The saddest aspect of the democratic process in America is that so many people don\u2019t know\u2014and don\u2019t seem to care\u2014about facts. It is not Truth that matters, it is ideology. And when Truth flies in the face of what a person believes, many people insist that the Truth is a lie<\/em>, thus making it possible for them to stick with their beliefs no matter what.<\/p>\n For instance, U.S. President Barack Obama recently said: \u201cAfter a decade of decline, this country has created over half a million new manufacturing jobs.\u201d The Truth: Since he took office, the country has lost <\/em>about a million such jobs, and has regained<\/em> more than half of them during the economic comeback. When a football team loses 15 yards of first down, then regains 8 yards on\u00a0 second down, that is not exactly called progress.<\/p>\n For instance, Republican Presidential Candidate Mitt Romney said in the second debate: \u201cWe have fewer people working today than we had when the president took office.\u201d The Truth: the economy was losing 800,000 jobs a month<\/em> when Mr. Obama took office as a result of 8 years of President Bush’s administration\u2014so holding Mr. Obama to a net job creation standard means he would have to have made up for massive losses that were out of his control entirely. <\/em>AND….he has done it. <\/em>The Bureau of Labor statistics show that across the four years of the Obama Administration there has been created a net positive 125,000 jobs.<\/p>\n Item 1 above was taken from a fascinating article in Time<\/em> magazine\u2019s Oct 15 issue, titled Blue Truth\/Red Truth. <\/em>The second item came from a story by reporter George Nornick published Oct 17 by The Nation <\/em>headlined Romney\u2019s Seven Biggest Debate Lies. <\/em>Here\u2019s another…<\/p>\n Mr. Romney said in the second debate: \u201cI don\u2019t believe employers should tell someone whether they could have contraceptive care or not. Every woman in America should have access to contraceptives.\u201d But back in March, when Senator Roy Blunt of Missouri introduced a bill that would allow employers to deny <\/em>contraceptive coverage to employees based on the employer\u2019s religious beliefs, Mr. Romney said: \u201cOf course I support the Blunt amendment.\u201d<\/p>\n Mr. Romney also said in that second debate: <\/strong>\u201cAs a matter of fact, oil production is down 14 percent this year on federal land.\u201d And, reporter Nornick points out, it is true <\/em>that drilling on public lands dropped 14 percent in 2011. But it went<\/em> up 15 percent <\/em>the year before. So overall, oil production on federal lands is up under Mr. Obama. Says The Nation<\/em> article: \u201cRomney is being extremely dishonest in singling out the one year that it dropped.\u201d<\/p>\n Meanwhile, the Time <\/em>magazine article pointed out that Mr. Obama has asked on the campaign trail, \u201cWhat rights would Romney deny (for gay couples)?\u201d Then he has answered his own question: \u201cAdopting children together.\u201d The magazine points out that this is simply false. The article in Time <\/em>corrects the record, pointing to the fact that Mr. Romney \u201csupports adoption rights for same-sex couples.\u201d<\/p>\n But the problem is about more than what the candidates say. It\u2019s about what the American public actually knows. <\/em>In the Oct 17 issue of USA TODAY <\/em>writer Katrina Trinko, a member of the paper\u2019s Board of Contributors, reports that \u201conly 34% of Americans can name even one Supreme Court justice,\u201d citing an August survey by FindLaw.com. She also reports that in 2011 Newsweek <\/em>magazine asked 1,000 Americans to take a citizenship test\u2014and 38% failed.<\/p>\n And a 2006 study by the McCormick Tribune Freedom Museum \u201cdiscovered that only 28% could identify even two of the First Amendments five freedoms,\u201d Trinko continued.<\/p>\n But it\u2019s not only constitutional provisions or civic questions that too many voters know little about, it\u2019s \u201cwhat\u2019s so\u201d in American life itself. For instance, Trinko reports, \u201ca 2011 CNN survey found that the median estimate for the percentage of the budget that was foreign aid was 10%. In reality, it was then under 1% of the total federal budget.\u201d<\/p>\n The writer says that \u201cit\u2019s the same story with public broadcasting,\u201d touted by Mr. Romney in a debate as a place where he would cut expenditures, saying he \u201cloves Big Bird,\u201d but the cost of PBS had to go. The public\u2019s median estimate of the PBS portion of the federal budget was 5%, \u201cwhile actually it was 1\/100th of 1%,\u201d Ms. Trinko\u2019s article said.<\/p>\n It’s becoming sadly clear that many people don\u2019t like it when \u201cfact checkers\u201d take the sting out of their candidate\u2019s charge, or the lift out of their candidate\u2019s claim.