Saturday, February 12, 2022

Petty hypocrisy works

As long as you have the press in your pocket. 

So this:


OK, she misspoke.  In a sane world, it's funny.  But as usual, outlets like the above leftwing rag use it to tar her as an idiot.  That way they can avoid the substance of her point. 

As one who spent a good part of my adult life in a fishbowl, where regular public speaking was part of the gig, I sympathize.  Try as you might, you'll eventually botch things.  More than once I misspoke or said something in a way I regretted. 

On the other hand, sometimes it was pettiness on the part of the listeners.  I remember once a fellow in our congregation emailed me after the morning services.  He was a bit shocked and disappointed that I split an infinitive in my sermon. I kid you not.  I wanted to respond and ask if he bothered to pay attention to anything else in the sermon, like the point of the message.  But I smiled and went on with life. 

So my sympathies are usually for those doing the speaking - Democrat, Republican, Druid or otherwise.  Nonetheless, it's not hard to see the naked hypocrisy, pettiness and lunacy that often accompanies the Left in exploiting such things.  

I remember in my younger years during the 1992 presidential campaign. We called it the great Potato Crisis.  Others called it Potatogate.  That's when VP Dan Quayle misspelled the word potato during an elementary school spelling bee.  For weeks it was hammered on by comedians, in the press, among pundits.  This was before the Internet or Cable News or Talk Radio had truly taken off.  I remember many I knew, Democrat and Republican, said let it die. Yet you'd think Quayle had declared the world to be flat. 

So I sympathize with the odd mistake, and typically don't exploit it for anything other than a chuckle.  Unless, of course, there appears to be something underneath suggesting an inner motive not intended to be revealed.  I also don't go crazy when it's clear that someone has misspoken (for instance, I knew President Obama knows how many states there are in the Union).  Otherwise making more of it than it is comes off as petty, childish, and more an indictment on those trying to make a mountain out of a molehill than the gaffe maker in question. 

BTW, as if to illustrate the press's help in the childish hypocrisy, behold a sampling of the results from Googling 'M. Greene' when this story broke:

4 comments:

  1. That's the point of going crazy over this, to deflect from the point and substance. Nothing new of course. But very frustrating.

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  2. For the most part conservatives should ignore the press, because when they are this dishonest there's no way your actual point is getting through.

    But if you do have to engage with them you can weaponize this tendency. Simply state something which is wrong, but the easiest way to debunk it requires the media to admit something that they otherwise wouldn't.

    For example, President Trump did this when he said that Hillary erased her e-mails "by wiping her hard drives with bleach." Many outlets suddenly said no, ACTUALLY she used a program named "bleachbit" to get rid of those improperly handled confidential e-mails before her hard drives could be examined. Some of these being the same outlets that up to that point refused to admit that there were any e-mails to delete. But getting one over on Trump was more important than maintaining the narrative.

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    Replies
    1. That's a good point. There is a way to do it. And until 2020, Trump did appear to have the press's number. He was able to get them to play his game. Perhaps finding some leaders able to do that would benefit conservatives immensely.

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    2. I like to call it the "cookie twist" from the example:

      "Brother ate 4 cookies out of the jar!"
      "That's a lie! I only ate 2!"

      And yes, Trump was a master of it as a board I was on would love to keep a running tally of every time he would do this which had a new entry weekly.

      He was able to get them to play his game. Perhaps finding some leaders able to do that would benefit conservatives immensely.

      Like... Trump? Who was constantly called a liar for this trick? Funny how many conservatives reacted to him...

      I'm sorry, just nowadays it really starts to feel like conservatives would rather have the house burn down than be rude to the arsonist.

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