IF YOU ARE CAREFUL ABOUT YOUR STATEMENTS, WILL PEOPLE TRUST YOU? | 2003-11-15
No.
If my leftist fact-checker tells me something I believe him, even though he is off the edge of my world politically.
If John McConaughy said something, I would believe him because he had earned my trust.
But I am the only person who is like that. No matter how insane a leftist spokesman's last pronouncement was, every conservative, respectable or not, treats his next pronouncement as if it were the Voice of the Prophet.
When a liberal makes another stupid statement about gun control, no conservative has ever been heard to say, "What about the last time when you said that if a person had a gun, he was exactly forty-three times as likely to have it taken from him and get killed with it as he was to defend himself with it?"
Every liberal spokesman is always treated as if he spoke the Gospel, no matter what he said last time. His words have to carefully considered and dealt with respectfully and only with something you have looked up.
So what's the point in honesty?
Every national liberal spokesman openly predicted that if people were able to get gun permits, there would be a "bloodbath."
No conservative has ever been heard to remind any liberal of this fact. Every time a liberal makes another pronouncement, he is assumed to be factually correct until somebody finds a reference to the contrary and finally gets a chance to publish it somewhere.
I used to write speeches for my congressman that drove his main opponent to shrieks of rage. And all I did was to repeat the nonsense he had said the year before.
No conservative ever does that. So what is the point in a liberal being right?