At the time she announced her candidacy for the presidency, Michele Bachmann,  Congresswoman from Minnesota, declared that her first task would be to repeal the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act – so called ObamaCare. Literally screaming at the audience, she  decried the Act as a “job killing law” and, parroting the House leadership, she quoted an alleged CBO ( Congressional Budget Office ) study that showed the Act would cost over 800,000 jobs before 2020. Of course, the facts were quite different. In fact, the so called CBO study she was quoting was not a CBO study at all. It was  actually a study done by the NFIB , conducted in late 2008 and released in January 2009, a full year before the Act was enacted. The Study was conducted by the NFIB, a well know opponent of the Affordable Care Act  and was commissioned by the U S Chamber of Commerced -likewise a champion of repeal. The actual facts, promulgated by an independent study by The Lewin Group, puts the job loss at around 200,000 and most of these would be minimum wage positions. There would be accordingly, a projected gain of over 800,000 jobs, including for hospitals, clinics and insurance companies. The CBO agreed with these calculations.

The other evening, I listened to Greta Van Susteren discuss the state of the deficit, blaming the Obama Administration for the deep vat of red ink. She stated with great surety that the  Bush administration left us with a 4.1 trillion dollar national debt and the remainder was solely the fault of the Obama Administration. The actuals seem slightly different. At  the close of FY 2001 there was a budget surplus with a modest national debt as compared to the previous administration. By the close of FY 2008, the federal deficit was raised to $455 billion dollars and the national debt was raised by 71.9 % to a level of $11 trillion dollars.

All of this is by way of making the key point of the message. I accept that most news outlets have their particular biases. Some lean to the left in presenting their version of the news. Others favor the right. The days of flat out objective newscasts  are gone . [ Fox News, well, that’s another story for another time but suffice it to say that several recently conducted studies concluded that, if your sole source of news was Fox News, you were less informed than if you had watched no news at all !! ]One must watch, read or listen to several sources and then decide on which version to accept as reputable. This is true for regional and national news, as I see it. [ Local news is a bit of a different stripe.] So, whether you choose CBS, NBC, ABC or MSNBC, understand there’s a bit of “leaning” to it all.

The key element here is to spend some serious fact check time. Kind of like “spell check” in a way.  If it matters – and it should – one doesn’t want to sound like an idiot looking for a village as so many these days do.

Back to Rep. Bachmann, I am sure she had little or no clue about what she was proclaiming that evening in North Carolina. What I am sure of is that she parroted what the GOP leadership told her. And therein lies the proverbial rub. The audience there and audiences all over television land probably believed her. That is, except those who either knew the facts or took the time to verify her stern warnings !!

We are plagued with misinformation and prevarications generated by individuals and groups intent on furthering their own agenda. The “commonweal” is of far less concern and of little or no interest when their own successes are at stake. This is especially true for those many single issue organizations, such as the NRA. I tire greatly of not only of the misinformation and some people’s obsessive adherence to it because their ” party loyalty ”  requires it but also of the rampant intellectual dishonesty which prevails in the political arena. In the face of even recent facts – not to mention video evidence of it – it seems that convenient amnesia paired with revisionist editing has reached epidemic proportions. The problem is magnified by what I term an audience ripe with ignorance. No apologies. I have stated on numerous occasions that the level of political ignorance in the U S is frightening and this makes for an easy target for fiction rather than fact.
The preeminent scholar and statesman, Daniel Patrick Moynihan is quoted as having said you are entitled to your own opinions but you are not entitled to your own facts.  It is a simple but most compelling creed by which to guide one’s words.

And should you be wondering – Rule #3 is: ” Don’t believe what you are told – double check “.