What You Need To Know About Propaganda Is Very Very Few People Are Fooled By It
Via Sullivan…who needs to be careful with his links… Connor Friedersdorf gives Andy MaCarthy’s fan base more credit then it deserves…
The Manifold Inaccuracies of Andy McCarthy’s New Book
It is perfectly fine for Mr. McCarthy to forcefully disagree with the rhetoric President Obama uses when discussing national security. Unfortunately, this first excerpt of Mr. McCarthy’s book isn’t an argument against President Obama’s rhetoric, it is a wildly, serially misleading, factually inaccurate account of the rhetoric he uses that better resembles an alternative universe.
It is so easily shown to be false that it ought to exist only in the author’s mind. Unfortunately, this misinformation is being touted by Rush Limbaugh as piercing, Michelle Malkin is recommending it to her readers, and Mark Levin is calling it “thorough” and “cutting edge, and few of their listeners will question the facts the book presents because they foolishly if understandably underestimate the capacity for intellectual negligence perpetrated by these hosts everyday.
They’re fools, but not fooled. At some level, nearly every one of McCarthy’s fanbase know full well he’s not to be trusted with the facts. As we software developers will sometimes ironically say, “It’s not a bug, it’s a feature.”
Propaganda does not deceive people; it merely helps them to deceive themselves.
-Eric Hoffer