I agree that it is a minority (very small minority) view. However, I have a hard time believing that many right wingers think Bush knew about 9/11 ahead of time, in detail, and his administration would have to have covered it up. The definitely leftist San Jose weekly had a supportive article on it last year. Plus I got a definitely left wing oriented book from the library once, published in 2000, on stuff the powers that be are lying to us about. One of them was that Osama bin Laden was dangerous - absurd, the article claimed. Whoops.
But neither this nor any other left wing misconceptions appears to be held by as many people as birtherism, that I’ll grant you.
There’s a pretty big difference between those two statements. #2 is not claiming that Bush actually does have the lowest IQ of any president in the past 50 years, it’s claiming that “a study” exists that says so. I don’t see anything particularly implausible about this. There are studies that say all kinds of things. We’re not told this was a peer-reviewed study or that it was conducted by a prominent psychological researcher, so all #2 is really asking us to believe is that someone somewhere has published a claim that Bush had the lowest IQ of any president of the past 50 years. I don’t know whether that’s true or not, but it doesn’t strike me as an obvious falsehood.
The list in the OP’s study are facts related to Fox News content. So an analogous list would have to be currently relevant political facts related to CNN reporting. That eliminates a lot of the proposed ones, to the extent they are even false facts (and many of them are not).
Here’s some I would suggest:
The Citizens United decision changed the law on whether foreign corporations can spend in US elections
The new AZ immigration law allows people to be stopped by police because they look Mexican
Scalia and Thomas never disagree when their vote matters
The Obama campaign was mostly financed by small donors
The insurance companies were making record profits in recent years
Hollow point bullets are only used by people who want to inflict maximum damage
A chernobyl-style meltdown is possible with current nuclear technology
Medical costs constitute a substantial portion of the debt in over half of bankruptcies (or, bankruptcies involving medical debts are on the rise)
I thought he was impeached for perjury. I mean, that’s the charge they wrapped their accusations under, anyway. And obstruction of justice or something.
Is that not right?
I mean, he lied to his wife(obviously) and so forth, but didn’t he allow his lawyer to say he did not have a sexual relationship with Monica Lewinsky while under oath? I thought that was what he was charged with.
Amended wording for (2): According to a peer-reviewed study by a prominent psychological researcher, George W. Bush has the lowest IQ of any president in the last 50 years.
I’m assuming people go with the assumption that validates their ideology even when the facts don’t support it. And all those facts go against mainstream conservative ideology in one way or another.
As far as a liberal list I have no idea what constitutes the core beliefs of a liberal ideology that people are so invested in that they will skew the facts to support it (I assume environmentalism, strong public sector, etc) I’m sure it exists, I just don’t know what it would be made of.
As examples I guess
[ul]
[li]Ralph Nader used union busting tactics against his own workers[/li][li]Transportation contributes to climate change more than beef and flat screen TVs[/li][li]Health insurance profits are why health care is so expensive[/li][li]Dick Cheney has donated millions to charity[/li][li]Calculations by Paul Krugman showed outsourcing cost the US over 15 million jobs[/li][li]Single parent homes have numerous negative psychological sociological effects[/li][li]More money is sent in by wealthy governments to help the poor in developing nations than is sent by family members in the form of remittances[/li][/ul]
That is all I can come up with.
I still don’t see anything about this statement that should strike a reasonable person as patently false. Believing that Obama was not born in the US requires one to also believe that there’s a massive government conspiracy to cover up the truth. No such tinfoilhattery is required to believe that a prominent psychological researcher had a study published in a peer-reviewed journal claiming that George W. Bush has a lower IQ than Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush the Elder, Clinton, and Obama. It’s not like claiming that there’s a peer-reviewed study that shows George W. Bush is dumber than a box of rocks, or even that his IQ is below average. It’s plausible that a psychological researcher would attempt to compare the IQs of recent former US presidents, and if such a study exists then some president has to be on the bottom. There’s no obvious reason why that president couldn’t be George W. Bush.
Again, one does not need to believe that Bush is in fact the least intelligent of that group of presidents to accept the statement as true – just that a prominent psychologist came up with some way of estimating presidential IQs, ranked Bush below Kennedy et al, and got the study published in a peer-reviewed journal. Nothing about this seems anywhere near as ridiculous as the notion that Obama was secretly born overseas but has somehow managed to hide the evidence and become president in violation of the US Constitution. I think a reasonable person with no particular left-wing bias could easily believe that such a study of presidential IQs exists.
In fact, it appears there actually is a real study that estimates Bush’s IQ as being lower than that of any recent president: “Presidential IQ, Openness, Intellectual Brilliance, and leadership: Estimates and correlations for 42 US chief executives”, written by UC Davis Psychology professor Dean Keith Simonton and published in 2006 in the journal Political Psychology. It’s mentioned in the Wikipedia article on the Presidential IQ hoax, and Wikipedia links to a story in The Times (UK) that says the same thing. Note in the Times story that Simonton does not claim that his study proves Bush is a drooling moron, he estimated Bush as having an IQ that’s “about the average for a college graduate in the United States”. He even adds that his study may underestimate Bush’s true intelligence.
