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SYNDICATED COLUMN: Factchecking the Factcheckers

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Ted Rall

In a Media Without Real Journalists, Lies Become True

When fact-checking organizations like Politifact and Factcheck.org appeared a few years ago, they seemed like perfect antidotes to a lazy, corrupt and broke corporate media unable and/or unwilling to hold politicians to account for their lies. Cue Murphy’s Law: Rather than set a higher standard, independent fact-checkers gave mainstream journalists more excuses not to work.

“Perhaps the most jarring aspect of media factchecking is that many reporters see it as someone else’s job,” Peter Hart and Julie Hollar wrote in FAIR’s Extra! magazine.

This year’s presidential debates have been showcases of absentee journalism. With the exception of a single interjection by Candy Crowley (on a trivial point), all three moderators sat silently and passively as Barack Obama and Mitt Romney told one lie after another to an audience mostly composed of citizens who were paying attention to the campaign for the first time.

“My moderator mission was to stay out of the way of the flow,” said Jim Lehrer, moderator of debate number one.

Lame mission accomplished.

To make things worse, the pundits and journalists voters count upon to set things straight let the biggest lies and gaffes stand uncorrected. Even partisan screamers let us down: Fox News failed to call out Obama’s biggest fibs while MSNBC dropped the ball on Romney’s.

And the fact-checking commentariat let the ugliest and meanest sleeping dogs lie.

Last night’s third and final presidential debate included a few gaffes—my favorite was the geographically challenged Romney’s repeated statement that “Syria is Iran’s route to the sea“—Iran doesn’t have a border with Syria, nor is it landlocked—and the usual share of whoppers, most of which have gone unchallenged so long that people consider them facts.

Do politicians’ lies matter? You bet.

Whether people are deciding which of the two corporate major-party candidates to vote for, or they’re looking outside the system to a third party, voter boycott or revolution to overthrow the entire system, they can’t make an intelligent decision without knowing the pertinent facts. The myth of U.S. exceptionalism, for example, mistakenly teaches Americans that their country is #1; if they knew the truth, that the U.S. is behind much of the industrialized world by such measures as child poverty (we’re #34 out of the 35 industrialized nations, just ahead of Romania), they might decide to stop tolerating U.S.-style corporate capitalism.

Lies are the glue that hold a sick and sickening system together.

As far as I can tell, neither cable news networks, nor news websites, nor newspapers have questioned somewhere the following bipartisan lies, which all reared their heads at the third debate:

Obama said: “We ended the war in Iraq, refocused our attention on those who actually killed us on 9/11.”

Actually, 16,000 U.S. troops will remain after the “pullout.” Hilariously reclassified as “staff” of the U.S. embassy in Baghdad—world’s biggest force of security guards—American soldiers will be fighting alongside 3,500 to 5,000 private U.S.-paid mercenaries.

9/11 was not carried out, or planned, by citizens of Iraq or Afghanistan.

What if they gave a war, and people came, but nobody knew? Some antiwar voters will vote for Obama for ending a war he is actually continuing.

Obama said: “We killed bin Laden…when we bring those who have harmed us to justice, that sends a message…”

The president could have argued that bin Laden got what he deserved. Bringing someone to justice means placing them under arrest so their fate can be determined by a judge and jury in a court of law. If the president can get away with saying—and the media doesn’t question it—that an assassination is justice, then law and order no longer have any meaning.

We live in an authoritarian police state.

A police state full of lazy reporters.

Obama said: “Moammar Gadhafi had more American blood on his hands than any individual other than Osama bin Laden.”

Everyone “knows” bin Laden was behind 9/11. That he admitted it in a video. But though bin Laden never shied away from his involvement in terrorism—he admitted ordering the 1998 East Africa embassy bombings—he denied ordering 9/11. The translated “confession” was shown to have been faked by the CIA.

Obama said: “Iran is a threat to our national security and it’s a threat to Israel’s national security…And they have said that they want to see Israel wiped off the map.”

