Why We Need Fact Checkers

I have been a wordsmith most of my life. Books allowed me to travel the world in my youth. When I was young I could read 5 books a day; admitted they were not books on quantum physics or the Symposium by Plato, but I read a lot. My vocabulary was always several grades ahead of the grade I was in and I was fortunate to have well read articulate parents who encouraged this sort of thing.

Now admittedly one can get carried away with the accuracy of language. By the time I graduated from college and began teaching, 6^th grade, I was so precise in my language hardly anyone understood a thing I was saying. My sixth grade class I was teaching, bless them all, and I made a pack; if they could not understand what I was saying they were to stop me and make me explain again. I think it was about 2 weeks before I got a full sentence out of my mouth. What they taught me was how to communicate again, which is the purpose of language.

So, I take seriously what was said in the comments on the last blog. Words should be used properly and they have meaning. A lot of writers today wanting to sound more profound than they are will make use of their word processors synonym feature and use a fancier sounding word than the one they wrote. Unfortunately, they invariably use a word that is farther away from what they say than they think. For instance a synonym of the first word in the last sentence, unfortunately, is unluckily; but to use it in that context would be incorrect. Luck is not involved it is just bad writing.

Now to current fact checks which I imagine will explode as the conventions get carried away with their own rhetoric and the campaign get wilder.

Three fact checks from today’s Politfact.com Truth-O-Meter. 1. Paul Ryan said President Obama “funneled” $616 billion out of Medicare “at the expense of the elderly.” They rate that statement mostly false. Worse they are just plain misleading; Obama or the healthcare act did not literally cut funding from the Medicare program budget. They do plan through anticipated saving hope to bring down costs by $715 billion over the next 10 years according to the CBO. Thus there were reductions but these were aimed at the insurance companies and hospitals, not beneficiaries.

2. John Thune at the GOP conventions said Obama proposed banning farm kids from doing basic chores. This was rated “pants on fire” on the Truth-O-Meter. This is just a plain lie couched in previous discussions about safety in operating farm machinery for farm kids and city kids alike and it never happened.

3. Rob Portman at the GOP convention said Barack Obama “never even worked in a business.” Which I guess is supposed to be a sin; nevertheless, it is rated false by the Truth-O-Meter. Obama was a research assistant in 1983 and 1984 at Business International Corp. in NYC. He was also an associate the partner in a law firm, Davis, Miner, Barnhill & Galland, from 1993 to 2004. Obviously he has less business experience than Romney but I’m not sure that is a bad think given the nature of the Bains company which sounds like a Gorden Gekko group from the movie Wall Street. I’d give kudos to Romney for his work with the Olympics though I don’t know those specifics but I am not impressed with his business ethics at Bain; it sounds like he made a lot of money at the expense of others.

4. Ryan spin at the GOP convention according to FactCheck.org. He said:

§  Accused President Obama’s health care law of funneling money away from Medicare “at the expense of the elderly.” In fact, Medicare’s chief actuary says the law “substantially improves” the system’s finances, and Ryan himself has embraced the same savings.

§  Accused Obama of doing “exactly nothing” about recommendations of a bipartisan deficit commission — which Ryan himself helped scuttle.

§  Claimed the American people were “cut out” of stimulus spending. Actually, more than a quarter of all stimulus dollars went for tax relief for workers.

§  Faulted Obama for failing to deliver a 2008 campaign promise to keep a Wisconsin plant open. It closed less than a month before Obama took office.

§  Blamed Obama for the loss of a AAA credit rating for the U.S. Actually, Standard & Poor’s blamed the downgrade on the uncompromising stands of both Republicans and Democrats.

[NB. Ryan is a most appealing fella, good looking, talks well, but his philosophy and economic beliefs ought to scare the bejeebers out of folk.

4. Santorum distorts “dependency claims at the convention. This one has been going on for a long time as almost have of Americans receive some sort assistance from the government. But as FactCheck points this is equally true of George W. Bush’s administration; the only real differences in more baby boomers retiring. My opinion of the popularity of this charge is that we like to scapegoat people in order to feel superior ourselves, even if we may be on that taking end.

Enough, you can read these for yourselves; but the vast majority of the public will not and may be falsely persuaded by misdirection and just plain lies.

A better story it seems to me is all the partying that is going on via the largesse of big money folk at the convention. Here I suggest you look a solid reporting by Bill Moyer: http://billmoyers.com/2012/08/29/party-time-whos-hosting-the-best-parties-in-tampa/

I admire your tenacity dmarks but you have a real problem when it comes to backing up your claims; site sources. Just saying something passionately does not make it true. I would also suggest study of logic paradigms and systems. Making fun of Al Gore may be appealing but it should be with some degree of accuracy of which he actually said. In my dreams/nightmares I dream of Al Gore facing Mitt Romney in a election and imagine the public reaction.