I’m concerned about the lack of working phooey detectors in American today.
And no, they’re not usually called “phooey detectors,” but this is a family newspaper.
Donald Trump’s success is Exhibit A in the case for a detector malfunction. But there’s another I’d like to share:
It comes from the fertile propaganda machine – I mean ‘imagination’ – of Rep. Louie Gohmert, a Republican from Texas. He addressed the annual Value Voters Summit, and announced that Hillary Clinton is “mentally impaired” because she had a concussion in 2012.
He spoke with all the medical authority of a man with a law degree.
“Maybe it was the concussion, the fall, back when she did,” said Gohmert. “Or maybe, who knows? They won’t tell her what’s going on with her. If I were going to smash cellphones, BlackBerrys, I’d use a 2-pound sledge. Who knows, maybe somebody got to wailing around and hit her again. But we need to be praying for Hillary Clinton. There’s special needs there. There’s mental impairment.”
Please allow me to translate. I didn’t go to medical school, but I do have a fair bit of experience detecting political cow pies.
The technical term for Gohmert’s pile of verbal bile is a “lie.”
Now, you may know what Gohmert did by some of its other monikers: fabrication, fairy tale, some-beep-I-just-made-up. A fib. A prevarication. A deception. A fraud. A whopper.
Gohmert’s Clinton-hit-in the-head-with-a-sledgehammer fantasy follows the Donald Trump model, which follows the Joseph Goebbels “Big Lie” model. Trump adds an extra flourish, by stating a lie, distancing himself by saying he’s not saying this, he’s just “asking the question.”
Sow doubt, plant the seed of a lie, and watch it bloom and infest the political discussion with kudzu. Do Gohmert and Trump think people will believe anything they say? It sure appears so — there is no, “oh, maybe I got that wrong” after the false statement is made, when evidence of the discrepancy is easily produced.
We can’t know if Gohmert believes what came out of his mouth. It’s immaterial. Politicians don’t talk just to talk. He’s peddling poisonous goods to a receptive audience, and he knows they’ll do the rest.
Once the tall tale gets outside the circle of true believers, that’s when we need our phooey detectors on full blast.
The Fourth Estate’s phooey-detectors have been on the fritz for a while, but they’re starting to sputter back to life. Come on, fellow people of the press. We need you. We can’t let false and ridiculous statements go unchallenged. Let’s make truth our bias.
The biggest question is, do so-called regular Americans notice the lies? I would hope that the likes of Trump’s and Gohmert’s falsehoods would ring alarm bells, but not necessarily. There’s a difference between making a mistake in a word, or getting something wrong by accident.
Statements like Gohmert’s bizarre Clinton fabrication just simply do not make sense. Sledges? Who is ‘they’? Special needs? What? It’s nonsensical.
If there is no expectation that a public servant, or someone running for office, should not make things up, then there is no downside to lying. There’s no political price to pay for fabricating stories — or policy positions or budget plans — from thin air.
BEEP BLOOP DING DING DING. The sound of all those phooey detectors is too loud to ignore.
