Friday, December 24, 2010
Arriving on Track 9
Paul Krugman takes another close up look at the Humbug Express. The Humbug Express is part of the vast right wing noise machine, designed to abuse your senses until you believe their shameless lies.
Is it really possible that the authors of those articles and speeches about soaring public employment didn’t know what was going on? Well, I guess we should never assume malice when ignorance remains a possibility.Governments always bullshit the people, but it has only been the last 30 years or so that one party has chosen to sell nothing but a "Bill of Goods" to the public and developed the means to do it well. We have to teach ourselves how to say Bah! to their Humbug.
There has not, however, been any visible effort to retract those erroneous claims. And this isn’t the only case of a claimed huge expansion in government that turns out to be nothing of the kind. Have you heard the one about how there’s been an explosion in the number of federal regulators? Mike Konczal of the Roosevelt Institute looked into the numbers behind that claim, and it turns out that almost all of those additional “regulators” work for the Department of Homeland Security, protecting us against terrorists.
Still, why does it matter what some politicians and think tanks say? The answer is that there’s a well-developed right-wing media infrastructure in place to catapult the propaganda, as former President George W. Bush put it, to rapidly disseminate bogus analysis to a wide audience where it becomes part of what “everyone knows.” (There’s nothing comparable on the left, which has fallen far behind in the humbug race.)
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