Forget Crossing the Line, Who Erased It?

Straining my ability to care even a whit, seems the current brouhaha over the did she exist scandal surrounding football player Manti Te'o illustrates for us a problem with modern "journalism," the invisible line between the old style adhering to print standards of actual journalism and new wave of teevee commentators spewing whatever comes into their heads in search of ratings, controversy, and cash.

Irony of irony, the new intertubes journalists at Deadspin have done the work of actual journalists, by you know, fact checking what someone says rather than just transcribe athlete's fantasies, making phone calls, and checking public databases.

Yet having done that, the writer seamlessly transitions to talking head teevee personality, free to give his own opinion as fact, a pasty faced white athlete wannabe jock sniffer recently released from his mama's basement now wondering if he "can ever trust Manti again."

Who cares if the kid had an imaginary girlfriend and fell victim to a hoax or if he invented a life for himself he wished he had, a heroic victim of outrageous fortune?

If the former, he shares with me my sin of trust in people; for no matter how many times others have betrayed me, am still tempted to trust.

If the latter, then also have I invented a girlfriend, or at least thought about how to make certain persons happy like Mandy the epicurean philosopher who hated her given name but had caring, ice blue eyes or a newly minted nurse with laughing eyes and aristocrat's fine fingers and manicure or Deidre my bartender withe the 3' diameter Dancing Shiva back piece tattoo, to think of being with one of them and caring about their hurt places, inmost needs, to try and synchronize breathing when falling asleep next to and holding a partner in the darkness of my night..

Society tells us we ought not suffer loneliness, with every Viagra, Cialis, and incontinence ad on teevee.  We expect our teevee athlete heroes to live the lives we cannot, so much so they feel the need to conform to what they feel expected of them, perhaps by investing into someone they've never physically met the qualities they seek in a partner.

"Everybody wants to be somebody else."

All humans have an instinctual need to become more than the sum of their pasts.  So we fail to see other parts of ourselves or invest into fantasy what we wish to become, or become addictive and embrace but a part of life as the whole, because as the Godz sang, we're all some kind of junkies: booze junkies, bible junkies, dope junkies, love junkies like me carrying kernels of past realtionships and hoping  to fan them like embers into flames of a new love.

We used to depend on journalists to research and help us navigate the sliver or chasm between truth and mere fantasy or even lies, to discern through cross referencing and fact checking and old fashioned shoe leather to help us realize that all our heroes have feet of clay, all live as human with fears and foibles and weaknesses.  In these tellings and stories as with bards of old, we learn we have good sides and bad sides and must ever use vigilance and discernmnt to perceive and then do the good, to help fellow humans rather than just ourselves.

Nevertheless, these modern day bloggers, besotted wretches, o longer have the purity of ink on their hands but live with and profit from sin of hubris of others, having found fault; they opine on it, pretending themselves above the human fray, casting judgment but accepting none, moving from the intertubes to print to teevee, from reporting to commentary to rank supposition, blithely ignoring humanity of their subjects while refusing to see their own faults, spawining a generaltion venerating the rantings of Skip Bayless and Rob Parker and Stephen A and whomever else you might name.

Where did the line between fact and fiction go?

Buried beneath the bottom line which means money rules all, so controversy gives the goods to teevee,

Mitt the Mendacious

Can hardly wait for the Vice Presidential debate tonight.

OH screw it, who am I kidding?  Debates themselves don't matter; only the following media narrative matters, at least according to the media itself.

Let's see if we can predict headlines for Friday: Biden Combative but Fails to Land Knockout Blow, Ryan Cool under Fire, Ryan Defends Romney Economic plan.

No where in the mainstream media will you read that paul Ryan lied his freakin' ass off, avoided the truth as if it were a leper, and used to smirking grin to conceal the death head visage of the grim reaper lurking in his plans to cut medicaid budgets and give block grants to states to wholly manage the program.  That might work in states where legislators have an actual conscience but not in FL where Republican't ideologues put their cut taxes for the rich first and health of citizens last, especially those folks of lower economic class.

Note here lower economic class includes grandparents retired and now working part time (35 hours a week) at Wal Mart which will not provide health insurance for workers even though 6 of the combined Walton progeny make more than the bottom 30% of the US population.

So don't expect any so-called liberal major media (What Liberal Media? The Truth About Bias and the News0 to point out that plans of plucky P90x paul Ryan fail basic arithmetic.

They just don't add up.

You can't drive from New York City to Los Angeles without breaking the speed limit.

