It is an election year, as in war, too often the first casualty is truth - and fact.
In this case however, it is not bullets but bullshit that flies, and if is emanating from those who are extremists, those who tend to be ignorant or low-information voters. In the case of the Tea Party, they tend to be funded by big money behind them in astro-turf entities, rather than genuinely grass-roots or populist organizations, and they tend to appeal to the simplistic thinking, low information voters.
FreedomWorks is Dick Army's front group for the Koch Brothers; it is a lobbying group for wealthy interests that seduces angry people by lying to them, organizing them, busing them around, and persuading them that they do not need to be informed or seek complex solutions for complex problems. They appeal to a filiopietistic form of patriotism that is not particularly fact driven, one that simply rewrites and edits out any part of history that is inconvenient or that they don't like.
From SourceWatch, regarding Freedom Works,
under the heading of Funding (emphasis added is mine - DG):
In an article in the August 30, 2010 issue of The New Yorker magazine, author Jane Mayer links the billionaire brothers David Koch and Charles Koch, owners of Koch Industries to tea party movement funding. Mayer writes,
The anti-government fervor infusing the 2010 elections represents a political triumph for the Kochs. By giving money to “educate,” fund, and organize Tea Party protesters, they have helped turn their private agenda into a mass movement. Bruce Bartlett, a conservative economist and a historian, who once worked at the National Center for Policy Analysis, a Dallas-based think tank that the Kochs fund, said, “The problem with the whole libertarian movement is that it’s been all chiefs and no Indians. There haven’t been any actual people, like voters, who give a crap about it. So the problem for the Kochs has been trying to create a movement.” With the emergence of the Tea Party, he said, “everyone suddenly sees that for the first time there are Indians out there—people who can provide real ideological power.” The Kochs, he said, are “trying to shape and control and channel the populist uprising into their own policies.[1]
Reports indicate that the Tea Party Movement benefits from millions of dollars from conservative foundations that are derived from wealthy U.S. families and their business interests. Is appears that money to organize and implement the Movement flows primarily through two conservative groups: Americans for Prosperity and FreedomWorks.
In an April 9, 2009 article on ThinkProgress.org, Lee Fang reports that the principal organizers of Tea Party events are Americans for Prosperity and Freedom Works, two "lobbyist-run think tanks" that are "well funded" and that provide the logistics and organizing for the Tea Party movement from coast to coast. Media Matters reported that David Koch of Koch Industries was a co-founder of Citizens for a Sound Economy (CSE), the predecessor of FreedomWorks. David Koch was chairman of the board of directors of CSE.[2] CSE received substantial funding from David Koch of Koch Industries, which is the largest privately-held energy company in the country, and the conservative Koch Family Foundations, which make substantial annual donations to conservative think tanks, advocacy groups, etc. Media Matters reported that the Koch family has given more than $12 million to CSE (predecessor of FreedomWorks) between 1985 and 2002.[3][4]
REAL patriotism is where you know the facts about both the good and the bad in the past, where you think critically so as to discern the difference, and where you bother to learn the facts of the present. Real patriotism requires us to be informed, and to think past the stupidly simplistic, and to be reality based.
An example of the Tea Party in action,
as reported in the Wall Street Journal - hardly a bastion of liberalism, and less so since being taken over by the notoriously dishonest and immoral conservative Rupert Murdoch of the UK media scandals notoriety - reported on the Tennessee Tea Party attempting to take out teaching slavery from American history, because it was embarrassing.
Don't worry if that makes your kid ignorant. Don't worry if it is a lie. It will make you properly believe that the founding fathers were not complex people who made mistakes. It is tea party ideology pure, and that matters to the extremists much more than facts; that is how you can tell they are extremists. You can tell because this sort of thing makes sense to them, is acceptable to them, is desirable to them. Don't worry if it makes your child less competitive; all that matters is that they are taught to believe that the United States is the greatest nation in the world, that it never makes mistakes, that it is never wrong -- not even for having slavery --and that if it IS wrong, ever, the solution is to simply LIE about it. Make stuff up that you like better, because liking it matters more to you if you are a tea partier or other right wing extremist, than the truth does.
