“There are no more arbiters of truth. We’ve crossed some Rubicon into the unknown.”

[Cthippo]

Originally Posted by Politico

President Barack Obama’s appearance Wednesday in the White House briefing room to present a documented rebuttal of suspicions that he was not born on U.S. soil was more than just a surprise. It was a decisive new turn in the centuries-long American history of political accusation and innuendo.

By directly and coolly engaging a debate with his most fevered critics, Obama offered the most unmistakable validation ever to the idea that we are living in an era of public life with no referee — and no common understandings between fair and unfair, between relevant and trivial, or even between facts and fantasy.

Lurid conspiracy theories have followed presidents for as long as the office has existed. Yet even Obama’s most recent predecessors benefited from a widespread consensus that some types of personal allegations had no place in public debate unless or until they received some imprimatur of legitimacy — from an official investigation, for instance, or from a detailed report by a major news organization.

“There are no more arbiters of truth,” said former White House press secretary Robert Gibbs. “So whatever you can prove factually, somebody else can find something else and point to it with enough ferocity to get people to believe it. We’ve crossed some Rubicon into the unknown.”

It’s hard to imagine Bill Clinton coming out to the White House briefing room to present evidence showing why people who thought he helped plot the murder of aide Vincent Foster— never mind official rulings of suicide — were wrong. George W. Bush, likewise, was never tempted to take to the Rose Garden to deny allegations from voices on the liberal fringe who believed that he knew about the Sept. 11 attacks ahead of time and chose to let them happen.

Obama did something like the equivalent of this, by releasing complete documentation from his Hawaii birth, then making a sober West Wing appearance to explain himself.

He did so, senior Obama advisers say, because of the radical reordering of the political-media universe over the past 15 years, or so. The decline of traditional media and the rise of viral emails and partisan Web and cable TV platforms has meant the near-collapse of common facts, believed across the political spectrum.

It did not matter that news organizations had debunked the notion that Obama was born overseas (which would have made him constitutionally ineligible for the presidency). Polls showed a startling percentage of Americans still either believed the myth or were unconvinced.

In response, Obama tried to ignore the issue, or tried to shame commentators who took it seriously. Or he tried to make fun of the whole fuss, by cueing up a rendition of Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the USA” to mark his appearance at the Gridiron Dinner last month.

On Wednesday, he finally gave in and affirmed a new truth of politics in the Internet era: Nothing can be dismissed and anything that poses a political threat must be confronted directly.

...

“Clinton never had to deal with a fully formed Internet,” the adviser said. “Drudge’s power was born out of the revelations of 1998. A fully automated cable TV universe with the Internet is something that he never had to deal with.”

Joe Lockhart, who was Clinton’s White House press secretary, said: “You’ve lost the ability to starve a story to death. So what you have to do is raise the price of those who are making the charges. If Donald Trump is out there saying this, you’ve got to make him pay a price for throwing a bomb before too much collateral damage is done.”

The days of not elevating an opponent or refraining from punching down are gone.

“You literally can’t laugh anything off,” Lockhart said. “There’s nothing neutral in politics. It’s either helping you or hurting you. You’ve got to make sure it’s helping you or you’re going to lose.”

...

And Lockhart noted that even now, the most hardcore of the birthers still won’t be satisfied.
“They’ll probably ask for the first diaper,” he said. “They’ll want to see the DNA.”

Original story

This is something I've been saying for a while and it seems to have gone mainstream finally. We've reached a point in American politics where the truth is no longer relevant to the discussion and so how do you conduct a democracy in this environment?

And by the way, Obama's mom was HOT

[DXR_13KE]

Originally Posted by Cthippo

And by the way, Obama's mom was HOT

pics?

[Cthippo]

[SuicideNeil]

You can see where he gets his chin from... 0_o

[GregTheRotter]

lol. What is she in that pic 16?

[Andersen]

Originally Posted by GregTheRotter

lol. What is she in that pic 16?

Wasn't she 18 or 19 when Big O was born?

[Archtronics]

Why does it matter where you are born? Especially since its not something we can decide.

[Nexxo]

People are morons. The reason that they focus on personality, origins ("He's just ordinary folk from a small town in Alabama"), religion, skin colour, age and gender is because it is easier to evaluate people on these simple tribal characteristics than on the complex politics that they are involved in. Most voters can hardly spell GDP, let alone tell you what it means. They certainly couldn't read any of Eddie or Cthippo's posts without their brain going all Chernobyl over the living-room ceiling and walls.

Historically leadership was decided on charisma and power with some birthright thrown in. Just because we use fancier words and more sophisticated campaigning does not mean have moved on from these feudal times.

[c.ruel]

Before Calfornia went down the pan some Republicans were thinking of trying to change the law so that Arnie could run for president! The only reason people care is that there is an old law that states that a US president has to be born in the US, hence why the needed to change the law if Arnie was to run ... in the end he didn't so the law stayed the same.

