The GOP that cried wolf

Politics & Elections
1

I’ve noted my distaste for Hillary Clinton has a lot to do with her inability to hold herself to account and tell the truth, if the truth would make her look bad. Since it’s going to be her or Donald Trump, and more than likely, it’s going to be her, the one thing I’m not looking forward to is having to separate fake scandal from reality.

The Republican Party and conservative media that operates as an arm of the Republican party are not trusted sources for information, anywhere outside of the very conservative part of the Republican party.

Variety Fox News and conservative media are the most trusted sources for information for the far right, outside of that bubble, they’re not trusted, and the reason is fairly simple. They don’t tell the truth. Like Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, they say whatever they think is good for them to say, regardless of whether or not it is actually true.

This is dangerous, especially if you actually believe the media has a pro-Clinton bent. And having seen a bit of it during the Bernie/Hillary primary season, it’s entirely possible that otherwise trustworthy journalists would focus less on the negatives associated with Hillary. I don’t think that’s especially going to be the case once she’s elected, but let’s assume it were true for the moment.

Who is going to spend every waking hour of their day looking for reasons to bring down the Clinton Presidency? Start with conservative media. They’ll be the main opposition.

The problem is, you can’t trust the main opposition to be honest.

Not their candidate for President:

Not their every-hour exposés about Hillary related scandals:

http://www.dailynewsbin.com/opinion/field-guide-to-defending-hillary-clinton-against-fake-scandals/24710/

(^Looong list of fake scandals)

Not their constant fabrications about President Obama:

http://www.forwardprogressives.com/debunking-almost-every-republican-lie-against-president-obama/

Not their coverage of their own party:

Not their e-mailers about what’s gone wrong with the country:

The bottom line, is that whatever the Republican party elected officials say about themselves or their opposition, whatever their political action committees advertise on TV, whatever they mail or email you, whatever appears on conservative media sources, is typically bullshit.

It’s the kind of bullshit that is simply nakedly partisan.

If all they do all day long is invent fake scandals for Obama and Hillary, who is actually going to hold Clinton’s feet to the fire when she inevitably lies to me again? There’s a reason why we need to have at least two parties and at least two perspectives, if not more. The reason is because it’s really bad for the country when the people in charge have no accountability.

If the people who hold politicians accountable to the American people aren’t even accountable to the truth, or for the consequences of their lies, then politicians will go on lying, and the media will go on presenting two different versions of the facts.

And when it turns out that Hillary did do something wrong, how are we going to separate that from fiction? Conservative media is broken. The Republican party is broken. And the Clintons have enjoyed positive media attention from the mainstream press for quite a long time.

It’s not enough to simply despise the political opposition and be willing to say anything to take them down. The “loyal” opposition in this country has a duty to the people to actually tell the truth about what’s wrong. And when they fail in that duty, to act as a check on those in power, then those with power will go unchecked.

To those who think it’s great that Fox News tells you exactly what you already believed in your gut, and never presents you with an idea that you hadn’t already formed in your head, or suspected all along, and think it’s great that they tell you everything you want to hear every day, and they tell you that you’re the real patriot, the real intelligent voter, and everyone else is a moron…

You get the government you deserve, and the media you deserve. When you think it’s perfectly okay to be lied to all day long as long as it is in the service of the politics you support, you’re going to end up with a Democratic President, and possibly a Democratic Senate, a party in power with a media that supports them. Everything that sucked about George W Bush and his GOP cronies in the Congress, and his 24 hour news channel that sucked his balls all day and every day and attacked every single liberal who tried to act as the loyal opposition.

That’s going to be you come November. Unchecked power and a loyal media apparatus for your political opposition, and being in the position of only being able to investigate and report what they’re doing wrong… and then having no one believe you if you actually find something.

And you’ll be told you’re only saying it because you’re a disloyal partisan, who values your side over the good of the country.

That’s what’s coming next.

And that’s shitty. I speak from experience.

Until you demand that your own side tells the truth, no one is going to care what you have to say, outside of your right-wing bubble.

When Hillary Clinton lies, I have always called it like it is, and said how much it disgusts me.

**When Brian Williams told us a lie, he *lost *his job.

**And what did he lie about? He embellished personal experiences.

He didn’t invent fiction about the President and invent fake news.

**When Sean Hannity tells you a lie, that IS his job.

I need you to demand better.

Otherwise when Hillary becomes the Democrat’s version of Richard Nixon, which she is in my opinion, and you *actually *have dirt on her, she will stay in power, because your guys are even bigger liars than she is and no one believes you, and other forms of media won’t cover it because they like her politics.

