I love this image of Republicans playing a shell game with the media. While it does seem to have become particularly easy to confuse the mainstream media, the barrage of lies coming from the Republican party is un-Mitt-igated.
Even more ironic is that even when confronted with their lies, the Republicans keep repeating them, or deny that they ever said the lie in the first place (even though there is video of them clearly lying). For example, Paul Ryan trying to blame Obama for the defense cuts the Republicans forced the administration to accept (and for which Ryan voted), and then denying that he voted for them.
Or they dismiss the media who dare to expose their lies. Romney’s pollster famously said “We’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact-checkers.” This was in response to a Romney ad claiming that Obama had removed the work requirement from the welfare law. That claim was completely false, yet they were going to keep running the ad because polling showed it was effective in getting votes for Romney.
And the conservative website RedState has proposed that if you quote a fact checker in a post, they will ban you from the site. I guess they can’t have any reality intrude into their comfortable bubble.
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It’s sad how anti-fact checkers conservatives are. A couple of years ago, I got tired of rebutting political emails from relatives, so I started replying with nothing more than a link to the relevant Snopes article. Initially, I got some responses along the lines of “Interesting…” After a while, I started getting responses about how you can’t trust Snopes for anything because it’s secretly funded by George Soros.
I went through the exact same situation. Now I just don’t respond at all. Nothing is going to change their minds, not even facts.
I always think that the GOP can’t do anything else to surprise me…but then they say things like, “We’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact-checkers” and my mind feels like it might explode. I even hoped (really, really hoped) it was taken out of context…but even in context, it’s just as bad. It seems logic no longer exists.
The same people in 2008 who sent the false chain e-mails were incapable of deleting the people they received them from. Incapable of copy/delete. I had great fun responding to all the people in the chain until finally someone caught on. I stopped getting the e-mails. At least those people knew how to forward an e-mail. A huge segment of our population can’t create and send an e-mail.
Ebdoug, hahaha. I never had the guts to reply to everyone on the list (let alone all those in the forward headers, too!), no matter how much I wanted to.
Chelsey – believe it or not, it was NOT taken out of context.
The context was that Romney had stated in an interview that in the good old days, when a campaign was told they were running an ad which was a lie, they would take it off the air. One of his senior campaign spokespeople was asked about that quote and why, then, was the Romney campaign still running the ad that all the fact checking services had found was a “Pants on Fire” lie. That person then said that fact checkers have their own opinions and biases, and they weren’t going to let their campaign be ruled by fact checkers.
So not only were they ignoring the facts, they actively are spreading the propaganda that the fact checking sites are all Liberal Fronts and you can’t trust them. I suppose its because Republicans lie about 5 times more often than Democrats.
Arthanyel–I should have been more clear. I was HOPING it was taken out of context (mostly because of the people who listen to that sort of thing), but then looked it up and saw that it was not. So I did know that it was not taken out of context. I’m sorry for not being clear about that.