Gentle Souls,
What follows is an earnest & eloquent rant, against the partisan nonsense which spews out
"facts" like Obama's Muslim Flag hanging over his desk in the Oval Office, or "facts" like
Obama playing 110 golf games in -- whazzit -- 48 hours?
And the Left has its own "Sick Puppies," as GHWB [#41] referred to the MSNBC evening anchors.
Here it is:
Hugh This video just totally changed my vote. Can't believe Obama would have the audacity to play 100+ rounds of golf. I would personally like to thank the group that spent the last four years counting Obama's golf rounds so they could make this propaganda video, completely disregard my intelligence with a blatant disregard for objectivity, and make our country a better place in the process. It's impartial videos like this that make modern politics a bastion of honesty and integrity and without them, I would never know that Republicans don't play golf. Thanks for sharing...
Fred to Hugh; Sometimes intelligence gets in the way of having the ability to be objective on the issues. This video states the facts of Obama's inability to do what he said he would do in his first term, which is why people voted for him. All the things that he blamed Bush for failing to do, he has failed to accomplish, two fold. How come every time somebody states factual truths about Obama, it becomes a bastion of honesty and lacks integrity, because its not what you want to hear. If all you heard in this video, was the amount of time Obama spent on the golf course, makes this video blatantly propagandizing Obama, then I don't know what to say!! Oh, by the way, fact check if you want, but the bias media always had the same response every time Bush played golf, which I think was about half of what Obama played in 8 years!!! Make a deal with you, Nov 6th is right around the corner, and we are going to cancel each others vote out, so lets leave it at that!!! The future will affect you much more then me, so I hope the outcome works to your benefit.- Hugh Here are some objective facts from factcheck.org relevant to the video. Obama ‘Doubled’ Deficit?
Romney: The president said he’d cut the deficit in half. Unfortunately, he doubled it. Trillion-dollar deficits for the last four years.
It’s not true that Obama “doubled” the deficit. He inherited a $1.2 trillion deficit and deficits have remained at or above that level, as Romney said, every year since then. Romney is right, however, that Obama has not kept his promise to cut the deficit in half.
Here’s the budget history in brief: The 2009 fiscal year began Oct. 1, 2008, when George W. Bush was president, and ended Sept. 30, 2009 with Obama as president. By the time Obama took office in January 2009, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office had already estimated that the federal government would end fiscal 2009 with a $1.2 trillion deficit because of higher spending and lower revenues.
Obama added to the 2009 deficit, but not by much. We found that Obama was responsible at most for an additional $203 billion. The government ended $1.4 trillion in the red that year. The deficits were about $1.3 trillion each year for the next two years, and this fiscal year just ended with a shortfall of nearly $1.2 trillion.
So, Obama didn’t double the deficits. But the president did pledge to cut them in half by the end of his first term during his State of the Union address on Feb. 24, 2009. A Congressional Budget Office analysis of the president’s latest budget plan doesn’t show the deficit being cut in half until 2014. - Hugh That comes from a good page of fact checking from the first debate...http://factcheck.org/
2012/10/dubious-denver-debate- declarations/ Seems to me to prove that both parties are full of BS. In response to my reaction to hearing what I "want to hear," all I can say is that all I want to hear are facts. I want to make it very clear that I don't think it's wrong at all to vote for Romney. I don't think it's right at all to vote for Obama. I just want people to give me info that truly is fair and balanced. My father feeds me positive stuff about Obama all day long and I don't "want to hear" that either. None of his sources are fair and balanced. NYT, MSNBC, etc. I can't be more adamant that that is NOT what I want to hear either. I don't want any more Chris Mathews, Sean Hannity, Dinesh D'souza or Michael Moore. I want those people to stop being so successful making money off all of us watching all of their decidedly un-objective garbage and I want factcheck.org to have it's own news network so I can watch that all day.
