Facts Are Stupid Things

Reagan once offered this line and beyond absurd adherence to Reaganomics and trickle down economics, this appears to be another legacy he has left to the party he helped build. Two stories today offer further proof of the Republican dislike of facts and arguments that don't fit their corporate-sponsored ideology. In the first, we learn that Fox News execs informed anchors that they should not mention global warming trends without immediately acknowledging the oil-company sponsored research that questions these claims (http://mediamatters.org/blog/201012150004). This came after an anchor had the gall to note that this decade is set to be the warmest on record. We recently learned that Fox reporters were also told to use "government option" instead of "public option" when covering the healthcare reform debate last year, based on research that the former phrase was less popular with the masses (remember the tollling bell "death tax" strategy?). The second story regards the ongoing debates about the fiscal crisis: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/12/14/financial-crisis-panel-wall-street_n_796839.html?view=print. Apparently the four Republicans on the commission to determine the root causes of the crash have decided that government, not Wall Street, is solely to blame for the housing bubble that led to the fall of the house of Lehman and the global financial crisis we are still living through today. CDOs and Credit Default Swaps, or predatory lending practices, apparently had nothing to do with the problem; it's just the Community Reinvestment Act myth that the government forced lenders to give out crappy loans -- which they then sold in secondary markets where they were bundled together and sold again, with insurance from AIG to back these crappy derivatives up if they happened to fail, which seemed unlikely given the AAA ratings they received. And of course it wasn't AIGs faul that they then sold insurance on these instruments/derivatives not once but up to ten times, or that Lehman and Goldman were selling CDOs to customers while buying the insurance and betting against them at the same time. No it has to be the governments fault because in Republican la la land, government is good for, huh, absolutely nothing, say it again. That's true, except when they are using the government to offer corporate welfare, pay off their corrupt benefactors or to legislate morality. Facts are, I suppose, stupid things -- unless one wants to save the country from the bloating plutocracy that seem intent on destroying us all in their ceaseless pursuit of more money than they could ever spend in 10 lifetimes.