Press Conference Magic

Listening to the President's press conference this morning was really a truly amazing thing. I now understand exactly why he was elected to a second term in office: he has the ability to be utterly convincing when pure bilge is streaming from his mouth.

He was spouting things I knew to be deliberate misrepresentations, things that I knew plain old falsifications. But the only reason I know that much of what comes out of his mouth is BS is because I spend far more time than is absolutely necessary reading about politics. How would I know, if I wasn't a political junkie, that he wasn't speaking anything close to the truth?

I probably wouldn't, and that's the problem. He goes on and on and on about how the bad Democrats are trying to second-guess the military and are buying peoples' votes with a larded-up spending bill. To prevent such abuses by the Legislative Branch he's going to have to use the veto. I know that's crap and you, if you're reading this blog, probably also know that's crap. But when he says it he truly sounds like an embattled president trying to do the right thing for the troops. Joe Couch Potato, who only believes what he hears on CNN, is going to fall for that hook, line, and sinker.

I think this is intimately related to a post I wrote awhile back about how much easier it is to lie than to debunk a lie. Unless CNN follows up the press conference with a list of all the points that the President misrepresented people are going to come away believing what he said. Most people just don't have the desire to go out and verify what the President is saying for themselves.

I'm watching the post-conference analysis right now, and no one is correcting what was said. They're just providing political color commentary: "Here's what the President wants, here's what the Democrats want, let's see what happens". Bleh...