Propaganda Versus Evidence

“Are we going to have a moment of silence at eleven o’clock?” asked a student first thing Monday morning before classes started.

“What are you talking about?” I asked.

“President Obama wants to have a moment of silence because of the shooting in Arizona,” he said.

“Oh. I didn’t know that,” I answered. Later, the principal came over the loudspeaker to announce that the entire school would observe a moment of silence at eleven. The Arizona shooting clearly dominated everyone’s attention and, being responsible for teaching current events, I postponed my planned Monday lesson plan and used the story to reinforce some earlier lessons on the Bill of Rights, propaganda, and the political spectrum.

“Open your books to page 885,” I said when class started, “and look at Amendment 6 at the top. It reads: ‘In all criminal prosecutions, the accused’ - and that would be Jared Loughner, the alleged shooter in this case - ‘shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the state and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law . . .’”

“The ‘state and district’ mentioned would be Tucson, Arizona, which is in Pima County. The sheriff of Pima County is Democrat Charles Dupnik, and he made some controversial statements about why he thinks Loughner did what he did.”

“Sheriff Dupnik blamed former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin and others for stirring up the shooter,” I explained. “Dupnik accused Palin of saying ‘We have people like Gabby Giffords in the crosshairs.’ Actually, Palin didn’t say that, but had published a map of the US showing congressional districts where Democrats like Gifford were targeted for defeat at the polls on election day. After Sheriff Dupnik said that, other Democrats made statements that it was right-wing conservatives in the Tea Party who provoked Loughner to shoot Congresswoman Gifford and the others.”

We had studied the political spectrum in class, so students knew what was meant by left-wing and right-wing. “Some people on the right have accused Sheriff Dupnik of using the shooting as propaganda to damage right-wing politicians,” I said. “I hope you remember what propaganda is.”

“Spreading information to help a cause or hurt an opposing cause,” said a girl.

“Yes,” I said. “We’ll look online for evidence that Jared Loughner was influenced by either right-wingers or by left-wingers. It’s only been 48 hours, but we’ll see if there’s any actual evidence out there to back up these claims, okay?”

They took out their laptops and started searching. On the blackboard, I wrote “Left Wing” on the left and “Right Wing” on the right. Some students read opinions like those expressed by Dupnik and I explained that opinions were not evidence. Then a student said, “Loughner wrote on Youtube that one of his favorite books was ‘The Communist Manifesto’ by Karl Marx. That’s left-wing,” the boy said.

“Right,” I answered. We had studied Marx as the founder of communism and I listed that as evidence on the left.

“Another favorite book was ‘We The Living,’” he added.

“The author of that book would be Ayn Rand, who was Libertarian. That’s conservative, and some might say right-wing,” I explained as I listed it on the right.

“Another book was ‘Mein Kampf’ by Hitler,” said a girl.

“I’ll put that on the right,” I said, “but some think Nazis were leftist. I guess they could go on either end.”

“Loughner could have been reading those books to study both sides,” said another boy.

“Good point,” I said. “I have books by both Marx and Rand in my own library. That Loughner had them is evidence that he may have been influenced politically one way or the other. A piece of evidence is a clue. It’s not proof.”

“One of Loughner’s classmates sald he was a left-wing pothead,” said a girl.

“Okay. That’s a first-hand account and it’s evidence,” I said as I listed it on the left.

“Another classmate said he had serious mental problems and she was afraid of him,” said the girl.

“That’s not left-wing or right-wing,” I said. “There are nutcases on both sides of the political spectrum, so let’s add another column in the middle called “Nutcase.” I did, and listed that description.

“Has anyone found more evidence that Loughner was influenced by left-wing or right-wing politics?” I asked.

There were no hands.

“Okay. How about evidence that he was a nutcase?”

Lots of hands went up.

“His math professor said he was dangerous,” said a boy.

“His parents said he was mentally ill,” said a girl.

“His neighbor said he was disturbed,” said another girl.

The middle column got longer and longer. “Looks like there’s far more evidence that Loughner acted because he was mentally disturbed than because he was motivated politically,” I said. “It appears Sheriff Dupnik was shooting from the hip with his opinions when he should have been looking for evidence.”

To Bail Or Not To Bail

People can choose whether or not to use their money to bail out a relative or friend, and that’s good. People don’t have a choice when government uses their money to bail out businesses, and that’s bad.

