Ken

WE'VE BEEN WORKING through another email from propagandists who call themselves "conservatives".

I'm using quotes there, to differentiate the propagandists from the true conservatives.

It involves a discussion between a father and a daughter about "redistribution of wealth".

The daughter thinks that extremely wealthy Americans ought to be taxed at higher rates—the way they were during the Eisenhower, Nixon, and Reagan administrations.

The father, a "conservative", doesn't think this is a good idea.

As the story continues, he makes his case...

One day she was challenging her father on his opposition to higher taxes on the rich and the need for more government programs.

The self-professed objectivity proclaimed by her professors had to be the truth and she indicated so to her father. He responded by asking how she was doing in school.

SOME TIME AGO I wrote a series of posts on a piece of "conservative" propaganda about an economics professor who failed an entire class.

I put the word "conservative" in quotes above, because I don't believe that the message in the email was actually representative of conservative values.

There's a game being played around the whole idea of "conservative" in this country.

The good, normal American citizens who consider themselves conservatives are being told, by talk radio, Fox news, Tea Party lobbyists, and all those forwarded emails, that being a conservative means selling yourself and your children out to Wall Street and big wealth.

But I digress.

Though only a little bit.

Because the same people who are misleading America about what it means to be a conservative are doing the same misleading about liberals.

A reader just forwarded me another email which begins with a similar riff on the same theme.

THIS IS THE COMPLETION OF A TWO-PART post, which I interrupted to disagree with Rachel Maddow and John Stewart on a closely related question.

In the first part, I...

1. Pointed out that the title of the "Repealing the Job-Killing Health Care Law Act" was factually false,
2. Asked why, then, Republicans had chosen to try to mislead the American people, and
3. Suggested that the answer to that question lay in the fact that, as humans, we use language in two distinct ways, for two distinct purposes.

These two uses of language can be called:

I'M GOING TO TAKE TIME out to disagree with two people I greatly admire.

Rachel Maddow and Jon Stewart each took time on their respective programs to reprimand Democratic Representative Steve Cohen for a speech he gave on the House floor Tuesday night.

Both Maddow and Stewart are "reality-based" people.

Each of them, in their own way, fights a noble battle for reason, civility, and small-t truth in public discourse.

So I was at first surprised, and then intrigued, when they both exhibited a sort of knee-jerk response to Cohen's remarks.

This is what Cohen said:

They say it's a "government takeover of health care"—a Big Lie: just like Goebbels.

You say it enough—you repeat the lie, you repeat the lie, you repeat the lie—and eventually, people believe it.

Like blood libel. That's the same kind of thing.

SORRY FOR MY recent absence from the mull—I've had a virus, which has kept me from my usual schedule.

The topic that brings me back is the recent revelation about the Republican attempt to repeal the health care bill.

One of the ongoing themes at the daily mull has been the deep connection between spirituality, politics, and reality-contact.

This bill, or rather its title, serves as a perfect case study of the problems we face as a nation in that regard.

As you probably know by now, Republicans titled the bill the..

Repealing the Job-Killing Health Care Law Act

As you also probably know, they back up the claim in the bill's title by citing the Congressional Budget Office, as the source of their estimate that the bill will cost 650,000 lost jobs.