They'll tell you any damn thing to support their ideology, such as Fox News, for example, saying that "historians pretty much agree" that FDR's policies prolonged the Great Depression. This assertion flies in the face of actual facts which show that the country was in much better shape in 1937, after four years of FDR's policies, than they were in 1933.
It was only in 1938, when FDR dialed back the New Deal and tried to balance the budget, that unemployment started going back up. In other words, it was when FDR stopped being FDR and flirted with being Herbert Hoover that the recovery stalled.
Rick Warren, ideological soul-mate of Fox News, pulled the same kind of stunt when he claimed, in an ad favoring California's Prop 8, that marriage has been the same throughout 5000 years of human history. That is obviously false, as anybody who knows anything at all about history surely knows.
Ideologues simply cannot be trusted. They'll tell you anything, sometimes just flat making it up on the spot, in order to convince you that their propaganda is really true. Now, I have nothing against propaganda. Propaganda has its place. If not, the advertising business would have to close up shop. But just because ideologues actually believe their own propaganda does not mean that anybody else should.
Comments