Sunday, January 12, 2014

Incompetence is no excuse (#1808)

When you have a situation where what seems on the face of it to be a bad idea and you know your trust in the person being accused of the bad idea is counter to your intuition, then dig deeper. What I usually find is that the person I trust has been egregiously accused by a false narrative. I take our current President for example. He is being accused of harming current social security recipients by being acceptable to a new formula for figuring cost of living increases. What his overly eager opponents don't get is that only if two conditions are met. First, revenues are substantially raised through tax code reform and second, the vulnerable and those in poverty and hardship are also exempt from the new formula. Yet all I hear is that our President is some kind of monster who is only out to gut our social security recipients. What is even worse it that the right wing conservatives in America are fueling this disinformation in hopes of dividing our progressive liberal base. The final point I will make about this example is that in the end Republicans will never accept it since it goes against their lockstep policy of never raising taxes on the wealthy. What is obvious to me is this, that yellow journalism is alive and unfortunately well in our country. When we get good honest folks believing lies and misinformation as fact and then acting on it without verifying it we are hopelessly stuck in a a universe where trust is nowhere to be found. I know that trusting is hard when most are dishonest but some are not and when we find the trustworthy we must always give them the benefit of the doubt so we don't turn on them with dishonest propaganda.

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