for debate, but these agenda are not constructed on an edifice of distortion and easily refuted “facts.” There simply is no equivalence here.
Oh puh-leeze.
Where to begin? the mind reels.
OK, just one, because I’m working late today and don’t have time to get into another endless pissing contest with you: Google “Well, that fence is now basically complete.” (The fence in question was about 5% complete.)
Every additional comment you make about how liberals and liberal politicians only ever tell the truth and stick to “simple and verifiable facts” and don’t have a distorted view of anything, while everything conservatives say and think is either a hallucination or a lie, only serves further to illustrate the point. That’s a distorted view of reality.
Just give it a rest for once, Peter, OK? Seriously.
Not according to Politifact.
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2011/may/16/barack-obama/obama-says-border-fence-now-basically-complete/
From Politifact:
Here’s one more, just from last night — deliberately misleading in the sneakiest way, and obviously intended to whip up class resentment:
Warren Buffett, who only pays himself $100k a year in salary, makes most of his money in the form of capital gains. Obviously he pays vastly more than his secretary in taxes.
Jeez, here we go again, even though I said I wasn’t going to. I’m done here.
Two things, Mal:
Don’t take the bait.
There will be bait.