[eddie_dane]

Originally Posted by Cthippo

Original story

This is something I've been saying for a while and it seems to have gone mainstream finally. We've reached a point in American politics where the truth is no longer relevant to the discussion and so how do you conduct a democracy in this environment?

And by the way, Obama's mom was HOT

I agree with your essential point that journalism doesn't seem to be concerned with the presentation of facts. This is not a new phenomena. I mean, presidents used to own their own newspapers (re: Andrew Jackson for one example) simply to get their message out using and perverting the premis of an objective press.

The era that we live in now is one of a double-edged sword that has become very sharp. I am highly encouraged in the ability for the common man to have real-time and on-demand access to information so they can decern for themselves what is actually happening in the world. Unfortunately, that wholly depends on their willingness to do so. But between not having access and having it, I think it is a much better situation today than in the past. Because entertainment is so pervasive in today's culture, the incentives and rewards seem to go to those that can entertain not necessarily those who can understand and communicate complicated realities and truth.

But the very nature of this conversation goes to my point that people are beginning to doubt, to seek multiple sources and to find things out for themselves. Questioning is good and cynicism does have rewards and value.

I think it is ironic that this is a politico article which is one of the lowest denominator of sources in my opinion and that White House sources "The Drudge Report". The incident that they are referring to in 1998 that put Drudge on the map was the fact that it was discovered that Clinton had an affair with an employee. Newsweek had chosen not to publish the story. For Drudge, the story wasn't the affair, it was the conscience choice of a major news organisation not to publish the story that propelled him to the top. Drudge clearly has a right-leaning agenda. But his website is merely an index, he only links to the original story, which is more than I can say for the website that is considered his doppleganger, the Huffington Post which pulls out of sequence paragraphs leading readers to a completely different conclusion about a story unless the reader clicks through and reads the entire original story.

The trend I am more afraid of is the willingness of the government to use politically driven decisions to control the access of information. Or to downright restrain reporters.

On the topic of the birth certificate. I never paid much attention to the whole controversy and thought it was kind of silly. I rolled my eyes at how Hillary Clinton raised the subject in a despirate attempt during an election year an LaRouche supporters ran with it but then got transferred to the tea party movement somehow. Then the release of the long form came out and was glad that it was all put to rest but that just raised more questions about document layers. My first instinct for the press is that this would be an easy issue to address by simply getting an Adobe Acrobat expert to verify that this could happen. The ONLY news organisation I could find that did this was Fox News, who confirmed that it was a real scanned document and that the layers do happen with PDFs. Irony abounds.

I got rid of cable/satellite TV 2 years ago and I can't tell you how much it has enriched my life and uncluttered my mind.

[Picarro]

But .. Does this surprise you people? The average american has the intellectual capabilities of a retarded seagull. For anything good to happen in America, the average Joe needs better education and a better understanding of the world.

[eddie_dane]

No, it doesn't surprise me. But then I have the intellect of a cognizant seagull.

[walle]

Originally Posted by Picarro

The average american has the intellectual capabilities of a retarded seagull. For anything good to happen in America, the average Joe needs better education and a better understanding of the world.

The Americans are hopelessly used and abused, but it's not their fault.

[Cthippo]

Originally Posted by eddie_dane

No, it doesn't surprise me. But then I have the intellect of a cognizant seagull.

Perhaps if his name were Jonathon Livingston Seagull


That was intended as a compliment, but as I just crawled out of bed, i'm not sure how it may have come out.

[Bindibadgi]

Originally Posted by Nexxo

People are morons.

I need this on a rubber stamp.

[boiled_elephant]

Originally Posted by Nexxo

Most voters can hardly spell GDP, let alone tell you what it means.

I think this says it all. In fact, I think it's going in my signature.

I don't think it was a mistake for Obama to tackle this head-on, but I do think it was futile. Crackpots are astonishingly resilient in the face of hard evidence - just look at the moon landing conspiracy theories, which are still widely believed despite about a billion conclusive demonstrations of why it's bullshit. The people Obama's trying to prove wrong simply won't listen, or will find new angles of attack.

[Cthippo]

[Elton]

Well the other thing is that the Obama Administration really hasn't publicized ALL their achievements yet. Once they do things might clear up a bit better. I mean look at the whole birth certificate thing, they could've published it much earlier, but the timing was almost immaculate(I would've waited until the GOP got Trump in the primaries, but meh). I'm waiting for that laundry list of achievements.

Now if only we could educate the populace on what GDP, unemployment rate, and national deficit meant.

[Nexxo]

The aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community", which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality". I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. "That's not the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We are an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality - judiciously, as you will - we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors... And you, all of you, will be left to study what we do."

--Unnamed senior Bush administration adviser, to journalist Ron Suskind, in Summer 2002

[stonedsurd]

Originally Posted by Nexxo

The aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community", which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality". I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. "That's not the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We are an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality - judiciously, as you will - we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors... And you, all of you, will be left to study what we do."

--Unnamed senior Bush administration adviser, to journalist Ron Suskind, in Summer 2002

Wow, that sounds so Orwellian.

"We are an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. "