{"id":1324,"date":"2004-05-15T12:00:21","date_gmt":"2004-05-15T16:00:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/000af36.netsolhost.com\/wordpress1\/2004\/05\/15\/pernicious_righ\/"},"modified":"2004-05-15T12:00:21","modified_gmt":"2004-05-15T16:00:21","slug":"pernicious_righ","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/griendling.com\/wordpress1\/2004\/05\/15\/pernicious_righ\/","title":{"rendered":"Pernicious Right"},"content":{"rendered":"

A friend who I can fairly characterize as a liberal was nonetheless shocked when she read Lies and the Lying Liars\u2026<\/em> by Al Franken. She admitted \u201chow naive I was about the shameless tactics of the Republicans. I am completely freaked out about what they have gotten away with\u2026.\u201d<\/p>\n

We now can see how that works even on a humble blog like this one. <\/p>\n

On my recent post \u201cWho\u2019s Worse?\u201d John K., who I believe is Republican, makes this comment, \u201cYour [sic] the same guy who also called the 9-11 terrorists \u2018courageous,\u2019 right?\u201d<\/p>\n

Note the hedging as it puts it in a form of a question but strongly suggests I said that. I did not. He used the word courageous; I never described the terrorists as courageous. <\/p>\n

My brief post (found here<\/a> along with exchange of comments John and I had) noted what former security advisor Dick Clarke said in his book Against All Enemies<\/em>: that the 9-11 terrorists, while evil in many ways, were not \u201ccowardly.\u201d John K. picked up on the dictionary definition that cowardly means \u201clacking courage.\u201d So by my saying they were not cowardly, he interprets as meaning I believe they are courageous. <\/p>\n

If one does not perform an act of courage today, does that mean that they spent the day being cowardly?<\/p>\n

It\u2019s one thing to mischaracterize the opposition by interpreting one vote as indicative of a political stance (e.g., Bush\u2019s charge that John Kerry doesn\u2019t want to protect American soldiers today because he voted against some weapons systems years ago), but it is wholly another thing to accuse people of saying something they never said. (See also my post Calling the Bushies<\/a>)<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a reason the right is losing credibility, day by day, lie by lie.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A friend who I can fairly characterize as a liberal was nonetheless shocked when she read Lies and the Lying Liars\u2026 by Al Franken. She admitted \u201chow naive I was about the shameless tactics of the Republicans. I am completely freaked out about what they have gotten away with\u2026.\u201d We now can see how that… Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/griendling.com\/wordpress1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1324"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/griendling.com\/wordpress1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/griendling.com\/wordpress1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/griendling.com\/wordpress1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/griendling.com\/wordpress1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1324"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/griendling.com\/wordpress1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1324\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/griendling.com\/wordpress1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1324"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/griendling.com\/wordpress1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1324"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/griendling.com\/wordpress1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1324"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}