Most annoying political myths of all time, pt. II (list your 'favorites'!)

A while back, we had a great discussion about what we, as progressive voters, consider the most annoying political myths of all time. You know, those blatant and persistent lies about events in government, political occurrences, individual politicians and issues that continue to be believed even by some of our own people.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x874551

I thought we might have fun revisiting this topic.

Some of my "favorite" political myths are:

1) Al Gore and John Kerry both lost their presidential elections.

2) "Reaganomics" (especially the "trickle-down" element of the Reagan economic "plan") improved the economy.

Add your own!

I have to chuckle when I hear wingnuts squawking "tax-and-spend, tax-and-spend" like an addled parrot. It's the government's responsibility to raise taxes in a fair manner and spend them on projects for the public good. It is most annoying that they can actually get any traction advocating that the government should spend no money so that they won't have to pay any taxes.

Plus, when Republicans are in office it's more like "borrow-and-waste, borrow-and-waste". They run up the deficit to pay for pie-in-the-sky military hardware, unnecessary wars, and bailouts of their corporate cronies who have some sad story about how the free market bit them in the ass.

People who say this obviously do no reading.

mostly owned by five profit-driven corporate conglomorates, not hippy Marxist collectives.

I kinda think there might have been a few others that contributed.

from 2001-

... A recent conference at Princeton, where the CIA released 19,160 pages of Cold War intelligence documents, indicated that the intelligence community in the 1980s screwed up bigtime.

Participants revealed that CIA analysts who took Mikhail Gorbachev's reforms seriously were gagged by their superiors. Such views were out of step with the hardline anti-Communism of the Reagan Administration. And the documents show that the CIA was clueless about all the major events of the Gorbachev era. Even as Gorbachev was unilaterally cutting the size of the Soviet army and removing troops from Eastern Europe, the CIA was maintaining that his "broad strategy is in the Leninist tradition" and aimed at "weakening" the United States. And as the Soviet Union was withdrawing its naval forces from Vietnam, the Indian Ocean, and the Mediterranean Sea, and ceasing much of its military activities in the Third World, a CIA analysis claimed Moscow intended "to expand its role as a global actor."

As former CIA analyst Mel Goodman has written, by missing the boat on Gorbachev, the intelligence community cost the United States in higher-than-necessary military spending and delayed arms control agreements. What's sad is that when the CIA did occasionally have a bead on developments in the Soviet Union -- such as when its analysts in the mid-1980s concluded that the Soviet Union, due to its own economic troubles, could not pay for a large arms buildup -- its insights were cut out of National Intelligence Estimates, the key sum-it-all-up documents of the intelligence services. The national security bureaucracy could not handle perspectives that challenged the mythology of the Big, Bad Bear.

He also appears in the 2nd part of The Power of Nightmares to say that this is the worst myth in the U.S. And, funny thing, Curtis, the creator of TPoN says the same thing about Al Qaeda.

Ted showed the industrialized world there was money to be made in using sattelite communications. Once that genie was out of the bottle, the Soviet apparatus could no longer stop the citizenry from seeing the real world "out there". The lies they had been told for 70 years were no longer sustainable.

Gorby gets credit for reading the writing on the wall, but i give that one technological advancement, promoted by Turner, the lion's share of the credit for their ultimate collapse.

BTW: The Soviet state was on the verge of bankruptcy during the Kennedy administration. So, Reagan didn't "outspend" them either.
The Professor

in so many ways - and in ways that a nation's leadership did not want us to see.

We were raised to believe that Russians and communists wanted to kill us or force us to give up religion.

Turner's international news network showed us Russians struggling to survive in ways basically similar to our own family struggles.

Ted Turner's international VISION did more to bring down the Wall and end the Cold War than any other SINGLE person.

Or "Iran has nukes" for that matter.

who did so, with the Israeli Mossad

:sarcasm:

before would be rich in five years."

I can't count how many times in my life (since I was a child, in fact) I've heard right wingers say this, but since it's never happened, they are just talking out of some part of their body other than their mouth.

And—how ridiculous?

I have never had the desire to accumulate wealth and power, but there are those who do crave wealth and have the skills to gain it.

inherited their money probably wouldn't end up with mucho wealth again. Paris Hilton, too.

such as lottery winners or those whose talents and skills just happened to match the needs of a particular time and place and wouldn't necessarily be so outstanding in another time and place.

Most people were a lot better educated 50 years ago (actually most in Britain at that time had no education beyond the age of 15) and evil progressives ruined that.

Britain and other countries owe Bush undying loyalty because the Americans (under FDR!) helped us in the war.

Everything that goes wrong in Britain is the fault of 'immigrants'.

Holy shit.

That's also a new one on me, and not just because I've never traveled to Great Britain/Europe.

People actually promote that crap? That's horrible. As far as that goes, you can tell them this clueless yank says the debt's been repaid and you can stop feeling obligated.

Jesus.

That irks me to my very soul.

It doesn't stand up to a moment's criticism and can be easily disproved. Yet DUers repeat this silly meme on an hourly basis.

