The Wrong Kind of Tolerance
Did you hear that Obama is blowing $200 million a day on his trip to Asia, wasting massive amounts of money in a vain mega-entourage of historic proportions, and that strapped U.S. taxpayers will be left to foot the eventual $2 billion bill for his opulent vacation? He has an entourage that consists of 2000 to 3000 people, who occupy between 500 and 870 five-star hotel rooms, with 34 warships–10% of the whole U.S. navy–and 40 aircraft for security.
Astonishing! And it would be even more astonishing it it were actually true!
That didn’t stop the top stars of the right wing from howling about Obama the spendthrift; Michele Bachmann, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Michelle Malkin, and Glenn Beck all flew off the handle among a host of guests and second-tier right-wing bloggers.
The problem, of course, is that the story, on its face, is laughably absurd. So much so that any rational human being would stop for a moment and ask, “Is that really true? Maybe we should check this before running with it.” At the very least, check the source.
And what was the source? An Indian news agency quoting a single, anonymous Indian government official. That article gave the $200 million figure and the 3000-person number. The next day, the same source reported on 800 hotel rooms, 40 cars, 13-heavy-lift aircraft and other goodies–this time none of it attributed to any source.
The story was then picked up–as is often the case–by Drudge, and that was all that was needed. Within hours, right-wing pundits were aflame in outrage, and the right-wing blogosphere was experiencing righteous indignation.
Among all those people going crazy and shouting all this to the world, apparently not one stopped to ask themselves if an anonymous Indian government official and other unidentified people could really be reliable sources of information about this. Certainly no one thought to, say, call up someone to check it out.
The thing is, to them, it doesn’t matter. I don’t know if they know it’s not true and don’t care, or if they actually believe it, and I don’t think that’s really relevant to these people. It’s all about smearing what they don’t like. And they are probably well aware, even meticulously aware of the fact that if something is shouted from the rooftops from many, many sources, then it will be accepted as fact by a great many people.
I have no doubt that–even after a thorough debunking in the media–if you were to poll Republicans next week, more than half–maybe even more than two-thirds–would cite the $200 million figure as truth. And a good many independents would probably be just as convinced, and maybe even some Democrats.
Think I’m going overboard? Look at how many people still think that there are Obama Death Panels, something that was demonstrably false from Day One. Think about the 52% of Republicans who believe that ACORN stole more votes than they registered.
No, this story is the perfect example of what you often hear called “the right-wing echo chamber,” where one of them makes a ludicrous claim, and then they all pick up on it and it reverberates and amplifies.
But conservatives are even more astonishing in their willingness to accept crap like this. To still embrace politicians who regularly spew out some of the most absurd crap imaginable, like headless torsos littering the Arizona desert. Or Sarah Palin claiming that she was skilled in foreign policy because one part of Alaska is within sight of one part of Russia, and Putin’s plane maybe flew over Alaska once.
This is why it is so hard for many on the left to understand what’s going on: we simply cannot empathize. If a Democrat were to repeatedly claim in media interviews that they were a diplomatic wonder because they were within eyesight of a foreign country once, we would laugh them out. Sure, Biden says stupid crap from time to time, but (a) nothing that idiotic, and (b) we give him a hard time for it, pretty universally. We don’t make him a media darling and put him up on a pedestal.
And if Keith Olbermann or Rachel Maddow started reporting obviously crazy nonsense like the $200 million story, they would quickly lose their audiences.
So what make right-wingers so tolerant of blatant bullshit? Is it that they don’t care, or that they can’t tell?
To close, here’s Maddow’s debunking of the story:
40 cars and 13 aircraft is believable. 800 room-nights (200 rooms for 4 nights) is too. As is an air-carrier group and other elements of the Fifth Fleet moving close in to India to protect AF1 and as a contingency.
If Obama did this every month then there would be grounds for complaint, but as head of state he’s perfectly within his rights to make state visits to important allies as part of his job.
There is a factual basis, but of course complaining about it is the true bullshit here.
It’s not so much an “echo chamber” as it is an attack propaganda apparatus.
It is true that we’re probably going to start denying hip replacements on Medicare, if we haven’t already. Medicare is horrificly underfunded — we’re going to need to more than double the payroll deduction (from 3% to 6.44%) just to pay for rising Part A expenses, Part B (payments to physicians) is going to be $500B/yr later this decade. Let’s not even get into Part D, another $100B/yr by the end of the decade.
Of course, without government insurance you’re not going to be getting that hip replacement anyway, and for Medicare to pay for this we’re going to have to drive down profits in the sector and/or increases current contributions.
