Politics, especially commenting on it for public consumption, has always been nasty. Perhaps it is no more deceitful now than in times past. In fact, the current Glenn Becks Sean Hannitys and Michael Moores aren’t that different from early American colonial pamphleteers – same message, new media.
Thomas Paine, he of Common Sense fame in the 1700s, was later eulogized: “One by one most of his old friends and acquaintances had deserted him. Maligned on every side, execrated, shunned and abhorred – his virtues denounced as vices – his services forgotten – his character blackened.” (We can only hope Ann Coulter meets a similar fate.)
Paine’s foul end befell one of the leading voices for the American Revolution because he remained highly opinionated on politics (and religion) even after the war and earned his living producing opinion pieces. Later, the Kennedy/Nixon campaign and swift-boaters would strike the same chord of heightened harangue. Even Davy Crockett, that congressmen and folk legend, would boast he could tell better lies than his political opponents.
President Andrew Jackson was known as a particularly vicious political campaigner.
So it’s hard to say current vitriol is any worse than what we’ve seen before. Maybe people were shocked when someone posted an Internet poll asking whether President Barack Obama should be assassinated––listing one answer as “yes” if he messes with health care. But that’s not going much further than some pundits who fill the airwaves. These professionals gode hearers to the edge of violence, referring to our country as under siege or facing destruction. The paid firebrands stop just short of utterances that would catch the Secret Service’s attention.
But even present death threats aren’t unprecedented. The famous duel, generally attributed to nasty political smears, between then-Vice President Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton actually left someone dead (Hamilton) in 1804.
A difference today is how easy it is to spread information, true or false. Poor Thomas Paine would never have made history as a pamphleteer in 2009. He’d have been one among thousands of bloggers toiling in obscurity while his boss wasn’t looking.
Given the flood of information, misinformation, disinformation, outright lies, repeated half-truths and spin, it’s best to take everything related to politics with a grain of salt.
And even while the Internet is a handy place for spreading mistruths, it also offers some good resources for correcting them. Two of the better sites to keep bookmarked are FactCheck.org and Politifact.com.
Both sites appear to be unbiased or at least check statements from both right and left.
Among interesting corrections they offer to current canards are these tidbits:
• President Obama did not lie when he said his healthcare plan doesn’t cover illegal immigrants. The House bill expressly forbids giving subsidies to those who are in the country illegally, according to FactCheck.
• But he did tell the Mt. Everest of falsehoods when he said his plan won’t add “one dime” to the federal deficit. Legislation offered so far would add hundreds of billions of dollars to that red ink, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
• On “death panels,” according to FactCheck -- The healthcare bill would not require that patients receive counseling sessions (for end of life), nor would it require a doctor to offer one. “Medicare will also pay for prosthetic limbs, but that doesn’t mean that every recipient gets those, too,” FactCheck noted.
• Film-maker Michael Moore offered about as many supported facts in his recent schlock-umentary on health care as you would expect to find in a Harry Potter flick. Among Moore’s outright fictions: "The majority actually want single-payer health care." According to Politifact, that statement is unsupported by polls.
• Concerning a widespread chain e-mail charging Democrats with sacking the Social Security Cost of Living Adjustment, the Politifact website rates the accusation, “pants on fire.” The site then explains the real reasons for stagnant social security checks. With nothing to do with the current Congress, it involves a federal law dating back to 1975 and a cost of living that is flat at present.
• Hurled from the other side, a Democrat National Committee ad claiming Republicans seek to end Medicare is simply not true, according to FactCheck.
We Americans can bemoan the current state of duplicity in politics or simply accept it as part of our long, if not proud, national tradition.
Just be sure to make the effort to sort truth from lies, show from substance.
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