I am having weird problems with my Internet connection right now and can’t access the Political Psychology site to see if it’s peer-reviewed, and one could quibble about how prominent Simonton really is, but it’s looking like your amended statement #2 is at least close to being true. I don’t mean to make too big a deal about Simonton’s study though, since my main point here is that the very idea of such a study is not so absurd that no reasonable person should believe it.
Well yes, that’s the “whole point” of the article about the study linked to in the OP. But the “whole point” of my opening this thread was to question this other “whole point”. Are you saying that it’s impossible to come up with a list of falsehoods that CNN viewers would be more likely to believe than Fox viewers?
You’re right. I’ve heard an abundance of natural medicine ads on hardcore libertarian radio shows. They seem to market them with a conspiratorial twist; “the gub’mint and doctors don’t want you to know how effective natural medicine is”. On the left, it’s that anything natural and organic is better than anything man-made, natural medicine is environmentally friendly, they’ve been used by enlightened noble savage cultures for centuries, and so on.
Still, in my experience, whenever I’ve been at a Whole Foods or a large supermarket with a large organic/natural section the people pursuing the homeopathic tinctures tend to be rather “crunchy”. Check out this previous thread.
Maybe not impossible, but incredibly difficult, as shown by this thread. Especially if you are going for anything like equivalent falsehoods. (See Observer’s posts)
I heard that one a lot in the days after 9/11. So yeah, I agree that is a left-wing falsehood.
My own contribution, dating from the days of antipsychiatry:
Nope. About 10 percent of the population will have some personality disorder or psycho-medically induced mental problems that makes them very likely to inflict harm or grief on their fellows. Like borderliners, schizophrenics, the heavily depressed, and sociopaths.
I would also note that the second right wing falsehood, that “the health reform law will increase the deficit” is not a false statement but is actually true.
Some of the other ones are also somewhat on the technical side, e.g. whether Obama “initiated” the GM/Chrysler bailouts, or whether the economy is “getting worse” (which can be measured a lot of ways), and some of the others.
Point of which in this thread is that in looking for left-wing falsehoods, it’s not just whether you’ve actually heard a lot of leftists already making these claims, but whether these claims would be accepted by leftists if you constructed them.
I’ve never heard any leftist claim that Dick Cheney has been implicated in a plot to kill Obama, but I’ll bet if you took a random survey asking people whether they believed Dick Cheney tried to kill Obama, some non-zero percentage would say yes, and that percentage would be higher among leftists than rightists.
Admittedly an extreme example, but you get the idea. I’ve not heard any focus in right wing circles on whether “most” Republicans opposed TARP, for example. In general, people have the (correct) notion that TARP was more popular among Democrats than among Republicans and get confused about the details. And so on.
To use a less extreme example: if you asked “most Democratic Senators voted against authorizing the war in Iraq: t/f?”, more liberals than average will incorrectly think this statement is true. Again, this specific point is not something I’ve heard actual liberals harping about (much like conservatives regarding whether most Republicans voted for TARP). But it would undoubtedly find more support among ignorant liberals than among equally ignorant conservatives, the converse of the TARP statement.
The “valid” debate is mostly for public consumption, the deniers of climate change caused by human influence have catastrophically lost support for their denial for decades already in the scientific, journalistic and academic circles.
The public debate we are having nowadays is driven mostly by interest groups created in the past to deny things like “tobacco causes cancer”.
CNN is not a left-wing news source, but rather a right-wing one. They gave Glenn Beck a show before Fox News Channel did.
But anyway, in the spirit of the season, here are factually false statements that I often hear parroted from the left:
[ul]
[li]25 percent of all women have been raped.[/li][li]The Constitution prohibits the government from giving money to religious organizations.[/li][li]James Watt once said that there was no need to protect the environment because the Rapture would occur soon.[/li][li]School voucher programs give money to the rich.[/li][li]The Democratic Party passed the Civil Rights Act over Republican resistance.[/li][/ul]
“Often”? Parroted, as in your characterizations are accurate?
Just to take on a couple, which shed light on the others:
The Constitution does prevent the government from “respecting an establishment of religion”, even if it does not (necessarily) prevent it from funding non-religious activities of religious organizations. The constitutionality of “faith-based initiatives” is questionable.
“My responsibility is to follow the Scriptures, which call upon us to occupy the land until Jesus returns.” - James Watt, Washington Post, 5/24/81. If you’re going to take a stand on the Rapture vs. the Second Coming, go right ahead.
Do you know what the Southern Strategy was/is? The rephrased statement “The party representing the demographic and mindset of those who now generally affiliate themselves with the Democratic Party passed the Civil Right Act over the resistance of the party representing the demographic and mindset of those who now generally affiliate themselves with the Republican Party” is factual.
Depends on what you include. The health care program itself is a net expense to the government, yes - but the law included ending the non-value-added corporate giveaways in Medicare Advantage and the college student loan program, which made the net effect score as, yes, a deficit reduction.
Do the proposed voucher programs have means tests? If not, they will give money to the rich - not that this has been an objection I’ve ever heard. That objection is about unequal education as the rich drive up the price of schools by adding money to their vouchers. Which will happen even if they don’t get any money.
Never heard this. (Except for Goldwater.) Now it is true that those who opposed the civil rights act as Democrats became Republicans for the most part not long afterward, so if the statement had been made before most of them died, it would have been correct.