2011 myths exposed!

By Tom Quiner

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YVP3KU-qOzc]

Joseph Goebbels was Adolph Hitler’s Propaganda Minister. His philosophy was specific:

“Success is the important thing. Propaganda is not a matter for average minds, but rather a matter for practitioners. It is not supposed to be lovely or theoretically correct. I do not care if I give wonderful, aesthetically elegant speeches, or speak so that women cry. The point of a political speech is to persuade people of what we think right.”

Does it sound to you like the ends justify the means from what he is saying? In other words, is it okay to bend the truth or outright lie? Mr. Goebbels expands on his philosophy:

“I speak differently in the provinces than I do in Berlin, and when I speak in Bayreuth, I say different things than I say in the Pharus Hall. That is a matter of practice, not of theory. We do not want to be a movement of a few straw brains, but rather a movement that can conquer the broad masses. Propaganda should be popular, not intellectually pleasing. It is not the task of propaganda to discover intellectual truths.”

Intellectual truth is not the issue to the propagandist like Mr. Goebbels. It is conquering the broad masses by saying whatever lie will get the job done. He and his boss, Adolph Hitler, were very effective at it. Just watch the video clip above.

That brings me to America in the year 2011. Technology is a wonderful thing, but it has simplified the art of the lie. Many things are said as a fact that may not be true, and is sent around the world in minutes by well-meaning folks who believe it to be true.

Could you imagine the internet in the hands of the Nazis?

It is incumbent on American voters to always seek the truth. Quiner’s Diner tries hard to convey opinions grounded in logic and backed by the truth. Today, I would like to expose some myths that just don’t seem to go away:

MYTH #1: Obama’s stimulus spending was a cost-effective way to create jobs. The White House claims the stimulus created or “saved” 2.4 million jobs in the private and “public” sector at a price tag of $666 billion. The bottom line? The stimulus cost taxpayers $278,000 per job, much of which was borrowed from China. It is far more cost-effective to leave job creation to start-up companies, but that would require more favorable tax policy than Mr. Obama and his party are willing to grant.

MYTH #2: Jane Fonda betrayed American POWS to their North Vietmanese captors. This old story crossed by desk in 2011. The essence: Jane Fonda visited Hanoi in 1972. She was presented with apparently well-treated American POWs. They attempted to secretly pass on to her slips of paper with their social security numbers on them so their family would know they were still alive. Legend has it that Ms. Fonda passed them on to their captors who beat several of them to death. I’m no fan of Ms. Fonda, but it looks like this story is false. Go to the Snopes link above for details.

MYTH #3: The 1% are rich at the expense of the 99%. The suggestion is that the rich are siphoning off wealth from the rest of us. In fact, the “rich” have a shrinking piece of America’s wealth, their share dropping pretty steadily for close to a century. Today, their share is about half of what it was in 1930.

 MYTH #4: America’s deficits are the result of the rich being under taxed. Quiner’s Diner’s famous Federal Spending for Dummies Chart quickly dispels the myth that we have a taxation problem. We have a mammoth spending problem, accelerated under the Bush II years and injected with stimulus-spending steroids under the Obama/Pelosi/Reid years:

MYTH #5: Greedy corporations are the problem. If that’s the case, talk to the 57% of Americans who hold stock in corporations, who depend on their growth and profits to pay for their retirements. The so-called 99% really have an issue with a lot more than 1% of Americans, they have a problem with the investor class, who include firemen, school teachers, and merchants.

[Check back tomorrow for more myths of 2011]