Lies, Damn Lies, and Presidential Campaigns!
Published by Jeff | Filed under 2008 Elections, Politics
I’m lucky that I have friends from a variety of political perspectives. Liberal, Conservative, Progressive, Libertarian, Christian conservative, you get the idea. But its distressing to receive a number of emails containing some of the most deceptive, baseless, malicious, and unfounded lies you’d ever want to hear, especially in the Presidential campaigns. And of course, this is the time of the year when many of us just love to argue.
Shankar Vedantam has written a good piece in the Washington Post about the power of political misinformation. The main point is that even after the misinformation is debunked, it still permeates and reinforces and empowers bad information. Right now, this stuff is all over the place. My fellow citizens, Democrats and Republicans, we owe it to the public to raise our games a bit.
There are incredibly complex and challenging issues for our country–from war and foreign policy, to health care, reform of our economy in banking, housing, employment, climate change—the list is almost endless.
Obama, quit stretchin’ the truth on McCain and Social Security. McCain, you’re lyin’ on Obama’s tax plan. Dudes’, FOCUS please. There is only around 40 days left to make your case.
And please, to all the surrogates who send out these counterfeit email spreading sultry yet absurd fertilizer…get a life.