That's how I imagine the forthcomming conservative translation of the Bible will put that famous line from John.
The other day, it happened again. You might have had the experience yourself, if your mother is anything like mine, hearing her say “I don’t understand.....” can make your blood run cold. While my mother is, in fact, a saint, and has been a constant news junkie all her adult life and continues to be very well read and generally sharp as anyone, she has a bad habit of intentionally thinking well of people who have demonstrated that they don’t deserve it. The other day it was an issue of insurance companies and their larcenous ways.
After discussing it with her for about twenty seconds her problem was obvious, she didn’t take into account one of the facts vital to comprehending the modern insurance industry in the United States, they’re, generally, a bunch of crooks who are in the business of taking your money and finding every way to not give it back, including just wearing you down with run arounds.
But it’s not just her, we all do it, to some extent. There is an example up at Buzzflash.com right now where the question is posed, Is Glenn Beck Ignorant or Shameless. Betting on either ignorance or shamelessness would be a sure thing with Beck, who always seems like the bottle blond, bastard child of one of the sleazier characters in a Monty Python skit. The structure of the question leaves out an undeniable and important truth about him and conservatism today.
Today, in 2010, American conservatives they don’t care if what they are saying or hearing are lies. Little lies of convenience, big profitable lies, lies that hurt people, lies that get people killed, lies that will end up in the extinction of the human species. A lie that gets them what they want, money, power, audience share,.... is fine with them. American conservatives have no connection with the truth whatsoever, thirty years in to the Reagan era. For them, a lie isn’t just as good as the truth if it gets them what they want, it is superior, the truth being unprofitable for them. For the propaganda machine that has replaced any semblance of news, it is superior because it’s cheaper to produce while it attracts the right-wing hate talk audience that isn’t stuck in drive-hour traffic.
If you haven’t already over indulged your daily allowance of irony, you might want to read what Howell Raines, fromerly of the New York Times, has to say about FOX in the Washington Post. When you read it, ask yourself why the NYT and WaPo don’t practice what they’re advocating for the gutter media. That Raines is telling a few obvious truths on a rival doesn’t make up for past and continuing journalistic sins in those two corporations.
I’m not going to turn on NPR this morning and risk the chance that Scott Simon giving one of his sermons riffing on what he read in the paper right before deadline. Too much irony makes your blood pressure spike.