Prevarications of 2013

       

As we come to the end of another year, I can’t help but reflect that this has been a year of monumental falsehood. I’m not talking about things hoped for and or planned for which didn’t work out as well as hoped. Those may be seen as mistakes or shortcomings, but rarely reflect a deliberate effort to deceive.  I’m referring to falsehoods issued by persons who knew when they said it that it was a lie, but had faith in the gullibility and naiveté of their audience.

          Unfortunately, in an America which lionizes such nincompoops as Sarah Palin, Phil Robertson, Ted Cruz and Rush Limbaugh, those deliberate prevarications all too frequently find fertile ground.  The aforementioned all decry their great Satan – the “liberal media” and their trusty acolytes echo the chant. As the year ends, I feel the need to once again, tilt against this windmill of straw. It’s cathartic, it’s fun, and it’s necessary; so I’ll try to select just a few of the most outrageous lies and address them with fact and truthful research.

#1:    “Liberal Media” – there ain’t no such animal, at least in the sense that the far right, especially the Tea Partiers use the term. There are various media outlets, print and broadcast, many owned by conservatives (Chicago Tribune and Tampa Times come to mind) and many owned by  liberals (The Washington Post, for example). As print media, they need to sell papers, and must do so to survive in a world increasingly dominated by internet and broadcast news competition. To blatantly favor either Far Left or Right would be economic suicide in an industry where pressures are already causing print sources to cease publication. It’s really that simple. 

          In like manner, until cable competition pinched them, major broadcast networks also competed with each other for advertisers, and none could afford an outright slant on content at the risk of losing national sponsors. None other than Roger Ailes, as recently as 1995, decried the possibility of an outright political slant in mainstream network outlets because of this fact.  In summary, until the advent of Fox News, and its discovery of legions of nose pickers who are apparently willing to believe anything they are told and the advent of sponsors who pander to this demographic there was no “liberal” or “conservative” media.

There was a tendency for outlets to cover mainstream news and science, which apparently offends some who believe the earth to be about 4800 years old, and (according to Bishop Usher, years ago), created on my birthday of Oct. 26^th!  These people were also, no doubt, offended by major media outlets in the 1960s showing those vicious Negros trying to march over those white peaceful police who were forced to defend themselves with water cannons, dogs and clubs! They also were troubled by anything less than whole hearted support and positive “spin” for the great adventure in Viet Nam. Probably the final straw was when the Washington Post actually dared imply that the Nixon White House had done anything wrong regarding Watergate events.

          If there is a markedly slanted media outlet today, it is Fox News, which I have renamed Faux News. The selfsame Roger Ailes is the original head of News there. It was he who, in 2000, before any media outlet dared call the Bush-Gore election had Faux announce Bush (his cousin, by coincidence!) had won Florida. It was Faux news which openly lamented the 2012 Obama reelection while the others simply reported numbers. It is Faux who gives the bully pulpit to the Becks, Limbaughs, Palins, Hannitys, et al, ad nauseum. While there are assuredly contrapuntal liberal outlets, they are cable/satellite talk radio, not television outlets masquerading as purveyors of factual information. Any imbecile, even Phil Robertson, could watch Diane Sawyer and compare ABC Nightly News to Sean Hannity and tell which is presenting news and which is partisan OpEd masquerading as news.

#2:   “Childhood vaccines cause autism spectrum disorders.” This lie was actually probably spread by persons believing they were protecting newborns, based on a study performed in England.  Although there are two separate issues concerning vaccines and autism, they're often lumped together. One has to do with the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine; the other involves vaccines containing the chemical preservative thimerosal, which contains a form of mercury that has been suspected of causing autism and has recently been removed from most vaccines. Hint: this means that there is no reason to fear this vaccination now, regardless of what Jenny McCarthy and/or Katie Couric tell you. The other issue is that thimoseral doesn’t react in the body or stay in the body as the more toxic ethyl mercury (not used in vaccines). A non medically/scientifically trained parent wouldn’t know the difference, but many acted as if they did.

      The MMR scare started 10 years ago with a report published in The Lancet, the British analogy to the Journal of the AMA, which described the cases of eight children who, as their parents recalled, developed autistic symptoms and digestive ailments shortly after getting their first MMR dose. The MMR vaccine controversy centered around the 1998 publication of a fraudulent research paper in the medical journal The Lancet that lent support to the subsequently discredited theory that colitis and autism spectrum disorders could be caused by the combined measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine. The media has been heavily criticized for its naive reporting and for lending undue credibility to the architect of the fraud, Andrew Wakefield.

Investigations revealed that Wakefield had "multiple undeclared conflicts of interest, had manipulated evidence, and had broken other ethical codes." The Lancet paper was fully retracted in 2010, and Wakefield was found guilty by the General Medical Council of serious professional misconduct in May 2010 and was struck off the Medical Register, meaning he could no longer practice as a doctor. The scientific consensus is that no evidence links the vaccine to the development of autism, and that the vaccine's benefits greatly outweigh its risks.

