making stuff up

[realthog]

As some may know, I e-subscribe to some of the horrible rightwing "news magazines" -- Nutsmax, World Nuts Daily, One Nuts Now, Bob Livington's Puberty Alert, etc. -- just to keep track of what latest vileness and calumny the wingnuts are perpetrating.  (Ed Brayton, on his Dispatches from the Culture Wars blog keeps a very much more assiduous watch on one of these, WorldNutsDaily, than I could ever hope to.)

If you e-subscribe to any of these zines, you get not just their daily package of news spun to pulsar speeds, not just their invitations to participate in dodgy financial schemes, not ju7st their attempts to sell you gold, not just their promotions of books/DVDs proving beyond all possible doubt that President Obama is a gay Kenyan Muslim from Outer Space, but also their quackery-ridden medical bulletins.

Nutsmax has two favourite nutsquax, Chauncey W. Crandall MD FACC (I'm not certain what the latter qualification is, but I suspect it's something like "FACC" as in "FACC orft") and Dr. Russell Blaylock, who's described by Nutsmax as "a nationally recognized board-certified neurosurgeon, health practitioner, author, lecturer, and editor" and by me as not just the quack's quack but the wingnut-quack's wingnut-quack. Some of his advice is perfectly sane -- "Eat more fibre and YOU TOO could power a Saturn V!" -- and some of it is, shall we say, less so.

But it's the wingnuttery that's drawn my attention tonight. As with its many neocon colleagues/competitors, Nutsmax is remarkably prone to what we might call the FAUX News Syndrome, otherwise known as "making stuff up". Today's Blaylock column, "Body Scanners More Dangerous Than Feds Admit" (good exploitation of fear and paranoia, eh?), contains this remarkable (and remarkably irrelevant to his subject matter) claim:

This government shares House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s view when she urged passage of the Obamacare bill sight unseen -- “Let’s just pass the bill, and we will find out what is in it later.”

I thought this an astonishingly unlikely thing for Pelosi to have said, not only because my own memory of her handling of the healthcare bill -- y'know, the bill that's vitally needed to help stop some tens of thousands of Americans dying unnecessarily each year -- differs quite considerably from this but also because, even had Pelosi advocated such a procedure, she'd never have been so completely bloody stupid as to say so. On the other hand, it was perfectly possibly that a Nutsmax columnist might be so completely bloody stupid as to think his readers were so completely bloody stupid that he could get away with a barefaced lie.

But, natch, nothing is impossible. So I googled the sentence "Let's just pass the bill, and we will find out what is in it later" and -- guess what? -- I discovered that every single one of the results was either a posting of Dr Blaylock's article "Body Scanners More Dangerous Than Feds Admit" (it seems Nutsmax is not alone in being graced by his fragrant presence) or a gullible viral regurgitation by some other rightist site that packs paranoia and fear the way babies pack diapers.

Okay, so maybe Blaylock made up the actual wording but captured the sense of what Pelosi said back during that false dawn when it seemed the Enlightenment might return to our shores? So back to Google I went, looking for some justification for the remark. A bundle of wingnut sites (and, hoo boy, some of these make Nutsmax look three-quarters sane) but as for hard news media? Nope, nuffink.

In short, Blaylock was making stuff up. I've always suspected this is what he does for much of his medical advice, which seems largely geared to mercenary ends -- "Carrots Are Good For You!! Send for Dr Blaylock's Special Orange Carrots, Only $4.99 ea. plus S&H!!" -- but it was, such is my innocent naivete, startling to find him doing it so blatantly in a political context. Is this delusional pablum-peddler someone I'd want surgeoning my neuro?

I find it pretty much summarizes the worth of a political movement when their sole rhetorical tool is to make stuff up. I'm sure that, if Blaylock weren't so ideologically lazy, he could find genuine arguments to use against Pelosi, arguments with which others holding different views of her could sensibly engage, but he seems not to possess that basic intellectual diligence -- or perhaps he's frightened of facing those contrary arguments because the paucity of his own intellectual underpinning might be exposed.