CSotD: Prognostication, prevarication, whatever
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The Brilliant Mind of Edison Lee certainly isn't the first strip to use an imaginary campaign for president as a gag during an election year, but the premise of the strip gives it an advantage, since Edison's combination of brilliance and naivete regularly steers him away from undue knee-jerk cynicism while keeping him from being overly cute.
It's a good established tone for this particular storyline, as Edison regularly delivers punchlines in the same matter-of-fact tone as today's.
Yes, details just confuse people, and, boy, am I sick of polls and claims and counterclaims and spin that all seek to avoid confusion by simply not providing details. Or facts.
And it's not entirely a conspiracy. I mean, there is planning and cynicism involved, including the concept of the Big Lie.
But it's also incompetence, laziness and a little stupidity on the part of both reporters and the public, made worse by the decentralization of information.
Today, everyone indeed does get to have not just their own opinions but their own facts.
What has emerged in recent campaigns is the importance of lying first, of establishing the Big Lie as the default against which your opponent has to work, rather than trying to use lies to upset what he has firmly established.
The benefit of the Big Lie is that, when someone tries to disprove it, they can be made to appear desperate.
This worked against John Kerry, who listed his war record but hadn't really set it up as a major premise in his campaign before the Big Lie loudly declared it a phony claim. Despite the word of people who had been with him on the days in question, the assertions of those who had not been present were already on the record and established.
Similarly, establishing birther claims out of a clear blue sky left Obama struggling to prove he was born in this country, rather than forcing the birthers to prove he wasn't.
In the olden days, the gatekeepers of the major media would have swatted this nonsense to the side and gone on, but the proliferation of media has not only decentralized the gatekeepers, but has set up enough alternative universes that people who would have been marginalized for their ludicrous grip on reality now have their folly reinforced 24/7 by TV shows backing up their delusional visions of Big Foot and extraterrestials and Nostradamus and black helicopters.
And, if it's no longer possible to prove where a person was born using contemporaneous newspaper reports and official documents, when brothers-in-arms are dismissed as liars because their story does not fit the established claim, what chance is there of using simple math to refute, for instance, the more mundane lie that Obama had a filibuster-proof Congress for two years?
None at all, especially given that the one-time gatekeepers have become timid, offering on-the-one-hand-while-on-the-other coverage that digs under rocks to come up with counterpoints to "balance" any view.
Budget restraints are the only reason TV stations don't hire two weathermen, one to tell you it rained yesterday and the other to point out that it only drizzled in some places, and a second sportscaster to offer a different view about whether the local team won or lost.
Leaving people to believe whatever they wanted to believe in the first place, unconfused by those pesky little details.
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