10 fictitious Tea Party beliefs
from Political Bookworm
WashPost
In a recent Political Bookworm item focusing on his book “The Virtues of Mendacity: On Lying in Politics,” guest blogger Martin Jay noted that “truth-telling is not always the best policy in even the most democratic of political contexts.” John Amato and David Neiwert get quite worked up over this notion, especially as it applies to the conservative right. In their book, “Over the Cliff: How Obama’s Election Drove the American Right Insane,” due out in June from PoliPoint Press, the authors explore the false stories they say are propagated by figureheads of the right such as Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and Lou Dobbs. Here they identify 10 beliefs of the Tea Party movement that they say are provably untrue. Amato is founder of Crooks and Liars, a progressive weblog. Neiwert is editor of the weblog Orcinus.
By John Amato and David Neiwert
We’ll admit up-front that the title of our forthcoming book,“Over the Cliff: How Obama’s Election Drove the American Right Insane,” indulges in some rhetorical imprecision: conservatives in the United States are of course not really insane in any clinical or legal sense, and we are not suggesting they undergo sanity hearings to determine if their rights should be suspended. We mean “insane” in the common-sense meaning of the word -- having taken leave of their senses.
What other word, after all, can properly describe the behavior of people who adamantly insist on believing things that are provably untrue? Einstein facetiously defined insanity as doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting different results. Defiantly clinging to exploded fantasies and thoroughly debunked false “facts,” even when evidence of their falsity is planted directly in front of them, is a kind of insanity too.
The numbers of things that the American Right -- embodied in its wildly popular new “grassroots” Tea Party movement – believes but that are provably untrue is actually a pretty long list. But we’ve put together the Top 10, listed by importance in their increasingly Planet Bizarro-like worldview:
(More here.)
WashPost
In a recent Political Bookworm item focusing on his book “The Virtues of Mendacity: On Lying in Politics,” guest blogger Martin Jay noted that “truth-telling is not always the best policy in even the most democratic of political contexts.” John Amato and David Neiwert get quite worked up over this notion, especially as it applies to the conservative right. In their book, “Over the Cliff: How Obama’s Election Drove the American Right Insane,” due out in June from PoliPoint Press, the authors explore the false stories they say are propagated by figureheads of the right such as Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and Lou Dobbs. Here they identify 10 beliefs of the Tea Party movement that they say are provably untrue. Amato is founder of Crooks and Liars, a progressive weblog. Neiwert is editor of the weblog Orcinus.
By John Amato and David Neiwert
We’ll admit up-front that the title of our forthcoming book,“Over the Cliff: How Obama’s Election Drove the American Right Insane,” indulges in some rhetorical imprecision: conservatives in the United States are of course not really insane in any clinical or legal sense, and we are not suggesting they undergo sanity hearings to determine if their rights should be suspended. We mean “insane” in the common-sense meaning of the word -- having taken leave of their senses.
What other word, after all, can properly describe the behavior of people who adamantly insist on believing things that are provably untrue? Einstein facetiously defined insanity as doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting different results. Defiantly clinging to exploded fantasies and thoroughly debunked false “facts,” even when evidence of their falsity is planted directly in front of them, is a kind of insanity too.
The numbers of things that the American Right -- embodied in its wildly popular new “grassroots” Tea Party movement – believes but that are provably untrue is actually a pretty long list. But we’ve put together the Top 10, listed by importance in their increasingly Planet Bizarro-like worldview:
(More here.)
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