As far as I can tell from this video, it makes two points in the first 3 and a half minutes. 1) That Obama has doubled the budget instead of halving it like he promised (clarified above) and 2) That Obama played over 100 hours of golf instead of "not resting until every citizen can find a job." Beyond that it tells me the length in years of one trillions seconds, the length of one trillion inches of string, and the fact that one trillion paper clips is equal to 8 thousand Honda Accords. These are interesting facts, but aren't giving me much info on the issues. Are there other substantive facts that I'm missing here? I think this is why one of the main things I took away from my viewing was the hours of golf, a claim I couldn't substantiate or negate on factcheck.org, likely because it's irrelevant.
The rest of the video does a handful of things:
1. SPECULATES that we will run out of money like Italy, Greece, Spain, etc. (this is a scare tactic, right? It's definitely not a fact as it hasn't happened yet, so it's said to scare us. That is what propaganda does, isn't it?)
2. Says to "consider" Obama's record on Energy, foreign policy, national sec., healthcare, immigration, and transparency, but doesn't give us any facts here. Just that we need to consider it.
3. From minute 3:30-4:30 it gives a definition of "statism," putting Obama in a graphic next to Marx, Hugo Chavez, and Che Guevara. (not many substantive facts here, just a bold and, in my opinion, dangerous comparison)
4. From 4:00-5:00, it gives us a list of champions of conservatism and says to "JOIN US."
5. From 5:00-6:30ish it quotes Ronald Reagan. (great quotes by the way)
6. And from 6:30 on it tells us to vote conservative for the 530,000 elected U.S. offices.
So, tell me if I'm wrong here, but the "facts" related to Obama's term in this film are still limited to the budget doubling vs. Halving (doubling = false, but Obama didn't accomplish his promise of halving it) and 100+ hours of golf.
Here is the definition of propaganda (from Wikipedia) -
Propaganda is a form of communication that is aimed at influencing the attitude of a community toward some cause or position by presenting only one side of an argument. Propaganda is usually repeated and dispersed over a wide variety of media in order to create the chosen result in audience attitudes. As opposed to impartially providing information, propaganda, in its most basic sense, presents information primarily to influence an audience. Propaganda often presents facts selectively (thus possibly lying by omission) to encourage a particular synthesis, or uses loaded messages to produce an emotional rather than rational response to the information presented. The desired result is a change of the attitude toward the subject in the target audience to further a political or religious agenda. Propaganda can be used as a form of political warfare.(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda)
So how on earth is this video not propaganda? It is the absolute definition of propaganda, at least according to Wikipedia. And if the purpose of propaganda is to get people to buy into something and, even better, get them to disperse it themselves, it's working like a charm. You posted it on facebook.
Now I am very aware that I am a blustering a-hole at this point, but I wouldn't put so much effort into this if I didn't think it was really important for the world to at least see videos like this for what they are. You are not wrong at all for voting for Romney and you are right about me wanting a better future for myself, so I am 100% willing to vote for Romney if I can find more evidence that my future will be better if I do. I am currently un-decided so our votes aren't canceling each other out yet, but videos like this don't help me at all. I want to know why our economy worked so well under Clinton. I want to know why it failed so badly under Bush. I want to know if Obama's Bin Laden work signifies a quality leader on national security or was a stroke of good luck and good timing. I want to hear a debate between economists as to what approach serves our country best. Trickle down? Ladder up from the middle class? Does gov't assistance actually help more honest, hard-working Americans or is there actual data that shows more people take advantage of it and drain our economy? I want graphs, spreadsheets, charts, and hard, empirical evidence of the success or failure of past economic principles. I don't want to know the approximate weight of one trillion paper clips. I don't want to be scared into thinking we are the next Greece. And I know that hearing the definition of statism isn't going to tell me the answer.
Please, please, please join me in being insulted by the people who think videos like this are good for our political process. I do not want you to change your vote. I want you to stand up to super-pacs and MSNBC and Chris Mathews and FOX News with me and demand that they start feeding us information rather than feeding us opinions and blatant impartiality.
