Yesterday I wrote a post, the thrust of which was that we are living in a world made largely fact free by the right wing echo chamber. I mentioned the fact that a friend of mine got an email from a right wing friend in which she claimed that Obama had spent his term blaming Bush for the world’s problems. I observed that was simply not the case, although he and the Democrats would be perfectly justified in doing so. As if to prove my point, one of my occasional right wing commenters had this to say:
google Blame Bush and you get 55.6 million results
Now there are probably times when the number of hits a particular search gets has some meaning, but this particular search can in no logical way be used to prove or disprove my point, which was that Obama has not made a habit of blaming Bush for anything. I certainly have, and so have lots of other people. Yet apparently my commenter thinks that somehow his search disproves my assertion. A corollary, perhaps, of the larger point I was making-both fact and logic free. The least he could do was search “Obama blame Bush”, though even the result of that search would be meaningless.
By the way, a search for “blame Obama” achieves 15,900,000 results, which considering Bush’s head start in both chronology and incompetence compares quite favorably in terms of raw numbers. Of course that result in no way proves that any particular person is blaming Obama for anything. In fact, at least on the first page of hits, that search turns up a lot of instances of Obama blaming….BP for the oil spill, not Bush for anything. Since Bush spent a lot of time blaming Clinton for everything under the sun, who knows how many of those 56 million hits are examples of just that.
Unfortunately, this is just one small, backwater example of an asymmetry with which we on the rational side of the street must deal. We try to deal in reasoned argument, while they are quite satisfied with non sequiturs. In fact, they appear to be proud of them.
By the way, it remains the case that there is almost nothing going tragically wrong in this country today that cannot be rightfully blamed on Bush and/or the Republicans. That’s simple fact and, as I said yesterday, it’s about time the Democrats started doing some blaming.
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