A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes. - Mark Twain.
If there was ever any doubt that the right-wing media machine thinks as one, it was confirmed this morning when, on This Week with George Stephanopoulos, the ever-pompous, exceedingly unctuous George Will was hectoring President Obama for making "incontinent" speeches. "That's how you end up with empty seats," he said, his eyes bugging through his coke-bottle glasses and his chicken head bobbing righteously.
George Will has always been a hypocrite (Mr. Old-Time Family Values was famously thrown out of the house when his then-wife found out about his affair with his now-wife and threw all his belongings onto the lawn), but he lies, too.
(Sometimes it's just lies by convenient omission. For instance, I don't remember him disclosing this year that Wife No. 2 was the communications director for the Rick Perry campaign. Oops!)
For Will, this was typical. Loose with the facts, pronounced as though he brought down the tablets from the mountaintop from his personal meeting with God.
Look, self-absorption is part of the occupational hazard of politics and then it's also part of the job description of being president. All that said, try to imagine Dwight Eisenhower talking about D-Day, saying, "I did this, I decided this, I did this and then I did that." It's inconceivable. If you struck from Barack Obama's vocabulary the first person singular pronoun, he would fall silent, which would be a mercy to us and service to him, actually, because he has been so incontinent in his speechmaking for the last three years that you wind up with, as you said in Ohio State University, empty seats.
It's simply bull. And of course Breitbart and Drudge pitch in to sell the snake oil:
The truth is that President Obama drew 14,000+ in an 18,000 seat arena. It wasn’t a sellout, but it was about 13,500 more people than Romney’s largest crowd in Ohio. As the Washington Post pointed out Romney has drawn crowds of several thousand during the campaign, what they didn’t mention is that most of his thousands were bused in Mormon college students, but Obama’s crowd today was exponentially bigger than anything Mitt Romney has drawn this year.
The right wing media was trying to level the playing field. They want to erase the memory of Mitt Romney giving his big economic address to 80,000 empty seats at Ford Field in Detroit. The problem they have is that even though right wing media does, the photographs don’t lie.The arena for the Obama event wasn’t empty. This was just another attempt by the right to plant a lie in the media, with the hope that it takes root and sprouts, but visual evidence and common sense are the pesticides needed to make sure that this weed never grows in our 2012 garden.
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