In Propaganda 101, you learn a technique called “the Big Lie“. It was defined by Adolf Hitler in his book Mein Kampf as a lie so “colossal” that people believe it, because no one would suspect that someone “could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously”.
You can probably guess where this is leading. McCain has a new campaign ad, which blames Obama for high gas prices because he’s against “drilling in America”, and against “independence from foreign oil”. I nearly fell off my chair laughing!
As The Young Turks sarcastically put it:
Turns out that for these 8 years with the gas prices quadrupling, it wasn’t Bush! It was Barack Obama secretly leading the country! I did not know that! Things that John McCain tells you every day that you did not know!
What’s really bizarre about this is that it represents a complete turnaround for McCain. His own campaign says “allowing new offshore drilling would have no immediate impact on supplies or gas prices.” Two months ago, when asked about offshore drilling, he said:
With those resources, which would take years to develop, you would only postpone or temporarily relieve our dependency on fossil fuels.
And just two weeks ago, he said:
Let me give you a little straight talk on energy. Our dangerous dependence on foreign oil has been thirty years in the making, not yesterday, thirty years.
McCain’s solution to high gas prices is more giveaways to big oil companies. Most economists agreed that his “gas tax holiday” would almost entirely line the pockets of oil companies, and now he wants to destroy our environment for something he says would only “temporarily relieve” the problem. Even the US Energy Department says production would not start until 2017 and have no “significant” effect on prices or supplies until 2030.
Even the (normally McCain loving) media is scratching their head at this ad:
- New York Times: “misleading on nearly every substantive point”
- Columbus Dispatch (also carried by four other Ohio papers): “laughable”
- Washington Post: “a stretch” and “It’s a bit audacious for McCain to charge that ‘some in Washington’ still oppose offshore oil drilling, since that was his position, most notably in his 2000 presidential campaign”
- CQ Politifact: “We find McCain’s claim to be false.”
- Annenberg Political FactCheck: “ridiculous”, “absurd”, “not true”, and “nonsense”.
3 Comments
Noted this gem in your Wikipedia citation, from a psychological profile of Hitler: “His primary rules were: never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it.”
WWWWWWWWWWWWWooooooooooooooooooooooooooowwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww
pmg lol
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[…] step, try to change the subject by blaming Obama for high oil prices. But that only elicits […]
[…] to oppose it. He claims that his change of heart is because of the high price of oil. He even has a TV ad attacking Obama for opposing the expansion of offshore oil drilling. But even the government says that expanding offshore oil drilling would not decrease the price of […]