Reply #43: You've made some good points

[customerserviceguy]

and I guess I really should have re-thought the word 'perceived' in that case, but I was looking to wrap up and get back to fixing my homemade spaghetti sauce!

Rebutting with the truth is indeed all we will have left, but people often disagree with what is 'truth'. In the case of George Allen saying "makaka", we do have evidence that was not disputed. But phony 'evidence' can be manufactured, and while presently detectable, that might not always be the case. I gotta tell you, after I saw Tom Hanks drop trou when he 'met' Lyndon Johnson in "Forrest Gump", I said to myself, "I can never truly believe a photographic image again."

You're right that most people didn't believe the "Obama is a Muslim" crap, but he was benefitting from the general public's trust. Should he get on the wrong side of that trust as the present recession may morph into a depression, he might not have that benefit of the doubt.

My comments on the Roberts and Alito nominations was only to reflect the fact that the right wing has been very effective so far in using the Internet to their purposes, and that we will surely see them try to use their skills again on the very next Democratic Supreme Court nominee. I expect that person to be pilloried like we've never seen before.

Again, I used the example of Harriet Miers. The freepers decided early on that she was not right wing enough, and they went to work on her. Sure enough, Bush dumped her. What if his father's nominee, David Souter, had been nominated in the Internet Age? Surely, we would have all kinds of stories trashing him, probably centering around the fact that he has never married. We have yet to see what they're going to pull out of the trash heap to use on President Obama's first Court nominee.

We're entering a bit of the Wild Wild West here, the lines will start to blur between the various sources of news, we already have a large part of the Internet population choosing either a progressive or conservative filter for their news, and I see that trend continuing. It seems like ancient history when literate Americans got their news from their local papers, Time and Newsweek, and Walter Cronkite. At least we had a common set of information with which to expand our debates upon.