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Swinging wild, conservatives are spreading distortions about liberals
More and more lately, I’ve been noticing a disturbing sloppiness on the part of conservatives when they quote and report about people they don’t like, namely Democrats and John McCain, with the result that they make their targets’ statements sound worse than they really are. Thus in a previous entry I noted how Rush Limbaugh and others characterized Barack Obama’s misstatement about having traveled to “57 states” in such a way as to make it appear that Obama actually doesn’t know how many states there are in the Union (the full Limbaugh quote is here). Another example of this kind of partisan distortion is the conservatives’ treatment of McCain’s speech this past week, in which he envisioned what he intends to have achieved by the end of his first term. “[O]ur southern border is now secure,” he said. This sentence spread like wildfire around the conservative Web, without its being made clear that McCain was talking about the situation he hoped to see in 2013, not about the actual situation in 2008. As a result, lots of conservatives went ballistic (some of them wrote to me about it) thinking that McCain was declaring that the border with Mexico is currently secure, thus enabling himself (as they feared) to start pushing for the comprehensive immigration bill immediately. Even Michelle Malkin indulged in that gross misrepresentation of McCain’s speech. Here is the title of her blog entry about it:
The problem with McCain’s Big Vision“Illegal immigration has been finally brought under control.” With this out-of-context quote, followed by her sardonic and immature “hahaha,” Malkin is creating the impression that the crazy McCain is saying the borders are under control NOW, an absurd statement that would totally discredit him. But, as we know, that was not what he was saying. Malkin published another serious distortion about McCain’s speech. Here is her introduction followed by her quote of the passage from McCain’s speech about what he expects to achieve on the immigrations issue by 2013. She writes:
The bulk of the speech is a “look back” as if it were 2013 and McCain’s assessing all his progress as president. You know it’s pure fantasy because of this line:After I read this, I wrote, as a draft for VFR:
He’s only to “bring it under control,” not stop it. And his main goal is getting the backward, inhumane American people to accept amnesty. WE are the ones he’s going to be working on for those four years, not illegal immigration. WE are the problem, not the illegals.However, when I looked up the full text of the speech, I found out that Malkin had left out the first half of the McCain paragraph on immigration, which is much stronger. Here is the entire paragraph, with the part left out by Malkin bolded:
Border state governors have certified and the American people recognize that after tremendous improvements to border security infrastructure and increases in the border patrol, and vigorous prosecution of companies that employ illegal aliens, our southern border is now secure. Illegal immigrants who broke our laws after they came here have been arrested and deported. Illegal immigration has been finally brought under control, and the American people accepted the practical necessity to institute a temporary worker program and deal humanely with the millions of immigrants who have been in this country illegally.Without the first half, the second half sounds as if McCain is only talking about bringing illegal immigration “under control,” a phrase that means nothing and makes it sound as though he’s planning to do nothing to secure the border. But with the first half of the paragraph restored, we see that McCain intends to make the borders “secure,” meaning he plans to stop illegal immigration across the border. It was a shocking lapse on Malkin’s part not to include that part of the text, since without it McCain’s position sounded much weaker than it really was. The irony is, that for all the animus Malkin is building up against McCain (as a further example, on the same page, she links a picture of McCain and Huckabee, with a photo of Giuliani in drag between them, entitled: “McCain-Huckabee: The GOP immigration drag queen ticket”), she will almost certainly end up voting for him. Why go so over-the-top against a candidate she’s probably going to vote for? Maybe it’s because she knows she’s going to vote for him and she can’t stand the thought.
As a side issue, notice the clotted, chaotic quality of the blog entry title I quoted above:
The problem with McCain’s Big VisionBetter yet, go to the linked page and see what the original title looks like. It reads, not like an expression of meaning, but like a confused, overcharged, hysterical jumble of phrases. Much of Malkin’s site reads like that nowadays, especially since the layout was changed sometime in the last year.
Terry Morris writes:
You wrote:LA writes:
I could have made it clearer that even if McCain stays true to his commitment to stop illegal immigration and control the border before pushing for comprehensive reform, his unchanged goal remains comprehensive reform, meaning legalization of all legal aliens and vastly expanded legal immigration. However, if he is true to his sequential commitment, he will not be pushing for amnesty (legalization) during his first term. That is a real difference between him and Obama.Adela G. writes:
You write: “More and more lately, I’ve been noticing a disturbing sloppiness on the part of conservatives when they quote and report about people they don’t like, namely Democrats and John McCain, with the result that they make their targets’ statements sound worse than they really are.” Posted by Lawrence Auster at May 17, 2008 07:59 AM | Send Email entry |