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| Jul 29, 2010 - 06:42 PM |
Queen City News - Helena's FREE Weekly Newspaper |
Helena, Montana |
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Conrad Burns’ performance at the recent Senatorial debate in Whitefish was a masterful performance of spin, deception and lies. In the course of one hour, Burns’ misrepresentations ran the gamut from tiresome conservative talking points to distortions of his record to the frankly unbelievable.
While it is somewhat passé to criticize a politician for being dishonest, Senator Burns raised the bar to an unprecedented level. Yet, in the mainstream coverage of the debate, pundits like Craig Wilson praised Burns’s use of the word “liberal” while ignoring Burns serial dishonesty. Burns, as he often does, got a free pass for being uninformed at best, dishonest at worst.
On national security, Burns made a muddle of Iraq and port defense. He claimed, of chemical weapons in Iraq, that, “There was some starin there, and other stuff." While it’s perhaps forgivable that Burns would mistake starin for sarin, it’s not forgivable that he lied about the presence of these weapons. Fox News notwithstanding, the Department of Defense and the Bush administration have both independently acknowledged that no weapons-grade WMDs have been found in Iraq. On port defense, Burns was so confused that he changed his position twice in the debate, finally settling on the position that, “They ain't coming through the ports ... if we secure the border and we grant no amnesty, we'll have time to deal with that (visa overstays) domestically." Certainly an interesting position, given that four of the 9/11 hijackers were people who had overstayed their visas.
On domestic issues, Burns did no better. He falsely claimed that the NSA phone-monitoring program only targeted international calls to terrorists, that the 2005 Energy bill “relied on renewables” (when, in fact, renewable promotion was gutted from the bill), and that he doesn’t “believe in raising taxes”, weeks after voting for a tax hike on college students and their families. Most transparently, he claimed that the Republican- controlled government was “retiring the deficit”, even though 2003-2007 will be the five years with the largest deficits in American history.
Even on basic history, Burns was wrong, claiming falsely that Democrats in Washington, D.C., had killed the line-item veto and that he had supported intervention into Sudan. One would expect a senator so well-versed in budget appropriations to be aware of the history of the line-item veto and to be aware of his own voting record, but that appears to be too much to expect from Senator Burns.
The lies came so easily and so freely that it’s clear that Burns is the kind of candidate who will say and do anything to be reelected. His recent reversal on the Rocky Mountain Front, supporting restrictions on oil and gas leases, while a good, if belated, decision, seems somewhat inconsistent with his position only two years ago that the leases were critical for “homeland security.”
How does Burns get away with these misrepresentations? The media let him. Instead of offering a critical analysis of the debate, the major Montana news outlets opted out of their responsibility to inform, instead offering a litany of one-liners and talking points from each candidate in the debate without examining their veracity. The story shouldn’t be the message or talking points of candidates, but useful analysis of what was said, and that should include looking into misstatements and falsehoods.
From Senate races to global warming, the press is simply too willing to present two sides to an issue as equally true when they are demonstrably not. Rather than fulfilling the function of informing the public, the mainstream media has transformed itself into a megaphone for each partisan side. At some point, the media’s pious invocations about the importance of a free press ring awfully hollow when the Fourth Estate seems more like a servant to the interests and lies of political opportunists like Burns.
(Don Pogreba, who teaches English and coaches debate at Helena High School, supports Jon Tester's candidacy for the U.S. Senate. He maintains a blog at www.intelligentdiscontent.com.)
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