Karl Rove spending millions lying about everyone
Crossroad GPS launches misleading ads against Elizabeth Warren, Jon Tester and Tim Kain
http://www.salon.com/2011/11/16/karl_rove_spending_millions_lying_about_everyone/singleton/
Now I admit I didn’t fact check the article, so I might be the fool here, but the gist of the article seems to mesh very well with my understanding of our current political money machine:
Rove has, it seems, realized that you don’t even need to base your attack ad on something that actually happened. You don’t need to take something out of context. You can just make up whatever attack you want! Jon Tester voted for spending taxpayer dollars on Magnolia cupcakes for pedophiles. Elizabeth Warren was a member of the Organizing Committee for the Second Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party.
And the only checks on their lies are mealy-mouthed newspaper fact-checkers and, apparently, cable companies. Otherwise there are no serious downsides or risks to running anonymously funded hundred-million-dollar misinformation campaigns. There are no consequences, no fear of any sort of future professional repercussions for any of the people involved in producing and airing the ads, and really no compelling reason not to lie to destroy a couple of political opponents.
Since the sheeple have proven time and time again that they will swallow whatever is presented to them in their trough, the 1% has learned that repeat a lie often enough and it does indeed become truth. Since they have the money to spend on the media saturation campaign, it wouldn’t surprise me if the attack-ee eventually starts to have their own doubts and maybe think they are evil incarnate.
What to do? Modify the constitution and prohibit anything but public dollars to be spent on any sort of political advertising. Yes, a dramatic pull-back on free speech, but when speech really isn’t free (try reaching a nation-wide audience for as little as 30 seconds and tell me that is free!) then what is at stake here is the uniform access of information and you can’t hear the melody of a single acoustic guitar when someone is blaring heavy metal at 11 (which, I want you to note, is not something I necessarily object to, being a bit of a heavy metal fan myself).