Also, it is true that NAFTA is all about increasing trade between Canada, the US, and Mexico.
We know that many among the right simply lie when it suits them (hi Geoff!). And with just a few lies you can distort reality enough to form an alternative narrative.
This nation was founded on Christianity and has a special mission with God that the gays and abortionists are endangering. Global warming and the theory of evolution are cons by the academy. The left wing, being anti-American, wanted us to lose Vietnam and were also thus pro-Saddam in 2002-2003. Fluoridation is to poison precious bodily fluids. There’s too many immigrants taking our jobs (well, this last one is probably true but it has always been true, since 1870 or whatever).
Speaking of alternative narratives, there’s this:
http://www.alternet.org/module/printversion/148795
about the christianist movement. If they were 5% of the vote or better dispersed they wouldn’t be an issue, but they damn near helped the R’s take the CO Senate seat up and are a true red-state bedrock interest group. The Baptists own the South, and the christianists own the Baptists.
CNN’s 2004 exit polling showed that 23% of the electorate is white evangelical and they were Bush’s strongest deme at 78%! That’s 20% of the electorate, probably closer to 25% in mid-terms.
This is why we are screwed.
13 aircraft, okay, but that was mixed with the number of cars and inflated to 40 by the right-wingers, making it sound like he had a fleet of jumbo jets carrying his entourage. 40 cars, especially if many were supplied by the Indian government, also sounds reasonable.
However, they did not say 800 “room nights,” but 800 rooms, and this was inflated to as much as 870, which supposedly would house the ridiculous number of people they claimed. They were not only assuming 200 rooms per night–which is actually a tad high, if you ask me–but 800 or 870 rooms per night, and claimed that all of these were at a 5-star hotel (probably they were referring to the Taj Majal Hotel, which they assumed would be completely reserved for Obama’s people to the last room).
The 34 warships would be too large even for a complete aircraft carrier group, counting things like supply and hospital ships as “warships.”
However, all of these were just dressing for their central claims–the 3000 people spending $200 million per day. Really, they think 3000 people? That simply defies belief, goes into a realm where it might as well be 30,000 people. And I’d wager that even if you counted every penny of salary and material costs for every person and activity even remotely connected to anything related to Obama’s trip, you still wouldn’t get the $200 million per night figure. All of which were then magnified further by this crowd to extend to every day of Obama’s travel, in every country.
This also leads to another pet peeve of mine–counting every dollar potentially connected with an activity as a special cost. Take the aircraft carrier; when the “cost” of deploying it for a trip like this is calculated, what is most often done is to take the entire cost of running the ship for the time it is deployed, and claiming that is what it cost the taxpayers for that activity. Which is ludicrous, because it’s not like the carrier would cost nothing if it were not used for that. Using military assets is relatively cheap, because we’re already paying for it. The only thing that should really be calculated is the excess expenditures, above and beyond normal operations we’d be doing anyway–overtime, special material purchases, hiring extra staff, extra fuel costs, etc. But I never hear of that being done.
Not that the right-wingers in this case did even that level of analysis–they just saw some foreign news source, of which they probably didn’t even remember the name, and ran with it. What was revealing was that they didn’t even stick to that story consistently–the numbers varied all over the place, hotel rooms varying from 500 to 800 to 870, people varying from 2000 to 3000, and so on. In short, they were simply laying bullshit on bullshit, making crap up along the way.
Not to mention that they did not at all count the fact that every president travels overseas and incurs costs. They certainly did not complain about Bush’s excessive vacations, each of which cost a great deal in not only travel costs but security at the locations, even as familiar a one as his ranch.
As you point out, this is pure attack dreck. But I stand by the “echo chamber” term as well, and that this was a definitive example: one right-winger says something (as is often the case, Drudge), then three or four repeat that one, then a dozen repeat them, and a brace of right-wingers repeat them… it reverberates into a crescendo before the debunking causes it to fall off into the lame, trailing “questions still remain” bullshit that faintly echoes on for days.
They were not only assuming 200 rooms per night–which is actually a tad high, if you ask me
I can see them wanting two floors of the hotel, which I think is 100 rooms each. The secret service team alone might be 100 people, too.
In short, they were simply laying bullshit on bullshit, making crap up along the way.
Is there anything they don’t do this for? Or is my filtering of their idiocies through Sadly No!, atrios, and tbogg misrepresentative : )
This is not an accident, this is intentional. Make noise. Bullshit the masses. Vilify, attack, destroy.
When you’re attacking you don’t have to play defense.
These people make Scientologists look respectable.