:grr:

Yep, yessiree, strict constructionists, all of 'em!

I've spent a lot of time registering Latino and Hispanic voters as well as reading about why research suggests some do not choose to vote Democrat. Issues of choice are a factor for some, but from what I've seen/read, most L/H voters who prefer to register and vote Republican are doing so either because they see the Republicans as more supportive of economic/educational opportunities for Latino and Hispanic people, or view Republicans as more supportive of immigrants. (Which is a nice way of saying that in many areas, it's known that the INS is predominantly Republican; far too many L/H voters I've spoken with seemed to feel that their communities would be subjected to less harassment from INS if they voted for Republican candidates.)

are controlling or trying to control my country/the world!

Usually, the group is said to be either 'Islamo-Fascists' (read Muslims) or 'Zionists' (read Jews) but I've also seen amazing sinister power attributed to Europaeans or non-specific 'Immigrants'.

This one, in its various forms, is probably the most dangerous one.

The exact opposite is true. War is good for a few businesses but for the majority it is devastating

And provable. Look at the textile and construction industries during WWII. If not for uniforms and the Manhattan project, 30% of all those business in operation in 1941 would have been out of business by 1945.
The Professor

...this is the worst, most damaging myth of all, and was largely responsible for blacks having their rights stolen from them for almost a century... Reconstruction worked fine, insofar as it increased literacy, gave blacks citizenship, and actually gave the South some civilized governments for a few years. It didn't "fail"; it was violently destroyed by terrorist attack, with the ultimate acquiescence of an exhausted North...

in terms of offensiveness and inaccuracy. I still encounter people trying to claim that slavery would have naturally just petered out into nothingness over the course of a few more decades and then everything would have been magically fine for Black Americans eventually.

Late term abortions occur in a tiny percentageof all abortions in this country and they are never done without careful thought about the outcome of the pregnant woman's health. Pregnant women in their 7th, 8th and 9th (!) month don't waltz off to an abortion clinic because they want to fit in a prom dress!

If we didn't have THAT problem, the Dems would rule everything so SHUT UP!!!

nt

I'm really proud of the fact that this thread is up to 30 posts and no one has thrown in any Obama/Hillary/Edwards snipes. Not even I did that! Is it possible we're going to have a discussion free from the Primary War madness? That is impressive!

Well, we can't have everything, I guess.

I didn't attack any candidate. If anything, it was critical of DUers and the way SOME seem to think the DLC is the cause of everything wrong with the Dems.

That's "their" "one issue."

I can't believe how often that one is repeated—around here.

...Statistically speaking 86% of Jews are liberal--probably because the importance of analysis and critical thinking is beaten into us from the time we can sit up. Yet, I keep hearing about how I must be the exception, since most Jews support Palestinian Apartheid like knee-jerk reactionaries. Either that or we're all Neo-cons like Wolfowitz and Bill Kristol.

And this is from the "Liberal" left!

But let me tell you my favourite political myth: The idea that Federal programs are inferior to anything that can be done by the Private Sector. It's been used as justification to destroy most of the New Deal. The Grover Nordquists of the the world love that particular myth!

My worse peeve. :mad:

as that is the true myth.

Looking at the politicians parading their "toughness" from imagined enemies that we are told to be terrified of, passing laws to restrict our freedoms to "protect" us, gives the lie to that bit nonsense.

“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.” H.L. Mencken

One that is pro-choice, pro-universal healthcare and pro environment... not to mention pro UN.

Especially when all indications are that the country is, in fact, becoming more progressive.

clinton's took 2 months
http://youtube.com/watch?v=fCutvXccFlA

That's one concern some conservative voters have, but it's rarely the most important one, in my experience.

Anyone who believes that one can just bite me.

I mean...okay we are causing it but the situation is greatly overstated....It's a conspiracy by liberal scientists...Look! It was cold in (insert city) today so the planet can't be warming!

Yada yada yada

as Holocaust deniers to me. Have you ever encountered the sub-sect of global warming naysayers who try to claim that Native Americans did more harm to the environment, including the air, than Westerners have in the modern age? They may not be the most dangerous of the global warming deniers, but I think they're the craziest.

(usually accompanied by pix of flooded school buses in a parking lot)

Truth: He had no control over the buses; they were operated by the Orleans Parish School Board, a separate entity from the City of New Orleans.

Since when is a MAYOR supposed to be a disaster response expert? The Bush admin. puts a guy in charge who used to manage race horses ferchrissakes but it's the goddamn MAYOR'S fault that the response sucked. :grr:

Ray Nagin isn't exactly a stellar mayor from what I'm told but I was glad that he got reelected, if only just to shut his ridiculous detractors up.

you can't challenge this with a sound bite because reflexively no one wants their taxes raised. However taxes in all comparable countries are higher and we have a huge budget deficit so I fail to see in what way "taxes are too high" If you want to say spending is too high, fine, but there's no way taxes are too high.

I would have said Reaganomics, but that was already taken. That drives me up the wall.