The Wall Street Journal wrote - (note, bold and large type are my emphasis - DG):
Tennessee Tea Party Wants Schools to Be Nicer to Founding Fathers
The late comedian George Carlin used to say America was built on a double standard: “This country was founded by slave owners who wanted to be free.”
We wonder how his joke would have sat with members of Tennessee’s tea party, which just presented state legislators with five priorities for action, including amending state laws governing school curriculums to change textbook selection so that “no portrayal of minority experience in the history which actually occurred shall obscure the experience or contributions of the Founding Fathers,” the Memphis Commercial Appeal reported.
Hal Rounds, an attorney and a spokesman for the group, said the goal is to address “an awful lot of made-up criticism about, for instance, the founders intruding on the Indians or having slaves or being hypocrites in one way or another,” according to the Commercial Appeal.
“Neglect and outright ill will have distorted the teaching of the history and character of the United States. We seek to compel the teaching of students in Tennessee the truth regarding the history of our nation and the nature of its government,” according to materials the activists distributed.
Critics say the activists’ search for truth is really an attempt at lies.
Information about the founders owning slaves and displacing Native Americans “is well documented and acknowledged by professional historians and should not be censored,” according to Addicting Info, a website dedicated to discrediting what it sees as right-wing propaganda. “Hiding knowledge is tantamount to lying and that’s what the Tea Party wants our teachers to do.”
What the group is asking is not unprecedented. In 2010, the Texas State Board of Education adopted controversial textbook standards that stress the Christian influence of the nation’s founding fathers and give more weight to conservative groups and personalities throughout history.
Those moves have been criticized as a departure from generally accepted historical teachings and a threat to the apolitical nature of academic standards.
The Tea Party doesn't just want to dumb down history, to turn it into propaganda; it wants to dumb down and lie about everything. Science, Economics, and judging by what I've seen from Republican math, that branch of education won't retain it's integrity very long either. It's not just Tennessee; our own Michele Bachmann, of Iowa, and occasionally Minnesota, promotes the same lies and stupidity. She's said things about slavery that were blatantly not true; she has made claims for science relating to global warming that were blatantly false. Her views on economic topics are tragically ill-informed, and often outright dishonest - stupidly so, because she gets busted doing it, and still does so over and over again. Why make the same mistakes? Because those errors appeal to her Tea Party base.
MODERATE is not a dirty word. COMPROMISE is not a dirty word. TAXES is not a dirty word. GOVERNMENT is not a dirty word. Because I became tired of the extremists treating politics as their own inmate run asylum, I decided this year it is time for the center to regroup, and to push back against extremists. It is in that context that I republish the FactCheck.org report on Tea Party activities.
What makes this different than other lies and exaggerations that are committed routinely during election years is the money behind it. This year ALL of the candidates running on the right are some version of extremists; this year more than ever before in my memory, there is no real selection from which to choose that represent the rest of the right that are not extremists.
But most of all what makes this year different is the money. It is the same big money and special interest groups that are behind Dick Armey and his astro-turf Tea Partiers that are running the media blitz in the campaigns. Our elections are being dominated by a few special interests, the same people who lie to us and rip us off by how they BUY our politicians, especially those on the right who they buy wholesale, that is corrupting our political process, and is ruining our nation. They have taken routine political lies and distortions, and turned them into world class Propaganda, to benefit themselves, to buy and sell us mere citizens who vote.
From Business Insider:
Super-PACs Bought 91 Percent Of The Political Ads That Ran In Alabama and Mississippi This Month
Michael Brendan Dougherty
March 13, 2012
Whoa!
Super-PACs are doing almost all the work of political advertising in this campaign season.
Greg Giroux of Bloomberg reports that these organizations which can take unlimited political donations, have been responsible for nearly every political ad in the two states having Republican primaries today.
So-called Super-PACs supplied 91 percent of the 5,592 campaign ads that aired on broadcast television stations in the two states in the past month, according to data from New York- based Kantar Media’s CMAG, which tracks advertising.
That's a ton!
