There’s been a delivery of some new funky mirrors in the funhouse. Here’s an article in the New York Times that I am sure many will find alarming or then again, maybe not.
The Right Baits the Left to Turn Against Hillary Clinton
Please read the article and then join me below to discuss the ramifications and possible responses to the problem revealed by the NYT.
For those who weren’t able to read the article, the NYT cited a number of instances where the left has been duped into passing along unflattering factoids about HRC that actually originated from the rightwing Pac America Rising.
The instances cited involve the environmentalist Bill McKibben who retweeted a tweet about Hillary attending a fundraiser with a Keystone Pipeline lobbyist without noticing the source. Another embarrassing retweet involved theAFL-CIO which passed along an America Rising tweet which said flattering things about Richard Trumka for saying things that opposed HRC’s economic stances (interjection- how would they know?)
Another avowed Liberal retweeted the same tweet that McKibbin did and once made aware of how she had been duped had this somewhat Jabberwockian bit of cognitive dissonance to offer:
“I guess it’s fair. If what they’re saying is factual, then I guess it’s fair play. It’s a dirty game.”
In a show of touching concern for the left, an American Rising spokeperson said they wanted to show that segment of the Dem voting bloc that Hillary is not in line with them.
Others, such as the more openly Rovian American Crossroads guy, make no secret of what their underlying motivations are – to diminish Clinton enthusiasm from lefties, and as a possible side effect, dampen fund-raising. It was nice of him to elaborate when he could have simply chortled “Bwahahaha!”
Okay then. In our upside down, right is left and left is right world, a world where I just listened to Mitch McConnell say nice things about President Obama while pushing the TPP, we now have Conservative PACS pushing the worldview and concerns of Liberals, Progressives, Populists, Environmentalists, Labor and Sanctimonious Purists or whatever your own preferred label for this subset is, in order to push Hillary left and to harm her in the general election.
Or so they think.
As a member of the subset being targeted, I’m biased and I think this is the better stance for HRC in the first place and one that I personally believe will have more resonance and offer more differentiation with Republicans in the general election. I think a populist pro-labor stance would reverberate to her advantage as opposed to a campaign where she has more overlap with the Republican candidate than not.
Let’s go back to the cognitive dissonance issue of the Liberal who called the Conservatives passing unflattering facts “a dirty game”:
We already have a documented history of Republicans liking to deny reality and Democrats responding along the lines of “You have a right to your own opinion, but you don’t have a right to your own facts.” I think we are going to have to learn to follow our own advice and accept facts as facts regardless of what the source may be and then respond accordingly.
I do have a bit of a personal struggle with right wing campaign machinations that advance my own progressive worldview under a false flag, but when confronting the moral dilemma presented, I decided that I would ask myself "What would Hillary do?" And, just as she and Bill have no issue with accepting funds from repressive regimes if they can use the funds to promote a better world, I decided that I could accept right wing PACs advancing Liberal causes if it ultimately works to my and the country's advantage in obtaining a more liberal and Progressive HRC as the end result. Wouldn't it be the most delicious irony in the whole world if we get a Progressive, Populist candidate and then President with coattails, courtesy of America Rising and American Crossroads?
To be clear, I am NOT saying that we should accept unfounded rumors or hearsay or distorted facts or misinformation from right wing sources, or accept any stories from sources that already have a long-term well-founded reputation for distortion and bias, but I am saying that if a rightwing source should somehow manage to get an actual documented for real FACT through our personal and media defenses and mental barbed wire, we ought to be adult enough to respond to the reality and not what we wish the reality was. If the Keystone fundraising tweet or the Trumka tweet had been originated by an environmental group or a labor blog, no one would have erased it and donned a hairshirt for being a patsy.
Hillary Clinton is putting into place a huge media and campaign operation headed by David Brock that will deal with misinformation and distortions and I applaud that because she will be faced with a barrage of garbage. But facts is facts.