Rudy Giuliani lies. He doesn't merely stretch the truth, as any ambitious pol is wont to do. He just makes stuff up. And when done with abandon, making stuff up is called lying. There is simply no better, no more accurate way to put it -- and in this presidential election cycle, with all that's at stake, we had better start calling a spade a spade, lest we get stuck with another liar of unchecked width and depth.
Unfortunately, however, you can't count on major press outlets to clue you in on Rudy's lying -- or what they could, at the very least, prominently note as factual missteps. They're too busy covering the horse-race angles. Substance, I guess, is perceived as boring.
The advanced condition of both Rudy's pathology and journalism's indifference to it was brought home to me early this morning upon reading this entry in the Washington Post: "Giuliani's Bid to Woo New Hampshire Independents Centers on Health Care," written by no less than two Post reporters, the camera-hugging Chris Cillizza and Shailagh Murray.
The piece opens with the savvy journalists noting the critical importance of New Hampshire's independent voting bloc. Rudy is also aware of this electoral reality, so, continue the journalists, the former mayor "is set to begin a direct-mail and radio campaign ... aimed at persuading unaligned voters to back his candidacy."
Naturally he needed an angle, and -- we can at least thank God for this -- Rudy landed on something other than 9/11. The media blitz, write Chris and Shailagh, is "centered on Giuliani's health-care plan," the details of which the piece says absolutely nothing, other than that they are among the most liberty-loving of health-care plans, and that "even [his] spokeswoman ... is on message," an observation of somewhat less than breathtaking insight.
There was, however, one detail mentioned, although it had nothing to do with Rudy's proposal. To wit,
"In the radio spot, Giuliani mentions his battle with prostate cancer and notes that his chances of surviving the disease in America were 82 percent, while in England his chances would have been 44 percent."
This just as naturally caught and then raised my eye. It seemed an astounding "fact," one either uplifting or thoroughly depressing, depending on one's gender and country of residence. It also seemed quite literally unbelievable. Yet there it sat, in print, with no journalistic probing of it.
So, deploying my vast research skills, I Googled "England prostate cancer survival rate," and up popped the Web site of "Cancer Research UK," the "leading funder of cancer research" in the Queen's realm. Want to know what I found?
I shall quote: "The relative five-year survival rate for men diagnosed in England in 2000–01 was 71%," which indicates that Rudy's flat figure of 44 was creatively arrived at, statistically speaking. Not only that, for mates in Rudy's current age group, 60-69, the survival rate is 83 percent -- one uptick higher than his vaunted statistic for us ruggedly male, American individualists. Yet those socialist bastards are doing it on the government plan.
Rudy, simply put, is lying -- but instead of taking a few seconds to research and then convey that salient fact, Chris and Shailagh treated us to news of Rudy's intrepid efforts at capturing the independent bloc.
You know what else? Perhaps you should make an offering of journalistic subsidy to the Post, and not me. For -- best case scenario -- it seems the poor dears can't afford the Internets as a basic research tool.
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to support p m carpenter's commentary -- and thank you!
What the hell else do you expect from "the Devil"?
Posted by: Mooser | October 28, 2007 at 02:26 PM