It's obvious at this point that Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum, who both have trouble doing traditional fundraising, have been relying on the Super-PACs aligned with them.
But Romney is benefiting from the spending almost just as much:
Restore Our Future, a super-PAC backing Romney, aired ads 2,098 times in Alabama through March 11, compared with 279 spots from Romney’s campaign, according to CMAG.
Again- that's nearly a 9-1 ratio. We're really in a new political environment.
With that kind of media boost behind it, manipulation of our political process is easy for the wealthy individuals and corporate entities that are being so successful at controlling it, at diluting and diminishing the role of the individual by controlling the preponderance of what they see and hear about political issues and candidates.
What is so exemplary about fact checking is that it allows people to push back against the propaganda - from all sides - and to try to drown out the lies with facts. It is only when we operate from facts that we can find solutions, by being reality based. It is only when we operate from facts, reliable and objective facts, that we can hope to bridge ideology differences, and find common ground. Facts are for moderates; lies and half-lies are for extremists - and for the crooks who manipulate and use them. That is because facts, fair, objective, in-context facts don't work for crooks and extremists. They don't like them.
Look at what the Tea Party, already viewed with worse disapproval than the rest of the Republicans - which is significantly worse than Democrats and Independents - is doing to their own more moderate political figures this election. They are trying to drive them out, leaving ONLY the extremists on the right. The 'Big Tent' Party has become more of a straight jacket.
Note the phrase I've emphasized - TOO MODERATE.
From
FactCheck.org:
Summary
Tea party-aligned FreedomWorks for America has launched campaigns against several Republicans whom it deems too moderate, including Senate veterans Orrin Hatch and Richard Lugar. But some of the group’s claims miss the mark.
A TV ad targeting Hatch claims the six-term Utah senator “has racked up half of our nation’s debt.” It’s true that Hatch voted 16 times to raise the debt ceiling a total of $7.5 trillion, but he didn’t support all of the deficit spending that caused the debt. In fact, he has championed a proposed balanced budget amendment to the Constitution, and three conservative watchdog groups grade his fiscal performance over his 35 years in the Senate as anywhere from middling to excellent.
The group also claims Hatch “gave away your family’s money for bailouts to Wall Street bankers.” It’s true that Hatch voted for TARP, but the part that went to bail out Wall Street bankers has actually turned a profit for American taxpayers.
A radio ad claims that in 2010 Hatch was “the third-highest earmarker of all 535 people in Congress.” According to the tallies by the most frequently cited earmark group, Taxpayers for Common Sense, however, Hatch ranked in the middle of the earmarking pack from 2008 to 2010, and in 2010 was 28th highest among the nation’s 100 senators.
A TV ad portrays Lugar as “Team Obama’s favorite senator” even though the Indiana Republican has voted against some of Obama’s signature pieces of legislation, including the health care law, and has voted with the Republican Party 90 percent of the time since the start of the current Congress, according to The Washington Post.
A Web video claims that Senate candidate David Dewhurst, who is the lieutenant governor of Texas, “pushed for a tax that would cost 40,000 Texas jobs.” The bill’s impact on jobs was a matter of dispute. The state comptroller projected the legislation — which also sharply reduced property taxes — would have created 60,000 jobs over 10 years.
That same video also says “state spending increased by billions” under Dewhurst. It’s true spending has risen, but so has inflation and the state’s population. The fact is that Texas spends less per person in inflation-adjusted dollars now than it did before Dewhurst took office.
We have crossed a line, a Rubicon, from ordinary smaller political lies and exaggerations to a far larger, far more calculated, far more manipulative and exploitive kind of lie. Our politics are no longer about the ordinary untruths and nastiness; we are now being treated to large scale deliberate propaganda. Getting rid of moderates, people who might not rubber stamp the most extreme legislation of special interests, is essential to their success, and to our defeat as individuals and citizens.
From my view on Primary Tuesday as an elective judge, the predicted low turnout was more variable. The up-ballot races were not driving voter participation, but rather from what I saw and what was reported to us by our county auditor about our county wide participation and the larger state-wide participation, high or low turnout was dependant on whether or not there were commissioner races, not the 'big' job races.
