Sep 19 2008
Team Obama Riding Goebbels Coattails
I don’t like spin or sound bites. The first item is the act of presenting a misleading image of an issue by cherry-picking aspects to emphasize one view. Misleading through being incomplete. Sound bites are ways to hide key aspects in vaguery. Some sound bits summarize well, become a shorthand for a common understanding, and this is fine. Others are used to refocus or redirect or obscure key issues.
Both mechanisms are used to dodge the thorns surrounding all issues. They are a bit of a dodge in my mind. But not immoral.
Outright lying? That is a different story. We have had Team Obama outright lie in this campaign in the recent weeks. One of the most aggregious lies was about John McCain’s understanding of technology based on a claim he ‘doesn’t’ use email. The fact is he ‘can’t’ use email or a computer keyboard due to injuries. He understand technology just fine. Â When faced with this mistake Team Obama did not change their position.
They knowingly continue to lie.
Now they have gone and taken words by Rush Limbaugh totally out of context and claimed the mean something they never did. As Rush notes they had to do this with forethought, it could not be accidental:
The malignant aspect of this is that Mr. Obama and his advisers know exactly what they are doing. They had to listen to both monologues or read the transcripts. They then had to pick the particular excerpts they used in order to create a commercial of distortions.Â
This is not spin or sound bites. Â This is blatantly lying. It is no different from snipping words from transcripts and making whole new sentences. They would, literally speaking, still be Rush’s ‘words’. In this case they snipped sentences and made whole new meaning. This what we call propaganda, and it seems Team Obama is riding the coattails of the most infamous propaganda master of modern history – the NazI Joseph Goebbels.
Goebbels did traffic in facts – made things up and claimed they were facts. How is team Obama any different here?
It’s hard to know which lie is more outrageous – first taking Limbaugh’s words out of context, or next claiming that John McCain and Rush Limbaugh have identical views on immigration. Limbaugh himself had a big laugh at that one.
I think Obama thought that since it was in spanish, no one else would notice. Seriously – I think that’s the level of thought that goes into their campaign.
[…] splicing and rewording the positions of those on the right by the left is becoming fairly rampant. I have found team Obama doing it before. But the worst example I have ever seen of outright lying by snipping words […]