On the Democratic left, non-factual statements about campaign finance reforms abound. Some reflect ignorance or misunderstanding of complicated campaign finance legislation and equally complicated systems for funding campaigns. But sometimes, advocates of campaign finance restrictions simply misstate simple facts of which they have every reason to be aware. Recently, Nation editor Katrina vanden Heuvel declared that liberal Democrat Russ Feingold lost his 2010 Senate race because of corporate spending unleashed by the recent Supreme Court decision striking down key provisions of campaign finance laws that restrained corporations. To substantiate this claim she linked to an interview with Feingold in her own magazine in which he directly contradicted her, explicitly stating that he did not lose because of spending unleashed by the Court’s ruling. When I pointed out this bold and shameless misstatement of fact, she repeated it, noting that Feingold’s statement should not be taken at face value: he denied being defeated by corporate spending because he didn’t want to ‘complain’. In other words, vanden Heuvel suggested, Feingold was not intending to make a factual statement.But, then, they are politicians. Having said that, I would go with Senator Feingold's view, his having been fetched up in Janesville, Wisconsin.
Regards — Cliff
This, indeed, is a serious problem. Al Franken's book title, though he's hopelessly biased to only look at lies he dislikes, about Lies (And the Lying Liars Who Tell Them), contains an important point once you get past the polemicism and the personalities, and it's not necessarily the one he was originally trying to make. Which is, once you resort to unreasonable hyperbole, let alone obvious falsehood, the underlying points you might have otherwise been trying to make for good, honest and supportable reason, are lost while everyone debates the unintended diversion.
ReplyDeleteA presentation author where I work, and with all best intention, recently and ill-advisedly included an internet factoid in one of his presentations, that there are more cell phones than toothbrushes in the world. The underlying basis for the statement was the artificially inflated numbers that the cell phone carriers use in competition with each other, and the fact that most of the world brushes their teeth without packaged products from the like of Oral B. The ear-catching sound byte, like the one referenced in the source article here, was clearly attended solely to gain attention, and is, like the source here, hardly concerned with the actual truth. But now, here we are debating cell phone carrier statistics and the original point is long since lost. Even folks who otherwise support the underlying gist of the presentation now doubt the credibility of all of it.
Ironic, but all too true.
Birthers whose goal is to discredit the President commit the same error in judgment when they espouse clearly erroneous "facts" that are all-too-easily proved to be falsehoods. I mentioned a few days ago my belief that Donald Trump is the best thing that could have happened for the President, and I believe it all the more so today. Birthers hurt reasonable Presidential opponents most of all, and it's darkly humorous that they can't see how true that is.
It's like Terry Jones burning Korans and winding up, essentially, killing Americans and others in Afghanistan by it, and only deepening the fervor with which adherents to the faith he clearly despises adhere to it.
People are sometimes extremely short-sighted about their style of argument, and their own worst enemies.