<\/p>\n They like it <\/em>when Mr. Romney says he wants to \u201ckeep our Pell Grant program growing,\u201d allowing young people who might not otherwise be able to afford it to go to college, and they hate it <\/em>when fact checkers like Mr. Nornick point out that the budget of Mr. Romney\u2019s own running mate, Vice-Presidential Candidate Paul Ryan, would cut Pell Grants for up to one million students.<\/p>\n They like it <\/em>when Mr. Romney responds to a debate question about where he stands on equal pay for women by saying that he actively sought to bring more women into his cabinet when he took office as governor of Massachusetts, and they hate it <\/em>when fact checkers point out that he actively and vocally opposed<\/em> the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act and the Paycheck Fairness Act.<\/p>\n (And they totally despise it<\/em> when Mr. Nornick reports on a Boston Globe <\/em>story revealing that there were no female partners <\/em>at Bain Capital during the 1980s and 1990s\u2014<\/em>and that even today only four of forty-nine <\/em>of the firm\u2019s managing directors are women<\/em>.)<\/p>\n People like it <\/em>when Mr. Obama\u2019s campaign charges that the way Bain Capital reorganized \u201ccost the government and the American taxpayers $10 million,\u201d and they hate it<\/em> when fact checkers at Time <\/em>magazine <\/em>point out that \u201cBain wrote off $10 million in debt to a failed bank at the expense of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (the FDIC)\u2014which is funded by banks.<\/em> Taxpayers paid nothing.\u201d<\/p>\n In just a few days now the people of American will decide: What part should Truth and Facts play in their decision regarding who shall be the next President of the United States? But the real question is, are there enough people with enough intelligence to even care?<\/p>\n A few days ago, when Bureau of Labor Statistics numbers showed that the unemployment rate in America is now lower than it was when Mr. Obama took office, right wing Republicans ran around claiming on all the talk shows that the latest statistics where artificially skewed in a vast internal conspiracy within the Obama Administration. These are the same statistics that those same Republicans considered extremely reliable when for the 43 previous months they showed a high unemployment rate.<\/p>\n The conclusion of the Far Right: When the numbers support us, embarrassing the President for 43 straight months, the Administration could do nothing to hide them or skew them, and so those numbers are reliable and you can stake your life on them. When the numbers oppose<\/em> us, showing the President has made some gains on the problem, the Administration must have at last found a way to secretly pressure or force the Bureau of labor Statistics to report false numbers, and so the new stats are the result of a conspiracy.<\/p>\n People believe what they want to believe. The New Spirituality calls for complete transparency in all matters, public and private. Will we ever see that in our political campaigns? Not in 2012, apparently. And worse yet, not enough people seem to care.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The saddest aspect of the democratic process in America is that so many people don\u2019t know\u2014and don\u2019t seem to care\u2014about facts. It is not Truth that matters, it is ideology. And when Truth flies in the face of what a person believes, many people insist that the Truth is a lie, thus making it possible […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[161],"tags":[371,372,368,373,370,369,374,284],"class_list":["post-1950","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-headline","tag-election","tag-fact-checkers","tag-obama","tag-pell-grants","tag-presidential-race","tag-romney","tag-unemployment-rate","tag-womens-rights"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theglobalconversation.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1950","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theglobalconversation.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theglobalconversation.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theglobalconversation.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theglobalconversation.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1950"}],"version-history":[{"count":16,"href":"https:\/\/www.theglobalconversation.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1950\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1952,"href":"https:\/\/www.theglobalconversation.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1950\/revisions\/1952"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theglobalconversation.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1950"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theglobalconversation.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1950"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theglobalconversation.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1950"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}