A Teddy Kennedy Clone Democrats Created By Injecting Kennedy’s DNA Into An Egg From Rachel Maddow Will Run Against Scott Brown in 2012: The Truth Has To Matter

My hope is that some right-leaning independents will read this and begin to question their beliefs and political leaning. I know that none of this matters to hard core conservatives, who are perfectly content to believe that President Obama is a socialist, Muslim, who wasn’t born in the United States, and has raised income taxes on workers, and wants to take away the right of American Citizens to own firearms. It’s a beautiful, easy to understand, consistent, alternate universe such conservatives live in. I would be perfectly happy to let them inhabit this fallacious reality, except they drop by and vote in mine. That makes them a problem.

At one time in human history, being reality-oriented undoubtedly had direct survival benefits. If you ate the wrong berries, you died. If you ate the wrong mushroom, you died. If Sara Paleontologic convinced caveman Bob that a full-grown saber-toothed tiger would make a great camp pet, some saber-toothed tiger would become well fed, and Bob would contribute no more off-spring to the gene pool. And soon no one would listen to Sara Paleontologic any more.

Unfortunately, truth and survival have become so separated that many people, particularly conservatives it seems, do not care whether they are lied to by their elected representatives or whether their elected representatives even seem to know the difference.

Scott Brown’s use of Rachel Maddow as a foil for fundraising is a convenient example. The backstory, if you haven’t heard it, is that Scott Brown heard a rumor that Rachel Maddow had been recruited by the Democrats to run against him in 2012, and because of Rachel’s liberal politics he sent out a fundraising letter asking for donations to help him defeat her. The kicker is that Rachel is not running. She says she has not been contacted and has no intention of running, and she has in innumerable ways asked Scott Brown to stop using her name in his fundraising efforts. Scott Brown and his staff continue to act as though Rachel’s candidacy was likely.

The conservative take on this is that it is no big deal because both Maddow and Brown have gotten something from the incident. Brown has been able to use Maddow to raise funds and Maddow (through a letter denying her candidacy which she placed in the Boston Globe and through blogs detailing this kerfuffle etc.) has been able to advertise her show.

There is an important difference, however. Maddow is telling the truth (Scott Brown has used her name and the groundless notion that Maddow is running against him in fundraising letters); whereas, Scott Brown is not telling the truth and he doesn’t care. That should matter. It should matter to voters in Massachusetts, and it should matter to independents leaning toward the right, because it is one more instance of today’s conservatives not basing their politics on reality.

How do I know that Rachel Maddow isn’t the one lying? One of Scott Brown’s defenders implied as much when making the point that truth is often hard to discern.

To be honest, we cannot know for dead-flat absolute certain what the truth is. Philosophically, I am a modern skeptic, and as such, I believe that the best we can ever achieve, outside of pure mathematics, is a strongly supported rational belief. When I go into the kitchen and turn on the electric stove, my rational belief is that the burner will either get hot (if the electricity is on and the stove is working) or not (if the electricity is off or the stove is not working). I do not expect the burner to become colder than the ambient air temperature. I cannot be certain that the burner will not get colder, but my rational belief, based on an understanding of how the stove works and years of empirical experience indicates that it will not. I plan to fry my eggs based on a rational belief.

My rational belief is that Rachel Maddow is telling the truth. Firstly, as much as I enjoy her show, seeing her outside of her comfort zone (for example on Meet the Press, or the David Letterman Show) tells me that Ms. Maddow would be a disastrous candidate. She enjoys being an intellectual, and shows no ability to glory in being the center of attention. Secondly, as a news commentator, Ms. Maddow lives on her credibility.

I know that credibility is not an essential asset for News Commentators on the right. However, for those of us who demand highly accurate reporting, if a commentator is found too often in error, we will not watch them. Ms. Maddow makes a habit of correcting any mistakes in her reporting. When possible, she corrects minor errors before the end of her broadcast, or will correct her statements on the next show. That to me is responsible journalism.

If you go to PolitiFact.Com’s coverage of Rachel Maddow’s statements, you will find only four statements are covered. Two PolitiFact labeled as false. Notified of the error for one item, Ms. Maddow admitted to inadequately fact-checking a source and promised a correction.

To me the “false judgements” by Politifact for Ms. Maddow were relatively minor. For example she said that Sara Palin, “got precisely zero support for her call for Alaska's Democratic Senator Mark Begich to resign because Ted Stevens' corruption conviction was overturned." Politifact found that the idea was not Sara Palin’s own, and that she did receive a little (not much) support when she called for Begich’s resignation. Rachel’s statement would have been judged at least half-true if she has said that Palin received “little support when she echoed the call for Begich to resign.

Compare this to Scott Brown’s false claim that “Federal employees are making twice as much as their private counterparts." Even his own questionable source doesn’t suggest Federal employees are making that much more than private-sector workers, and it is based on a very questionable comparison. Or how about Brown’s claim that the stimulus bill "didn’t create one new job," (which Politifact labeled as a “Pants on Fire” lie)? Do you suppose Brown has issued a correction for either of those?

My rational belief is that Rachel Maddow is telling the truth, in this instance, and Scott Brown is running on a lie. He might as well have based his fundraising letter on the possibility that the Democrats are planning to run a Teddy clone (created from Kennedy’s DNA implanted in one of Rachel’s eggs) against him in 2012.

Brown’s lies about Ms. Maddow are, by themselves a trivial matter (although Ms. Maddow finds them quite irritating and her editorial comments about this on last night’s show, Tuesday March 30, echo mine in her insistence that lying should matter). However, when we allow lies, distortions, and disconnect from reality to pass, we are in danger of finding our laws and policy based not on the real world, but on a make believe world, and ultimately—if the law encourages adopting saber-toothed tigers as pets—laws based on fairytales, like those that deregulated the banking industry, can have disastrous real world consequences. Policy based on Brown’s lies about the stimulus package, and the pay rates for federal employees (the kind of lies we are coming to accept as part of the game) would be equally destructive.

For Ms. Maddow I have a modest suggestion. If you cannot do it through your show, then why not find someone like MoveOn.Org or the Massachusetts Democratic Party to open a “Stop Brown’s Fund-Raising Lies” fund, and accept donations that will be used to finance the candidacy of whoever does run against Brown in 2012. The fund could be set up to solicit and accept donations until Scott Brown comes on your show and admits his error.