Though debunked, the oft-repeated canard that Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad wants to “wipe Israel off the map” is part of Democratic and Republican propaganda alike.

Jonathan Steele of the UK Guardian provides the best available translation of what Ahmadinejad really did say: “The Iranian president was quoting an ancient statement by Iran’s first Islamist leader, the late Ayatollah Khomeini, that ‘this regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time,’ just as the Shah’s regime in Iran had vanished. He was not making a military threat. He was calling for an end to the occupation of Jerusalem at some point in the future. The ‘page of time’ phrase suggests he did not expect it to happen soon.”

A top Israeli official, intelligence and atomic energy minister Dan Meridor, agreed recently that Ahmadinejad never used that “wipe off the map” phrase, which doesn’t exist in Farci. Meridor says that Ahmadinejad  and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said “that Israel is an unnatural creature, it will not survive. They didn’t say, ‘We’ll wipe it out.'”

Romney again repeated his meaningless line that Iran is “four years closer to a nuclear weapon.” By the same logic, Iran was eight years loser to a nuclear weapon during Ronald Reagan’s two terms as president.

Bob Schieffer asked Romney: “What if the prime minister of Israel called you on the phone and said: Our bombers are on the way. We’re going to bomb Iran. What do you say?” Romney replied: “Our relationship with Israel, my relationship with the prime minister of Israel is such that we would not get a call saying our bombers are on the way or their fighters are on the way. This is the kind of thing that would have been discussed and thoroughly evaluated well before that kind of action.”

Romney can’t be that sure. Israeli officials have told their U.S. counterparts that they won’t ask permission before attacking Iran—and will give us no more than 12 hours advance notice.

Romney lied less but his biggest lie was the biggest.

“America’s going to…continue to promote principles of peace,” he said in his closing statement.

It must have been difficult for the audience, who’d promised to keep quiet, not to laugh out loud. America? Peaceful?

Unless they believe that stuff about Obama ending the war in Iraq.

(Ted Rall‘s latest book is “The Book of Obama: How We Went From Hope and Change to the Age of Revolt.” His website is tedrall.com.)

COPYRIGHT 2012 TED RALL

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4520 Main St., Kansas City, Mo. 64111; (877) 682-5425 / TED RALL ONLINE: rall.com

RALL     10/23/12

Reissue the Tour de France Awards

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Ted Rall

I don’t typically weigh in on sports, but the French agency that conducts the Tour de France has stripped Lance Armstrong of his seven Tour de France titles, and has decided to leave no winner listed for those years.

That is wrong.

The prize obviously should go to the runners up.

As a cartoonist and columnist, II am aware of the fact that several previous Pulitzer Prize winners are plagiarists and/or hacks whose malfeasance is so over-the-top that they should be stripped of their Pulitzers.

It was bad enough for the legitimate cartoonists who deserved to win to be passed up at the time. But clearly, when a prize is stripped from someone for cheating, that prize should be properly and reawarded to the honest professional who was passed up at the time. Not to do so is to pretend that the agency that issued the award had not made a mistake at the time, when in fact they did.

Support Your Local Hell-Raising Cartoonist and Columnist

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Ted Rall

As the election draws near, just a little reminder that my Book of Obama: How We Went From Hope and Change to the Age of Revolt, is still available either through Amazon or through direct purchase with me. If you’re wondering how to vote—or whether to vote—you owe yourself a read through this look at the last four years and why so many of us are so disappointed. If you buy it through me, not only do I get a far higher percentage of the royalties, but you get a signed copy personally delivered to you.

Also worth considering is the Ted Rall Subscription Service, which for a mere $30 a year, gives you an advance, sneak peek at each week’s columns, cartoons, and illustrations, in many cases days before they go out to anyone else; in addition, you’ll receive sneak previews of upcoming projects, and rough sketches of cartoons that hit the cutting room floor because they were rejected by editors. (That last one is a new feature.) So if you want to support my work in a direct way, that is something to consider.