Bail is a great system as traditionally practiced. When someone’s arrested, he can either stay in jail until his trial when his guilt or innocent will be determined, or he can be bailed out. He’s allowed one phone call to send word out into the community at large that he’s in jail charged with whatever. If he has a good enough reputation, a family member or a friend will show up at the jail and put down however much money to secure his release until trial, and the amount would depend on the seriousness of the charge(s).

On the other hand, if he’s worn out his welcome with family and friends in the community, if his reputation is so tarnished that there’s nobody left who is willing to come forward and help, then he stays in jail. We could call this process the “trial before the trial.” If those who know him best make the judgement, if in their opinion he’s become dysfunctional - by abusing alcohol or drugs, through dishonesty, laziness, violence, or whatever - each relative or friend makes an individual decision about whether they wish to extend themselves for him - or leave him in jail to take the legal consequences of his behavior. It’s a wonderful process. If no one answers his call, the accused stays inside to ponder how things got so bad. A judge might force him to undergo treatment for addiction or mental illness. The accused may resolve to change the way he runs his life and become a better person after dealing with the consequences of his behavior. Or maybe not, and he’ll stay in jail a very long time. Either outcome is usually good for the community at large.

The traditional bail system is a wonderful process. Lately, however, the term has been applied as a remedy for bankruptcy. There’s a whole set of bankruptcy laws for individuals who have managed their affairs badly and cannot pay their debts. I’m no expert, but when they declare bankruptcy, whatever assets they have beyond basic necessities are liquidated to pay off creditors and the rest of their debts are forgiven. Some of their creditors don’t get paid, and that’s a consequence either of bad luck, or for their bad judgement in choosing to do business with an unreliable person. There’s still some choice involved, but it’s before the fact, not after. Once bankruptcy is declared, a judge makes the decisions.

It’s much the same process with a corporation. If it makes bad decisions, if it’s irresponsible, greedy, lazy, mismanaged, or dysfunctional in some other way and cannot pay its debts, it declares bankruptcy and then it has no more choices. All contracts become null and void and a judge decides what should be done from then on. It could be forced to reorganize in some way. If it’s a large corporation, competitors often choose to buy up parts of it and continue to operate them. Some creditors get paid, others lump it, but the overall outcome is usually good for the community at large. Bankruptcy laws apply, but the free market is the ultimate arbiter. Government has, until lately, avoided involvement beyond maintaining courts to function as they were designed. When government goes beyond that and bails out big companies as it has lately, ostensibly to protect the overall economy, it makes things worse. Some companies need to fail, just as some individuals need to sit in jail. Families don’t help by continuing to bail out dysfunctional relatives, and neither does government help by bailing out dysfunctional companies. It only prolongs the agony and the inevitable collapse, which will likely be even more catastrophic than it might otherwise have been if it were allowed to occur early. Failure is a great teacher and there are many who seem not to learn any other way.

Taxpayers don’t have a choice when government bails out businesses, even though it’s their money being spent, or it’s borrowed money being spent that taxpayers, their children and their grandchildren, will be forced to repay with interest. The Democrat Congress and President Bush began the process with TARP in 2008 (Troubled Assets Relief Program), but an even more heavily Democrat Congress and President Obama after November, 2008 elections, have taken the practice much, much farther. Together, they have mortgaged the whole country with crippling debt to bail out their friends on Wall Street and in unions like the UAW (United Auto Workers). If General Motors and Chrysler had been allowed to collapse, union contracts would have been nullified. Their unwieldy pension and benefit packages were major factors pushing the auto companies over the brink. However, since unions are a major constituency of the Democrat Party, government preserved those unsustainable contracts with huge bailouts when the whole mess should have been allowed to collapse.

Americans are fuming and the Tea Party is in revolt. Government took away their choice to bail or not to bail, so they’ll choose instead to replace their dysfunctional government at the polls next month.

It’s going to be a very interesting election.

Strong Wind To Starboard

Some still don’t take the Tea Party seriously, even after they’ve gathered over and over, all around the country, in huge numbers, and protested big government’s unconstitutional expansion. Mostly they’re smug liberals who consider themselves to be intellectuals. They think they know what’s best for the rest of us and they’re running the country - right into the ground. Bernie Marcus, one of the guys who founded Home Depot, thinks they’re tenured academics and “They don’t have a clue of what they’re talking about.”