You just can't, but otherwise reliable if shallow legitimate news organizations either cannot bring themselves to believe this Republican't presidential ticket has adopted the strategy of the Big Lie: lie often, lie no matter how ridiculous, lie with a straight face, and ridicule those who point out 1 + 1 equals 2 and call them liars.

The campaign employs the Gish Gambit strategy, spewing so many lies in a short time so that no reasonable person can respond to them in a short attention span debate.

[One reason that I criticized Romney's debate performance – though many other Americans, including many Democrats, disagreed with my assessment – was that I felt his lying and his squirrely behavior were more important than Obama's sluggishness. Telling lies while waving your arms shouldn't trump telling the truth in a moderate tone.

Indeed, as a journalist, I simply cannot abide politicians who lie systematically, who don't just trim the truth once in a while but make falsehoods a strategic part of their politics and policies....

Thus, minor threats, like peasant uprisings in Central America, were portrayed as part of a grand Soviet strategy to invade the United States through Texas. The strength of the Soviet Union was itself exaggerated to justify a massive U.S. military build-up. Today's neocons cut their teeth of such distortions and lies.

Post 9/11, with George W. Bush in the White House, this neocon strategy of fear-mongering led the United States into the debacle of the Iraq War (in pursuit of imaginary weapons of mass destruction).

Now, less than a year after U.S. military forces left Iraq - and with a withdrawal from Afghanistan finally underway - the latest polls suggest that the American voters are shifting toward the election of another neocon President who promises more soaring rhetoric about U.S. "exceptionalism" and more interventionism abroad.

It's almost as if many Americans like being lied to.]  emphasis added
http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/13887-mitt-romney-lies-to-the-world

[One of the problems striking workers cite is the lack of access to full-time working hours, which prevents them from obtaining even the meager health benefits the company offers. The National Consumer’s League (NCL) told Raw Story that Walmart’s refusal to provide those benefits by exploiting part-time labor leads to a number of spillover costs that taxpayers ultimately pick up.

“Many Walmart workers are dependent on public assistance programs due to their low wages and not having access to full time jobs and being denied benefits because they’re not working the number of hours required to get access to those benefits, or the benefits are just so expensive that on their low wages they just can’t afford them,” NCL Executive Director Sally Greenberg said in an exclusive interview. “Walmart has a record of even working with employees to sign them up for public assistance programs, which we think is really atrocious.”

She added that Walmart’s position of keeping wages low in order to pass the savings along to consumers doesn’t wash either: “Companies that pay a decent wage and provide benefits to their workers help create a middle class that is able to buy the kinds of products that Walmart sells,” Greenberg explained. “It is actually a plus for companies if they provide fair compensation to workers. It’s also better for consumers when they’re able to actually afford housing, healthcare and have access to benefits of the kind we think Walmart, with all its success and profits, ought to be able to pay workers.”

The famously anti-union retailer, which says it employs more than 2.1 million people, raked in $114.3 billion in revenues during just the second fiscal quarter of 2012, earning a profit of $4.02 billion. Berkeley labor economist Sylvia Allegretto found last year that just six of the Walton family’s richest members have a combined wealth greater than the bottom 30 percent of American earners put together.]  emphasis added
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2012/10/10/walmart-worker-strikes-go-viral-hitting-28-stores-in-12-states/

Willard Versus Facts

Suppose his inability to do basic arithmetic ought not surprise me as his "work" experience went thus: borrow millions to buy a company by bankrupting it with debt, make millions in management fees, sell the business before it craters, and walk away from the ruins whistling on his way to the bank.

[— One of the biggest disputes was over tax cuts. Obama argued that Romney's plan to stimulate the economy includes a tax cut totaling $5 trillion that, Obama said, isn't possible because the Republican nominee is also promising to spend money in other places.

Romney flatly disputed that number. "First of all, I don't have a $5 trillion tax cut," he said.

Who's right? The Washington Post's Fact Checker says the facts on this one are on Obama's side. The New York Times notes that Romney "has proposed cutting all marginal tax rates by 20 percent — which would in and of itself cut tax revenue by $5 trillion."