*I *do not want that to happen. *
YOU *do not want that to happen.

Here’s an example where a liberal and a conservative could be in full and complete agreement. That’s why you need to get off your ass and demand the truth and demand accountability from your own side, and stop listening only to people blowing smoke up your ass and telling you only what you want to hear. And when your liberal friends insist that Fox News is garbage, maybe think that it’s not just for partisan reasons that they’re saying it. Maybe the reason why they’re saying it is because it’s really dangerous to have a partisan propaganda machine masquerading as the news. Especially if the day does come when the mainstream media drops the ball. And it does happen, just with nowhere near the frequency you can expect from an opinion channel where talk radio hacks masquerade as newsmen.

They’re not journalists. They report only what makes Rupert Murdoch happy. And until recently, whatever made Roger Ailes happy. And he was not a trustworthy or ethical person. And the people that work there are afraid, because they have to toe the line or they’ll lose their livelihood. And because their bosses act like mafia thugs.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/24/business/at-fox-news-kisses-innuendo-propositions-and-fears-of-reprisal.html?_r=0

It’s all coming out, only because Roger crossed too many legal lines. But it’s been essentially a mafia organization since it began. Now that the mafia don is gone, they feel safe enough to speak out.

That’s Nixonian behavior.

So when Hillary pulls the same kind of crap, I need a non-Nixon media to tell me about it. That’s the only way our society functions. Otherwise, all I can assume is that both of you are full of crap, and I can’t know for sure what happened.

^This is what happens when a mainstream (call it liberal I guess) organization tells one lie. Maybe not even *telling *a lie, simply believing in a forgery and not doing your job well enough.

In liberal land and moderate land,*** everyone loses their jobs when that happens. ***It never happens again without someone else filing for unemployment.

So get in there! You’re turning our nation into one of either cynics who believe in nothing, or a bunch of naive doofuses who believe whatever one side tells them. Do your goddamned job as the loyal opposition and demand some fricking accountability.

I’ll try really hard to believe a word you say, when you start caring what your side says.

That is all.

2

First link is borked, can’t edit post or it vanishes.

That’s the only broken link I think.

3

You must live in another dimension where the New York Times and other sources that are regularly accused of being liberal by the right were not the ones that broke many of the scandals. That in the end they turned to be weak sauce or non scandals never seems to be a problem for the right wing.

4

I wasn’t exactly sure what the OP was on about, but if that’s it, I think he’s just wrong. The media have not been kind to Hillary in this election cycle. If anything, the opposite. I can’t get worked up about the idea of HRC becoming a teflon president because the NYT can’t get past fawning all over her. And while I share the OP’s distrust of her, to an extent, I think putting her in the same category as Nixon is way over the top.

5

My take on the issue that the GOP has indeed damaged our ability to have rational and critical discourse in the country. By crying wolf over President Obama’s many (imaginary) sins and Hillary’s (imaginary) scandals, they’ve created a world in which any future claims have no weight. They’ve overused accusations of fascism and tyranny to hyperbolic excess, so that when a genuine menace comes along (Trump) we can’t effectively deal with it because those words have lost all meaning. For example, calling someone a Nazi has basically come to the point where it gets applied to anyone a person happens to disagree with. So when a genuine white supremacist fascist comes along that uses the same playbook as Hitler, everyone shouts “Godwin’s Law!” and the critic loses their credibility.

6

I tried. :smiley:

7

The idea that word loses meaning when it’s misused to demonize an opponent is indeed a known outcome. Shame it takes forever for the general public to figure out.

8

She lied about something that didn’t matter and she wasn’t going to get in trouble for, her emails. The only reason she lied was because she needed to look good in the middle of a campaign season, but it was immediately exposed to be a lie. I cannot trust her to do this when she can actually cite national security or whatever, to decline to respond to pointed questions, when it doesn’t apply and when she’s actually in office, because this was a scenario where there were going to be no repercussions, other than potentially electoral ones, for relaying what happened truthfully.

When I look for more information on the matter, when I google “Hillary email” or “Hillary email lie”, what I get are right wing media attack pieces, or I get Bill Clinton defending his wife. I have to specifically type in “**facts **about Hillary email” etc, include the word facts, otherwise the search results are opinion pieces and hatchet jobs by right wing media sources or Democratic party spin and defense of Hillary. If you look at the wikipedia article on the incident, it talks about the responses by the two parties, which were predictable. There also doesn’t seem to be a conclusion regarding what level of falsehood went on.

I’m not sure which source to use if I want to learn more about this incident.

