In 2003, future U.S. senator Al Franken trashed conservatives in his book "Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them." This past Wednesday on the lefty website AlterNet, blogger Amanda Marcotte posted a brief, unofficial follow-up to Franken's work in which she detailed "5 Things Conservatives Lie Shamelessly About."
"Conservatives have figured out a neat little rhetorical trick," claimed Marcotte, a regular at The Daily Beast and Slate. "One lie is easy for your opponents to debunk. Tell one lie after another, however, and your opponent’s debunkings will never catch up. By the time the liberal opposition has debunked one lie, there’s a dozen more to take its place."
Marcotte's five "things" were creationism; climate change; Obamacare; Obamacare's contraception mandate (she opined that there are so many right-wing lies about it that it "deserves its own category"); and gun safety. Highlights:
-- "[C]reationists...have perfected the art of making up nonsense faster than scientists can refute it. The list of false or irrelevant claims made by creationists, as chronicled by Talk Origins, numbers in the dozens, perhaps even hundreds, and more are always being spun out. Trying to argue with a creationist, therefore, turns into a hellish game of Whack-A-Mole."
-- "Climate change denialists have many changing excuses for why they reject the science showing that human-caused greenhouse gases are changing the climate, but what all these reasons have in common is they are utter nonsense in service of a predetermined opposition to taking any action to prevent further damage...
"[T]he point of these lies is not to create a real discussion about the issue, but to confuse the issue so much it’s impossible to get any real momentum behind efforts to stop global warming."
-- "When it comes to healthcare reform, the lying has been relentless. There are the big lies, such as calling Obamacare 'socialism'...
"The strategy of just lying and lying and lying some more about the ACA has gotten to the point where Fox News is just broadcasting lies accusing the Obama administration of lying."
-- "Groups like the NRA like to paint themselves [as] human rights organizations, but in fact, they are an industry lobby whose only real goal is to protect the profit margins of gun manufacturers, regardless of the costs to human health and safety...
"A small sampling of the many, many lies spouted by gun industry advocates: That guns prevent murder, when in fact more guns correlates strongly with more murders...That any move to make gun ownership safer is a move to take away your guns."
Marcotte still may be best known for her short stint as the "blogmaster" for John Edwards's 2008 presidential campaign. She resigned after an uproar over earlier posts on her own blog that were widely considered anti-Catholic (e.g., "Q: What if Mary had taken Plan B after the Lord filled her with his hot, white, sticky Holy Spirit? A: You’d have to justify your misogyny with another ancient mythology").
Recently: Amanda Marcotte Compares Abortion to Cavity Removal, Calls Babies ‘Time-Sucking Monsters’