FactCheck.org has weighed in too, tweeting during the debatethat "Romney says he will pay for $5T tax cut without raising deficit or raising taxes on middle class. Experts say that's not possible."]
http://www.npr.org/blogs/itsallpolitics/2012/10/03/162263539/romney-goes-on-offense-pays-for-it-in-first-wave-of-fact-checks?ft=1&f=1001&sc=tw&utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter


http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-pn-fact-check-romney-healthcare-20121003,0,5148610.story

http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-pn-fact-check-debate-romney-tax-20121003,0,3813713.story

http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-pn-fact-check-romney-medicare-cut-20121003,0,3111207.story

"11 Things The GOP Doesn't Want You To Know About The Deficit"

[The national debt surpassed a record $16 trillion on Friday: a massive figure thatRepublican politicians are using to slam the Obama administration....

But while Republican politicians claim that an Obama spending binge is responsible for the ballooning deficit, the truth is not so simple.

1.  The deficit has ballooned not because of specific spending measures, but because of the recession....]
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/05/republican-party-deficit_n_1858295.html?ref=topbar

Willard Romney's Manifold Lies

533 lies in 30 weeks, quite an accomplishment for any human, even one running for President of these United States.

[Mitt Romney says many, many things that are not true. He says this despite being in possession of the correct facts of the matter.

Which is to say that Mitt Romney lies. A lot. He lies more than any other national candidate for office in my lifetime. And I was born before the Nixon administration.

This is documented. Proven. Validated, verified, demonstrated, catalogued and quantified. Mitt Romney lies.

Here are 30 — 30! — of Benen’s weekly “chronicling” posts. These are all backed up and sourced. These are not assertions, interpretations or allegations. These are facts, actual instances.

Over the past 30 weeks, Mitt Romney has told lie after lie after lie: I, II, III, IV, V, VI,VII, VIII, IX, X, XI, XII, XIII, XIV, XV, XVI, XVII, XVIII, XIX, XX, XXI, XXII,XXIII, XXIV, XXV, XXVI, XXVII, XXVIII, XXIX, XXX.

Click those links. Read the lists. List after list of lie after lie. Hundreds of them — 533, to be exact, although Benen does not make any claim to providing a comprehensive chronicle.

This is unprecedented. “We’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact-checkers,” Romney’s pollster, Neil Newhouse, said.

This has produced what James Fallows calls the “post-truth” age — a relentlessly dishonest onslaught of brazen falsehoods with which the media and the political system are struggling to cope. What do you do when every article, every “fact-check,” every arbiter denounces a lie and corrects it, but then a politician just keeps repeating it?

It’s remarkable to behold.] emphasis added
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/2012/08/29/mitt-romney-tells-533-lies-in-30-weeks-steve-benen-documents-them/

What Does the Book of Mormon Say About Lying?

Because the few Bible translations just checked say don't bear false witness against your neighbor, in other words lie.

Nevertheless, Willard Mitt Romney really does lie a lot.

Don't get me wrong, this extremely cynical just turned 54 year old--who knew even at tender age of 10 Richard Nixon full of shit when he said he had a secret plan to end Second Indochinese War--has read The Selling of the President by Joe McGinniss and realized politicians in the age of mass media have to idealize themselves in certain ways, gain at least a sheen of common man as hero glow, and to  emphasize their positive attributes and minimize negatives.

Even as it turns out Nixon did have a secret plan, bomb the bejesus out of North Viet Nam and hope to thus bully their leaders while inflicting great devastation upon common people.  Nixon ignored the fact leaders safe in bomb shelters have an extraordinary capacity to endure the suffering of others.

Many folks listening to Tricky Dicky in the campaign of 1968 assumed he meant peace negotiations rather than biblical levels of destruction.

Recent history of the last campaign illustrates another aspect of the idealization process; voters tend to see candidates as transformational actors in the larger American polity without evaluating factors constraining the actions of a President: a recalcitrant House of Representatives, a minority party in the Senate abusing the filibuster to block any progress whatsoever, and even an activist, conservative Supreme Court.

Thus we see and read whiny, puling, progressive punks whining about Obama's inability to institute "our" liberal agenda.  Thanks, Suze.

For the rest of us living in the real world, we assume truth as a fundamental basis of human communication,  Otherwise, how would prehistoric humans tell each other facts to help human survival, stuff like you'll find water over the next ridge or run a big ass tiger coming this way.

Nevertheless in this age of mass mis-communication, our words have become un-moored from any truth whatsoever, as witnessed by current crop of TV ads run by Willard Mitt Romney lying about welfare waivers granted to governors of states which requested them, reviving Ronald Raygunz's canards on welfare queens.

At long last, Willard, have you no decency?