That kind of distortion created by the right wing media and sympathetic media and partisan media and opinion pieces classified as news, is beyond cumbersome. Try typing in several versions of the following: Hillary lied about the emails, Did hillary tell the truth about the emails, or simpler searches like Hillary email controversy, and see how many results you get you’d actually trust to be impartial, and not coming from Republican or Democratic spin machines.

There are good media sources out there, fortunately. But it’s buried in garbage. Finding the facts shouldn’t be a needle in a haystack operation.

And sometimes, rarely, the mainstream media does drop the ball. I cited two famous examples of mainstream trusted newspeople losing their jobs over failing to do their jobs properly. When that happens, I **need **the critics of the mainstream news people to not be utterly corrupt partisan hacks, or else it can be weeks or months before there’s a correction, and by then, the incorrect version of the story has already been out there and accepted as truth and people are slow to accept new versions of what happened after it came from a source they trust and it’s been a while.

It would also be nice to not have to respond to conservatives in a debate by first immediately dismissing the citations from the websites they frequently visit, and asking them to first cite a genuine piece of journalism. Why is that a thing? Why do we always need to sort out which set of facts we have to use, before we can even talk to one another?

It’s bullshit.

All of this is utterly terrible for our national discourse, and when there’s a real hot button issue, and party loyalists are reacting with skepticism and defensiveness because their guy (or gal) is under attack, the response shouldn’t first be “your source is partisan”. It would be nice to skip directly to the facts of the case first.

9

I also went against my usual policy in the OP and cited left-wing journalistic pieces. Huffington Post, forwardprogressives? That’s not typically my bag. But that’s who is covering those stories I was talking about.

I don’t know how much I can trust these media sources.

And the supposedly non-partisan media that I should be trusting has the bias of attempting to present both sides as being equal, or shying away from controversy and taking a deliberately neutral stance, or simply reporting what Donald Trump says without fact checking it (a practice it took them a while to abandon, too long in fact).

I need a news source that will tell me what happened, along with the facts, regardless of what the subject of the story is about.

I can half-trust liberal media to give me the negative side of Republicans and the positive side of Democrats. But that’s not the whole picture.

I can almost completely distrust conservative media to actually give me the facts, I can find positive things about Republicans they endorse, and negative things about everyone else, but facts are few and far between.

I can trust the media that tries to stay neutral, to some extent, but to another, that neutrality is its own bias. Not fact-checking and simply repeating what politicians say is not the same as journalism.

The worst of the three is the conservative media. Their job should be to correct the liberal or mainstream media when their liberal or lack of fact checking bias comes into play.

But you can’t trust them at all. Usually, it’s the liberal media itself, or simply a rival news organization that isn’t Fox, that ends up correcting things that are wrong in the mainstream media. That self-policing is slow and comes too late sometimes.

10

Because if facts and reason were sufficient to convince humans we wouldn’t be faced with most of the problems we are faced with today.

11

here’a hint.
actually watch Fox News.
sure , they are right wing usually , but not all-in for Trump .

on flip side , all other tv networks are pro Hillary with no hiding it.
print media ? vast majority are left wing pro Hillary.
right wing pretty much owns political radio.

12

Search engines aren’t a good measure of what the media is reporting. Search engines suck. Half the time I search for some specific recent event, I get mostly hits from 5 years ago.

13

Well, first, watch Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, The Daily Show, The Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore, and Full Frontal with Samantha Bee. Yes they are all comedy shows to one extent or another, and they all come at things from a liberal POV. But they are up front about that POV, they are not afraid about skewering the left when necessary, and they have a lot of truth in their comedy. At the least, they can give you an idea of places to start looking for more information. And they will have a lot of facts in there, which is more than you can say for Fox or wingnut radio.

That is something you can say about the week night line up on MSNBC also. They are definitely giving a left leaning reading to news stories, but they are up front about it. They don’t try to claim to be impartial or unbiased, and Rachel Maddow at least is always polite to her conservative guests, even when you can tell they are saying things that she disagrees with completely.

I check a variety of websites, Talking Points Memo, Raw Story, Politico, Real Clear Politics, to get a diverse take from both sides. TPM and Raw Story are more liberal than RCP and Politico are conservative, but frankly, I haven’t found a more conservative website that I trust will actually give me facts. Raw Story is my least favorite site because they have so much liberal opinion there that can be just as crazy as the right wing nuts. But they manage to keep enough decent stories I check them out a couple times a week.

Try looking for podcasts dealing with news or politics. On The Media does a pretty good job dissecting news outlets and they way they deal with stories, which can be a good way to get an idea about which ones are reliable. Another place that looks at how various news organizations do things is Pressthink.org by Jay Rosen.