Tuesday, November 29, 2005

State of the Day: This Is How They Do It: Lie, Rinse, Repeat

"Despite official retractions, strategy reversals, and policy changes, the Right Wing hatemongers repeat and embellish the lie.

Even two and a half years later, the lie is front and center for the likes of Ann Coulter:

In the Iraq war so far, the U.S. military has deposed a dictator who had already used weapons of mass destruction and would have used them again. As we now know, Saddam Hussein was working with al-Qaida and was trying to acquire long-range missiles from North Korea and enriched uranium from Niger.
Exactly which WMD would Saddam have used again, Ann? The ones that we are no longer even searching for? Or the ones that Rumsfeld's military is shamefully using 'over there so we don't have to fight them over here?'

Read more of Ann's latest bile-fueled, falsehood-laden, hate-mongering opinion piece.

This type of bald-faced lying is a hallmark of Coulter, Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly, and others on the Raving Right. This strategy is doubly effective because it solidifies the lie with those who missed the retraction and it gets the mainstream media to focus on the lie again, instead of on the rebunking of the lie. This obscures the real story, sometimes completely. This works to the advantage of the side that is lying. Often instead of arguing about the point in question, the Right will cry, 'The Democrats are doing this for political gain,' which takes the attention away from the issue, whatever it is, and turns it to partisan politics. If the story now shifts to Democrats vs. Republicans, or Liberals vs. Conservatives, or 'he said, she said,' the liars win because the public has been distracted by what the lie was designed to obscure."

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