Judson Phillips is the head propagandist for Tea Party Nation. Tea Party Nation is one of several for-profit mouthpieces for the corporate doublespeak of our day. No sooner did I hit the publish button on my previous post just before this about how the media allows Big Lies to take hold and overrun the discussion, than Phillips cuts forth with some of the Biggest Lies yet in his latest email, which I will quote here, but cannot link to since you’d have to register to read it.
He opens with this:
Back in what the liberals would refer to as the “good old days,” when their favorite country, the old Soviet Union was cranking along at full speed and it looked like socialism might take over the world, there was a school of art in communist Russia called “Socialist Reality.” In Socialist Reality, artists never depicted things as they were, only as they should be. In the old Soviet Union, the artists always showed happy workers living a life of plenty because that is how it was supposed to be.
I’m not sure what “good old days” Phillips is talking about here. But notice how he alters history to the right-wing version of reality, where “socialism might take over the world”? I grew up in the 60s and 70s, and I recall that we were all supposed to be afraid of the Commies because communism was going to take over the world. Of course, there’s a difference between socialism and communism — a significant one, but Phillips isn’t worried about that because this isn’t supposed to be factual. It’s merely a dog whistle.
The real fear in those days wasn’t of a Soviet socio-economic model of governance. The true fear was of authoritarian/totalitarian rule, which stripped citizens of their individual rights and liberties and subjected them to the whims of the totalitarian state. They just wrapped that fear in the word Commie. Today’s Commies are Muslims. Same approach, different group.
Phillips just can’t resist. Continuing on with his own Tea Party Reality, he also takes aim at the media from an opposite vantage point:
The media today seems to be infected with a healthy dose of Socialist Reality. Back when George Bush was President, things were terrible. Unemployment dipped below five percent, something some economists said was impossible and absolutely represented full employment. Some how, that was not good. Now, under the Obama regime, official unemployment is at ten percent and real unemployment is much closer to twenty percent. Yet some how, they want to convince us all is well under the leadership of Comrade Obama.
Fact-check time. Here’s the chart of unemployment rates. Bush took office in January, 2001, when unemployment was 4.7%. Over the next two months it dropped by one-tenth of a percent. In June, 2001, the first set of Bush tax cuts were passed, taking effect January, 2002. From June, 2001 on, the unemployment rate climbed, never dropping below 5%. When Bush left office in January, 2009, the unemployment rate was 8.5%.
Now that the fact-check is out of the way, two additional notes. First, the references to “Comrade Obama” and the “regime” are a technique Phillips uses routinely. He uses them in nearly every email he sends to his membership and does so expressly to stoke irrational fear in his readers. It’s Phillips’ version of the Big Lie. Second, he intentionally misstates fact or ignores it where convenient in order to whip fires of discontent and fear. More Big Lie techniques.
After softening up his audience by serving their ration of fear (he has a few more paragraphs with careful allusions to regimes, Comrades and Soviets), he tosses out the corporate bait, carefully threaded on the hook:
First, cut taxes. Cutting taxes stimulates the economy….
Second, cut burdensome regulation on business. This will come as a shock to liberals, but the harder you make to do business; the less likely companies are to do business…
What astounded me about this particular missive was how blatant it was in its dripping intellectual dishonesty, start to finish. From assertions that liberals are constructing an alternate reality to conclusions that tax cuts and regulations are the cause of our economic downturn, he contradicts himself at every turn while ignoring facts we all have at our fingertips.
I’ve already linked the table of unemployment rates and pointed to the dates where the Bush tax cuts took effect. Is there a correlation between the two? I don’t know if there is or not, but there’s really no way anyone can possibly draw the conclusion that tax cuts stimulated the economy, because the numbers don’t lie. The economy did not thrive after the Bush tax cuts; in fact, it never even came close to what it was under the higher Clinton rates. Either the two are related or they’re not, but you can’t take the negative outcomes post-tax cuts and claim they were stimulative. Well, you can’t unless you’re constructing a Tea Party reality.
The same is true of regulations. The Bush administration issued less regulations and didn’t enforce regulations already on the books. No administration in recent history was more lax about regulatory enforcement. The net effect? The biggest economic downturn since the Great Depression, with more wealth passing from the hands of the poor and middle class to the wealthy in this country than at any other time since the 1920′s. This is fact. It’s not made-up. It’s hard, cold fact. Whenever they use the term “redistribution of wealth” I want to cringe, given today’s harsh reality.
About the only thing I can find to agree with Phillips on is how poorly reported all of this is. Surely someone can take these facts and distill them into something that gets some play on the news? As fact?
Or maybe not, considering most college graduates in the US cannot distinguish opinion from fact these days, so why bother?
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