As a further follow-up to my previous posts, I shall just list a couple new talking points, sometimes reduced to a name, that have absolutely no relationship to anything in reality, yet are repeated over and over and over as if repeating falsehoods grants them the appearance of truth. The first one is something new I learned from FOXNews, and if I attempted to make it up and claim it was a new right-wing talking point, no one would believe me. That's how absurd it is. I won't refute these points, just present them, recognizing that they are, in fact, not true.
- Socialized medicine breeds terrorists
- Bill Clinton was convicted of the same crime as Scooter Libby
- Mr. Rogers is to blame for many social ills (another FOXNews gem)
- Libby didn't lie
- Valerie Plame wasn't covert
- There was no underlying crime
- The pardon of Mark Rich was worse than the pardon of Scooter (who was Rich's attorney)
Should you be reading right-wing blogs, or listening to right-wing radio, or watching FOXNews, my guess is that, in the course of thirty minutes of programming, all of these various items will come up at least once. Again, they are part of the structuring of a right-wing narrative about recent events. It is the narrative that is important, not any connection between specific events in the narrative and actual events. My suggestion is we play some kind of right-wing talking point bingo, with the winner getting, I don't know, free health care for the rest of his or her life. The losers would be forced to listen to Glenn Beck for a month. Something like that.