        Reviews of the evidence by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the Institute of Medicine of the US National Academy of Sciences, the UK National Health Service, and the Cochrane Library all found no link between the vaccine and autism. The claims in Wakefield's 1998 The Lancet article were, unfortunately  widely reported; vaccination rates in the UK and Ireland dropped sharply, which was followed by significantly increased incidence of measles and mumps, resulting in deaths and severe and permanent injuries. A 2011 Lancet article described the vaccine-autism connection as "the most damaging medical hoax of the last 100 years

. Since that initial finding, 14 studies including millions of children in several countries consistently show no significant difference in autism rates between children who got the MMR vaccine those who didn't.  Fear of autism frightens parents, and it should. But today few parents in the U.S. or other developed countries have seen the suffering and death wrought by measles and other disease that vaccines can prevent, including measles,

      Unfortunately, the saner voices in the medical community which recommend vaccination as of microscopic risk compared to the kill potential of Measles, Rubella and Mumps, are in many cases shouted down by non-medical persons who, by virtue of some degree of celebrity, get heard by gullible mothers and dads. Such a person is Jenny McCarthy. While she has a bitchin’ bod and a cute face (her Playboy credentials) she has zero medical training. What she does have, lamentably, are two autistic children and ample opportunities to tell anyone who listens, including Katie Couric (who used to actually do news) that she has insight denied to the ”medical community,”  a term she uses with exactly the same inflection Palin uses when she says “liberal media”.

What she will never say is that her opinions are based on the above, thoroughly debunked Lancet Wakefield study and that she has chosen to ignore all the mountain of contradictory evidence and you should too if you love your kids!  No one whose child dies from measles because their mom and dad thought Jenny McCarthy somehow really knew anything, will ever sue her, more’s the pity.

3: Executive Order hoax. The last for today came to me in an e-mail this morning. I’ll cut and paste the gist:

“For the SHOCK of your life, take 1 minute to comprehend what you read below. During our lifetimes, all Presidents have issued Executive Orders. For various reasons, some have issued more than others. These things will directly affect us all, in years to come. Question is: Do YOU care enough to send this, 'shocking info,' to people you love and others?  (Ed note: Is anyone more impressed by ALL CAPS?)

NUMBER OF EXECUTIVE ORDERS ISSUED by U.S. Presidents in the last 100 years:

Teddy Roosevelt – 3                     All Others until FDR - 0

FDR - 11 in 16 years                     Truman - 5 in 7 years

Ike - 2 in 8 years                            Kennedy - 4 in 3 years

LBJ - 4 in 5 years                          Nixon - 1 in 6 years

Ford - 3 in 2 years                          Carter - 3 in 4 years

Reagan - 5 in 8 years                     Bush - 3 in 4 years

Clinton - 15 in 8 years                   George W. Bush - 62 in 8 years

Obama - 923 in 3 1/2 years! More than 1000+ and counting Executive Orders in 6 years...  Read some of them below – unbelievable!

Next step -dictatorship. (Looks like we are there already!)

Wow! Scary, huh? And it might be in any of it were factual. Realty is that like many of these “revelatory” e-mails, literally none of the numbers are true! That’s right – it’s completely false and the ratios are also false. So ok, Dorman what is the real story, you ask? I’ll respond by pasting the response I sent to the person who forwarded this to me. He is a dear friend, but has no concept of "fact check."

Dear ****,  ya got suckered again. The real (as in truthful) numbers are in the table I attached. Some of the executive orders claimed to have been issued by the current President were actually issued in the Kennedy years! In truth, as of the end of 2012, LBJ signed more than twice as many as did Reagan (you remember, the God the original issuer of this scurrilous e-mail still probably prays to!). As of now, President Barack Obama is on about the same (almost exact) pace as his predecessor, and will probably have issued less than 1/3 as many as Republican Theodore Roosevelt and about half as many as Eisenhower . This is simply one more example of "blame it on the black guy." It took, by the way, about 30 seconds to verify that the content of this e-mail is a fraud. I left the link at the bottom.     Mike

Name	Number claimed:	Actual number:
Theodore Roosevelt	3	1,081
Franklin Roosevelt	11	3,522
Harry Truman	5	907
Dwight Eisenhower	2	484
John Kennedy	4	214
Lyndon Johnson	4	325
Richard Nixon	1	346
Gerald Ford	3	169
Jimmy Carter	3	320
Ronald Reagan	5	381
George H.W. Bush	3	166
Bill Clinton	15	364
George W. Bush	62	291
Barack Obama	923	138

 

PS. Even my poorest history student, upon reflecting a moment, would have realized that claiming that FDR issued only 11 in 12 years was a red flag the size of Texas, considering the huge amount of new deal actions that were done by executive order in the first 100 days of FDR's first term and again starting December 8, 1941. Think about it.

          So as the 2014 creeps up on us, what new bullshit storms will assail us? Stay tuned.