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{"id":38864,"date":"2012-10-17T00:03:56","date_gmt":"2012-10-17T07:03:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/markshea\/?p=38864"},"modified":"2014-12-30T12:03:29","modified_gmt":"2014-12-30T19:03:29","slug":"when-trying-to-evaluate-pols","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/markshea\/2012\/10\/when-trying-to-evaluate-pols.html","title":{"rendered":"When trying to evaluate pols…"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

\u2026you not only have to pay attention to what they say, but to what their enemies say\u2013and to how their enemies distort what they say.<\/p>\n

This *seems* obvious enough. People bark \u201cDon\u2019t trust the liberal media\u201d and figure that\u2019s it, but it can be trickier than we suppose. So, for instance, people will sometimes send me some panicky Planned Parenthood fundraising letter warning that Mitt Romney is just about to institute martial law, abolish abortion, and erect a Handmaid\u2019s Tale <\/em>theocracy of forced impregnation and pre-frontral lobotomies for college educated women who act uppity and watch The View<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere!\u201d I am told. \u201cYou see! Romney *is* prolife! Look how they fear him!\u201d<\/p>\n

What such people forget is that it is a time-honored fundraising technique to try to stampede your donors into coughing up money with scare tactics. The Anti-Defamation League does it with ominous tales of the alleged \u201ctide of anti-semitism\u201d that is perpetually about to swamp this most philo-semitic country on planet earth (an orthodox rabbi I know once wisecracked that the big danger Jews face is not that Christians want to kill them, but that they want to marry them). The Right does it with hysterical rubbish about how Obama the devout Muslim <\/a>and Marxist atheist communist <\/a>is just about to declare martial law<\/a>, launch a race war<\/a>, and turn the US into a Stalinist<\/a> prison camp governed by shariah<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Oh, and he\u2019s Hitler<\/a>. So is Romney<\/a>. In the future, everyone will be Hitler for 15 minutes because a lot of American political discourse is lazy and stupid.<\/p>\n

The point is this: As Debbie Wasserman-Schultz <\/a>demonstrated, just because a Lefty is trying to gin up panic about Romney\u2019s alleged anti-abortion fanaticism, that doesn\u2019t mean it\u2019s true.<\/p>\n

Conversely, just because a Lefty is talking about Romney doesn\u2019t mean everything is a lie. Lefties, like Righties, are capable of doing research, documentation and fact-checking. When they do, it\u2019s wise to pay attention to what they say, even if they are ritually impure members of the wrong tribe. So when conservative bloggers took down Dan Rather because he did a crappy job of sourcing his story, it was unwise for Old Media to dismiss them as pajama-wearing buffoons. Similarly, when William Saletan documents (as if we needed it) the fact that Romney\u2019s \u201cconversion\u201d to being \u201cprolife\u201d is utterly phony and driven solely by the need to appear prolife for the GOP base, we should listen<\/a> since this is not a mere baseless hatchet job but a careful look at the documented record of Romney words and deeds. The plain truth is that Romney is a moral void when it comes to abortion, not the crazed prolifer the Left fears. <\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"