Happy Humbug Day

Just a short note today. If you have time tomorrow, stop by for the Christmas Maha-Spectacular.

Paul Krugman writes today about the Humbug Express:

Have you heard the one about how there’s been an explosion in the number of federal regulators? Mike Konczal of the Roosevelt Institute looked into the numbers behind that claim, and it turns out that almost all of those additional “regulators” work for the Department of Homeland Security, protecting us against terrorists.

Still, why does it matter what some politicians and think tanks say? The answer is that there’s a well-developed right-wing media infrastructure in place to catapult the propaganda, as former President George W. Bush put it, to rapidly disseminate bogus analysis to a wide audience where it becomes part of what “everyone knows.” (There’s nothing comparable on the left, which has fallen far behind in the humbug race.)

And it’s a very effective process. When discussing the alleged huge expansion of government under Mr. Obama, I’ve repeatedly found that people just won’t believe me when I try to point out that it never happened. They assume that I’m lying, or somehow cherry-picking the data. After all, they’ve heard over and over again about that surge in government spending and employment, and they don’t realize that everything they’ve heard was a special delivery from the Humbug Express.

See also “People, We’re in Deep Trouble” by Gene Lyons.

Even compared to the manifest swindles and perversions of the past 20 years or thereabouts, the United States has never seen anything like Fox News. The closest comparison to what Fox does daily would be the party-line propaganda sheets of the far left and extreme right that made Orwell worry “that the very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world.”

If you read the comments — and I don’t necessarily recommend that you do — it becomes apparent that it does no good to tell the lemmings they’re being lied to. The truth is whatever Faux says it is.

Elsewhere: Brian Beutler has more to say about why moderate Republicans voted for some Democratic bills in the lame duck session.