At Media Matters, Eric Boehlert asks, “Can conservative bloggers tell the truth?”
No.
Simple answers to simple question, eh?
They can’t even tell the truth when they’ve been pinned to the ground with their falsehoods. Boehlert caught John Hinderaker of Power Line in a lie — just plain nailed him — and Hinderaker’s response is a study in weaseling. He got caught fibbing, so to defend himself he shifts to a different set of lies. Unreal.
The lie was that the stories told about John Kerry’s Vietnam service by the Swift Boat crew had never been disputed. Cough.
The Jawa Report defended Hinderaker by publishing the fact that David Brock, the founder of Media Matters, had made campaign contributions to John Kerry. However, it’s anyone’s guess what this is supposed to “prove.” In this bloggers sick little — very little — mind, campaign contributions to a a Democrat are evidence of sedition and conspiracy, evidently.
I read through some of this brouhaha last night.
Hinderaker is a disgrace. He’s a decent writer who knows how to tell the stories in such a way as to draw people in. Unfortunately, he uses his skill to shove together a pile of complete and total bovine feces.
This seems to be a pattern with the more popular conservative bloggers who write at all levels of politics: local, state, national and international. The popular ones are good writers, in general. But instead of plying their trade in a forthright way, they consistently demonstrate a fundamental lack of integrity and good conscience.
What I’ve noticed in the far right is their utter lack of moral courage. They utterly lack a commitment to the truth, wherever it may take them. Standing up for the truth frequently is risky and may pit you against the powers-that-be, as Jesus Christ and others found out. These people are incapable of taking this kind of risk, and so they compromise themselves into hypocrisy.
This lack of commitment to the truth means they are married to an ideology, which stands in for the truth, and which acts as a filter in the way they perceive the world. If some bit of evidence is found that challenges the ideology, they will contort themselves into inventing exotic sophistries to defend the ideology at all costs.
This is why give and take is impossible with these people. They can never be wrong. Instead of committing to the truth, they are committed to winning at any cost. This is what threw liberals for so many years, when we assumed that they were playing by the same set of rules (the same level of morality) as the rest of us.
The lack of moral courage and intellectual dishonesty of these people needs to be pointed out at every turn, because this is the foundation of whatever arguments they put forth. Point out their moral cowardice and hypocrisy and their arguments crumble.
The larger problem, I think, is that conservatives can’t tell the truth, period. They were on the wrong side of the New Deal and they were on the wrong side of the civil rights movement. And today, they’re on the unpopular side of almost every issue (national healthcare, minimum wage, global warming, corporate power, stem cell research, public education, Social Security, etc. etc., not to mention Iraq). They can’t be honest about their own positions, and they can’t be honest about what the American people want. The modern conservative movement is built on lies.
Remember, these are the same people who daily exclaimed during the Clinton impeachment, “It wasn’t the sex, it was the lies!”
Moonbat seems to have hit the nail on the head.
“They are commited to winning at any cost”
Absolutely. The end justifies the means. This is the lesson a lot of dems still don’t get.
Griff
The end justifies the means. This is the lesson a lot of dems still don’t get.
I’m not sure they should “get” that lesson. This “ends justify means” nonsense is (finally) burying the Republican party.
You can’t beat karma.