Angering readers an inevitable consequence
A letter in the Recorder said that I was intent on angering half of the voters in the county. It is not my intention; it’s simply an inevitable consequence of the current political situation.
Many of my columns say that Republicans have been lied to in order to make them angry enough to vote. That is a fact, acknowledged by virtually every news outlet in the country. Reporters get fired if they lie — unless they work for outlets like Fox that slant their views with little regard to facts.
If Democrats say that two plus two is four and Republicans say it’s five, we can’t compromise and say that it’s four and a half. The lie can’t be allowed to stand. If you believe a lie and repeat it, you’ll look foolish, and people will laugh at you, and you’ll be angry. That’s how it works.
As to the graphic at Pinter. com, it’s not, like, the results of a survey; it’s a visual joke that Democrats find humorous. Of course all Republicans aren’t stupid. I have Republican friends that I know aren’t stupid; a few of them are honestly brilliant. But they are all delusional. For emotional reasons, they choose to be blind to facts. That’s not unusual; there are congregations of humans who believe entire litanies for which there is absolutely no proof. “You just have to have faith,” they tell us. No we don’t. Some of us demand facts.
As they say, you are entitled to your own opinions, but not to your own facts. Facts can be hard to nail down if you don’t agree on the rules. In my world, “facts” are the conclusions of intelligent, well-informed people who have all come to the same conclusion. That’s the definition. If you don’t fact-check, if you decide to repeat the claims of a liar or a fool, you will look foolish. Sometimes it looks like half of the population of Tulare County, and indeed of our country, thinks like that — three million illegal aliens voted for Clinton, that sort of nonsense. So as long as I insist on proof and half of the county doesn’t fact-check, half of the county will be angered by my columns. But if they would fact-check, they could change that. And it would make America great again. Les Pinter Springville