“They come out of Harvard,” he said. “They come out of Yale. They’re all on tenure. Tenure means they get paid whether they work or not. Tenure means they’re on insurance for the rest of their lives. Tenure means they don’t ever have to worry about anything because they were there for a number of years, but America is not that way . . . If the president got out of the White House and started moving among the peasants, which is everybody else in the world except for Washington. Washington has their own insurance plan. They got their own pensions. They don’t abide by the rules everyone else abides by . . . When I talk to people who are creating jobs today - these are not villains. These are not monsters.”

“And you think they’re being portrayed that way [by the White House]?” asked the host.

“Oh, there’s no question about it. Yeah, we’re monsters and we are disgusting human beings . . . for creating 300,000 jobs
. . .”

Marcus is pissed. So is the Tea Party. The elitists still don’t get it. They will after November 2nd though.

These tenured liberals have lived all their lives in academic echo chambers and think they know how to run the world - its health care and its economy. They’re still predicting an economic recovery to follow the $800 billion stimulus that spent $2 million for each job it created. But ordinary Americans understand that no recovery is going to happen that way. They know Obama, Pelosi and Reid only made things worse by putting us $800 billion further into debt. They know our health care system was much better before that triumvirate “fixed” it by making it more complicated, more expensive, and less effective. They know we won’t have a recovery until they take back their government - and they will.

Senator John Kerry, for whom I used to work when I was a young and foolish liberal, made some nasty remarks about Tea Party victories in last week’s primaries. “The news from Delaware is crystal clear: It’s Sarah Palin’s party now. We [must] defeat the Tea Party extremists.”

Extremists? The Tea Party is extremist? Not smug elitists like himself who tripled our deficit and turned recession to depression? Tenured elitists think Republicans are being hijacked by the Tea Party and they’re right. The Tea Party wants to pull the Constitution out of mothballs, dust it off, and apply it the way the founding fathers intended. That’s extremist to Ivy League elitists like Kerry, who think they’re much smarter than Jefferson and Madison. They don’t want government to be hampered by the Constitution. They know better how to create jobs better than people like Bernie Marcus too, even though he’s actually done it and they haven’t.

They’re right that the Tea Party has been concentrating on Republicans - to clean liberals like Castle, Murkowski and Crist out, because there’s no point having two liberal parties. That makes other RINOs (Republicans in Name Only) like Maine Senator Olympia Snowe nervous. If Mike Castle can lose a primary in a liberal state like Delaware, Snowe can lose one in liberal Maine too - and she’s up in 2012. Some expect her to come out of the closet as a Democrat soon. Will Susan Collins be far behind? She’s up in 2014.

Now that the primaries are over, the Tea Party will focus on defeating liberal Democrats in November. How many will drop? Hard to tell. I happened to be passing through Portland, Maine last Monday when Lady Gaga showed up to pressure our two Lady RINO senators into breaking ranks and repealing “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” The pierced and tattooed turned out to cheer their liberal Democrat heroes who warmed up the crowd with speeches - like 1st District Congresswoman and Pelosi Pet, Chellie Pingree. The contrast between that crowd and a Tea Party crowd in nearby Westbrook where Pingree’s opponent, conservative Republican Dean Scontras, spoke the day before could not be more profound. Pingree’s web site pledges to “Stop the Tea Party,” but which constituency will prevail in Maine and America on November 2nd? Maine’s 1st district is the bluest part of a very blue state in the azure northeast - a sanctuary state with generous welfare benefits for illegal immigrants and a homosexual haven. Pingree is ahead in opinion polls 48% to Scontras’s 37%, but 15% are undecided. Scontras is a tireless campaigner and Pingree is worried. She looked pretty haggard when I saw her Monday. She knows that 15% is likely to break for Scontras and sink her.

If Scontras beats her November 2nd, our two Lady RINOs will probably start tacking to starboard as John McCain has in Arizona. In spite of Lady Gaga’s pressure, they didn’t break ranks when “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” came up in the US Senate on Tuesday. They have their fingers in the wind - which will become a gale in about five weeks.

With Carol Shea Porter (D-NH) on one side of me and Chellie Pingree (D-ME) on the other, it’s been difficult, but both may well go down in only forty days. I can’t wait.