These days, as print media goes away, but digital media fails to pay, people like me, whose ideas don’t necessarily correlate to conventional wisdom or the “mainstream” of center-right American politics, will be relegated to underemployment or being forced to quit entirely, as many of as as many of my peers have in recent years.

The only way to avoid losing those of us who think independently is if you support our work directly.

Thank you in advance for thinking about it.

Thank you also for your previous support.

The Cartoon Auction Returns

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Ted Rall

After a long hiatus I am bringing back the cartoon auction. For a mere 99 cent starting bid (or a Buy It Now price of $150), I will draw a cartoon about a subject of your choice.

Not only that, you keep the original art.

And you can reprint or donate the reprint rights (one time only) to the publication of your choice!

It’s a great buy, even if you just want the original artwork, which I usually sell for $500+.

Check it out here.

SYNDICATED COLUMN: If You Vote, You Can’t Complain

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Ted Rall

Why It’s OK for Disgusted Liberals Not to Vote for Obama

Here we go again. Like Charlie Brown considering Lucy’s offer to hold the football so he can kick it–and Lucy’s promises not to pull it away at the last second, as she’s done every time in the past–lefties are being urged to set aside their disgust over the last four years and vote Democratic.

At least Lucy respected Charlie Brown enough to lie to him. President Obama isn’t even bothering to tell disappointed progressive voters that things will be different this time. At last night’s second presidential debate, for example, he promised to create jobs years in the future–not now, when we need them.

Despite my well-documented doubts, I voted for Obama in 2008. Not this time.

“If you don’t vote for Obama, you’re letting Romney win.” (So many friends, colleagues, family members, correspondents, bloggers and random whoevers have told me that that it hardly seems fair to single one out for attribution.)

Nonsense!

No election in the U.S. has ever been decided by one vote. None.

Thus, by definition, my vote is purely symbolic. (Don’t give me that “if everyone thinks the same way…” garbage. If everyone bought my book, it would be a #1 bestseller. If everyone used trashcans, there wouldn’t be litter. If everyone…if if if. The only vote you control, the only action you can take, is your own.)

My vote has no value other than as a symbolic endorsement. And I refuse to endorse what this president has done and failed to do.

I won’t symbolically endorse his drone war, which has killed thousands of Pakistanis–98% of them innocent civilians, the other 2% political dissidents with no designs against the U.S.

I will not endorse Obama’s 2009 decision to hand $7.77 trillion–$24,000 for every man, woman and child in the country–to bankers, no strings attached, who ought to be in prison while consciously standing by and allowing millions of homeowners to fall victim to illegal foreclosures and failing to abolish the time limit for unemployment benefits, as is standard in other countries.

Obama can go golfing more than 100 times while prisoners the Pentagon has declared innocent continue to rot in Gitmo dog cages. I can’t stop his war crimes. But he can commit them without my tacit silence-equals-death consent, much less my voluntary endorsement.

I could write a book.

The comedian George Carlin said: “People say, ‘If you don’t vote, you have no right to complain,’ but where’s the logic in that? If you vote and you elect dishonest, incompetent people into office who screw everything up, you are responsible for what they have done. You caused the problem; you voted them in; you have no right to complain. I, on the other hand, who did not vote, who in fact did not even leave the house on election day, am in no way responsible for what these people have done and have every right to complain about the mess you created that I had nothing to do with.”

If you’re like me, you think Mitt Romney would be even worse than Obama. What should you do? Whatever you want.

I don’t care if you vote for Obama, or for a third-party candidate like Jill Stein of the Greens, or if you don’t vote at all. Do whatever you want, but don’t think about it. Electoral politics is a distraction.

You should be spending your time and energy thinking about revolution.