[So what does {Paul Waldman} think of Mitt Romney's new ad that claims President Obama has a plan for "dropping work requirements" for welfare? "Under Obama's plan," says the narrator, "you wouldn't have to work and wouldn't have to train for a job. They just send you your welfare check."

"I've seen ads that were more inflammatory than this one, and ads that were in various ways more reprehensible than this one (not many, but some). But I cannot recall a single presidential campaign ad in the history of American politics that lied more blatantly than this one.

…Usually candidates deceive voters by taking something their opponent says out of context, or giving a tendentious reading to facts, or distorting the effects of policies. But in this case, Romney and his people looked at a policy of the Obama administration to allow states to pursue alternative means of placing welfare recipients in jobs, and said, "Well, how about if we just say that they're eliminating all work requirements and just sending people checks?" I have no idea if someone in the room said, "We could say that, but it's not even remotely true," and then someone else said, "Who gives a crap?", or if nobody ever suggested in the first place that this might be problematic. But either way, they decided that they don't even have to pretend to be telling the truth anymore.

This is what's so striking about Romney's campaign. As Paul says, it's common to twist and distort and cherry pick. But Romney has flatly claimed that Obama said something that, in fact, a John McCain aide said. He's snipped out sentences from an Obama speech and spliced the two halves back together so nobody could tell what he did. Then he did it again to another Obama speech. And he unequivocally said that Obama plans to drop work requirements for welfare even though he's done nothing of the sort."] emphasis in original
http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2012/08/mitt-romney-sure-does-lie-lot-doesnt-he

Romney/Ryan: The Liar Picks the Fraud

The Romney/Ryan ticket already bores me; not even the fodder they provide for satire compensates for the absolute bankruptcy in their souls and paucity of ideas, their only real one the inbred desire to cut taxes for rich people and screw the rest.

Even having reached the august and ever more cynical age of 54, it just seems to me a political race for elected office should involve some degree of facts, some sort of telling truth to gain support of voters.

Even in 1969 in a campaign to sell Richard Nixon chronicled in the book The Selling of the President, Nixon proposed a War on Crime and marketed his secret plan to end the Viet Nam War.

Now, politics has entered a fact free age without the need for the so called "liberal media" (The Selling of the President) to call a lie a lie and a spade a spade.

Great Mencken's ghost, Willard Romney couldn't even tell the truth if it walked up, slapped him in the face, and signed his tax returns for him.

How could anyone with even a functioining brain cell left even think about voting for this feckless fool?  Even Fox "News" watching zombies should feel shame if they vote for this ticket.

Lies of Willard Romney part 29, literally, twenty-freakin'-nine: [Joe Klein reflected briefly on Mitt Romney this week, noting, "I can't remember a candidate so brazenly allergic to facts. What a travesty." Kevin Drum offered some related thoughts....

Of course, if months of distortions and lies causes irreparable harm to a presidential candidate, Romney might as well pack up and go to one of his mansions now. To consider this problem in more detail, consider the 29th installment of my weekly series, chronicling Mitt's mendacity.

1. In a radio interview yesterday, Romney said of the president, "His campaign and the people working with him have focused almost exclusively on personal attacks."

That's both ironic and untrue.

2. In an attack ad launched this week, Romney said Obama "quietly announced a plan to gut welfare reform by dropping work requirements."

This is as obvious a lie as any presidential candidate has ever told.]

http://maddowblog.msnbc.com/_news/2012/08/10/13221172-chronicling-mitts-mendacity-vol-xxix?lite
[This morning on “This Week,” New York Times columnist Paul Krugman called Rep. Paul Ryan’s proposed budget plan a “fraud” as Romney campaign senior advisor Eric Fehrnstrom confirmed his candidate’s support for the plan that would trim trillions in federal spending over the next decade.

“The Ryan plan — and I guess this is what counts as a personal attack — but it isn’t. It’s not an attack on the person; it’s an attack on the plan. The plan’s a fraud,” said Krugman. “And so to say that — just tell the truth that there is really no plan there, neither from Ryan, nor from Governor Romney, is just the truth. That’s not — if that’s — if that’s being harsh and partisan, gosh, then I guess the truth is anti-bipartisanship. ”

Krugman, who has been critical of the Ryan, R-Wis., plan in the past, was responding to the Fehrnstrom, who confirmed Romney’s support for the plan after ABC News’ George Will asked Fehrnstrom to clarify his candidate’s stance on the Ryan proposal.

“He’s for the Ryan plan."]
http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2012/06/paul-krugman-paul-ryan-budget-that-romney-supports-is-a-fraud/