Saturday, May 26, 2012

All talking points all the way down

Roger Simon asks if liberalism is dead.  He notes this:
An indication of this ideological flimflam is the recent braggadocio from various MSNBC hosts that Obama is really the King of Austerity and has spent less than other presidents.  Apparently, this assertion was based on the misleading figures of an economist who lumped nearly a year of Obama’s expenditures under Bush, including at least half the stimulus, but never mind.  What you have is MSNBC, of all paleo-liberal outlets, bragging about their man’s lower government spending.  Whatever happened to liberalism?

This is a great example of the 'talking point' mentality that has come to dominate the Democrats' actions. Obama's spending is a serious problem for his re-election campaign.  So a new talking point is created to address the problem.  It doesn't matter how divorced from reality it is.  Politics is some game, some high school debate trick, where truth got jettisoned so long ago that the Democrats lost track of it as a concept.  All that remains is the use of talking points.

For example, Obamacare was hugely expensive.  So they compared 6 years of expenditures with 10 years of revenue.  Since it still didn't balance, they double-counted a major source of savings.  And they made ridiculous assumptions that have no chance of being right.  Why?  They wanted a talking point -- that Obamacare would save money.  It didn't matter how many lies were baked in or how ridiculous the whole process.  It didn't even matter that everyone paying attention knew it was a fraud.  All that mattered was that they could repeat the talking point constantly with full confidence that the news media would cover for them and their faithful liberal voters would embrace it.

It's a looking glass world where talking points rule.  Humpty Dumpty would be proud.

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