Between now and the dictatorship of the proletariat, however, we have to fend off a lot of stupid pro-Democrat entreaties to forget the dead Pakistanis and the desperate poor and your own bank balance and endorse the man and the administration who made them possible. To help you refute your pseudo-liberal, Obama-loving, Democratic apologist friends, here are some powerful counterarguments to their lesser-evilism.

Argument 1: If you don’t vote for Obama, Romney will win.

Your response: Bull. That might be true if you live in a swing state. (If you’re one of the three out of four Americans who don’t live in a swing state, stop reading here.) A 2010 study found that zero out of 20,000 elections–including for Congress and Senate–has ever come down to one vote. The closest margin, for one race in 1910, was six votes. Feel free to stay home. Hell, vote for Romney. Won’t make any difference.

Argument 2: Obama will be more liberal in a second term.

Your response: How do you know? Not having learned anything from the last four years, Obama still says he’ll be “more than happy to work with Republicans” after the election (to help them dismantle Medicare). Let’s take the man at his lack of word: he hasn’t promised much. Even if we stipulate Obama’s secret, silent liberal intentions, how will he push them through House that will likely remain Republican? Not to mention, lame duck presidencies aren’t renowned for their record of legislative achievement. Obama will have as much chance of signing big new programs into law sitting in his kitchen in Chicago as in the Oval Office.

Argument 3: Romney will push the country even further to the Right.

Your response: The U.S. has moved to the right since the early 1970s. But it wasn’t just because of Reagan and Bush Jr. Presidents Carter, Clinton and yes, Obama also moved the needle to the right. Their most important actions were pro-Republican: Carter’s pre-Reagan defense build-up and arming the Afghan Islamists, Clinton’s gutting of welfare and hollowing out of American manufacturing with “free trade” deals, Obama’s expansive drone wars and bank bailouts, which increased the chasm between the rich and the poor. They ridiculed, marginalized and silenced liberals and progressives within the Democratic Party. Most of all, they didn’t hold the line against GOP ideas, rarely resorting to filibusters and frequently going along with conservative initiatives.

Whether Romney or Obama wins, the Right will continue to get their way. That’s how the system works.

Don’t forget the ironic only-Nixon-could-go-to-China phenomenon: Democratic presidents sometimes go further right than Republicans can. If George W. Bush were still president, he would have taken a lot more heat from the left than Obama has. It’s easy to imagine him being forced to, for example, extend unemployment benefits indefinitely–something Obama hasn’t even tried–to avoid a revolutionary uprising.

In the short run, it makes sense for liberals to vote Democratic. In the long run, voting for conservative Democrats costs libs their leverage. During times of crisis, like now, short-term and long-term considerations intersect. This is not a time to vote same-old, same-old–or to think that voting matters.

(Ted Rall‘s latest book is “The Book of Obama: How We Went From Hope and Change to the Age of Revolt.” His website is tedrall.com.)

COPYRIGHT 2012 TED RALL

Jobs…When?

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Ted Rall

For me, the low point of last night’s debate – and the most telling – was the lack of response to the young man who does not have a job upon graduating from college. Neither Obama nor Romney even pretended to have a plan to provide a job for that young man right now. People don’t need jobs five years from now. They need them now.

Ted Rall Column Ends at MSNBC.com

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Ted Rall

I had really enjoyed my brief tenure at MSNBC’s Lean Forward blog. Good audience, nice venue. Sadly, it’s over now; last week’s column will be my last for them. From now on their blogs will be written by their on-air talent. I assume it’s a combination of cost savings and integration; why promote writers who aren’t bringing in on-air revenue? I dunno.

I have to look at my weekly column to see if it’s worth continuing. The client list has steadily fallen for the last ten years—a reflection of the state of print media—so even though more people read it online than ever before, it has never paid as little. The revenue is back to 1995 levels.

I honestly don’t know what to do—about the column or my career in general. If there is a way to make money online, I haven’t been able to figure it out—nor has anyone I know.

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