Setting the Record Straight

.
Yesterday, I spent most of the afternoon responding to a long article in a local independent newspaper that quoted at length from an "article" from World Net Daily (WND) that quoted an "article" from Investor's Business Daily (IBD) that quoted "Obama Nation" by Jerome Corsi.

You remember Corsi. His book was so inaccurate and distorted that even Fox News stopped ballyhooing it. Several ultra-conservative think tanks bought thousands of copies of it so that it would appear at the top of the New York Times bestseller list for at least one week. Obama's campaign posted a refutation of much of the book on its website that ran to 42 pages.

Both WND and IBD are far-right websites that latch onto any negative information they can find about Obama, give it a new twist, and spread it to the world. In the case of this article, they had latched onto two topics, conflated them, then interpreted their conflation to fit their world view.

The two topics are Obama's desire to create a "Universal Voluntary Public Service" cadre and his once-stated and never-repeated idea that there should be a civilian national-security force "as powerful, as strong, and as well-funded" as the military. IBD turned these two nebulous ideas into a plot by Obama to suck our youth into a Hitlerian organization that would enforce conformity with the tactics of the Brown Shirts.

They took "well-funded" to mean "equally funded," which is, of course, ridiculous. A civilian national-security force would not need to be as large as our military, as it would not cover the whole world but only the land within our borders, nor would it need expensive equipment like jet fighters or Tomahawk missiles to engage in the kind of police work and intelligence gathering that is the only way to combat terrorism.

Whenever I see material like this, I try to respond to it. It is important to fight the lies and distortions with the truth. Democrats failed to do this during the Clinton years, and it led the Republicans to be so arrogant that they wasted all that time and money impeaching the President when they knew they could not convict him. I don't want ever again to see the country divided the way it has been for the past couple of decades. We need to pull together.

But to do that, we can't let negative statements stand -- or they will be taken as fact.
.