Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

I went ahead and watched three hours of Republican convention coverage on PBS last night, even though I knew it would make me want to shout back at the television every so often. I heard false statements uttered and accepted without challenge from the commentators -- for the most part I'm not going to venture a guess right now as to which were lies and intentional distortions, and which were mistakes and misconceptions held by the speakers, but it seems to me that matters of fact should be corrected. And it also makes me wonder how many such things slipped right by me during the Democratic convention, because they were in line with what I wanted/expected to hear, or lined up with things I already mistakenly believe, and were similarly un-challenged by those reporting and commenting on the event. The media would be doing me a service by pointing out false statements made by each side. Reasonable people can disagree about matters of opinion or speculation, about what our goals should be and how to prioritize them, even about interpretation, but as Daniel Moynihan famously said, "Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts."

One phrase that stuck in my mind, partly because I was a little surprised to still hear it after the Palin nomination, was when Obama was referred to (by Fred Thompson) as "the most inexperienced nominee to ever run for president."

Let's see: eight years in a state legislature and two years in the US house of representatives can be made out to be a little light in terms of preparation to become POTUS, I suppose, when running against someone with a longer history ... but that candidate not only got elected, he gets brought up as a shining example of how wonderful a Republican president can be! With the same amount of time at the state level, Obama has two more years in the Senate than Abraham Lincoln did in the House. And you'd think that Republican orators would be expected to know something about the most famous Republican president, n'est-ce pas? After all, I'm not as well versed in history as I ought to be, but it took me less than five minutes to find that out. I still don't know who was the least experienced candidate to run, but it's easy to find candidates less experienced than Obama who won.

So I'm not inclined to give them a pass on that one. Even if 'twas an honest mistake the first time they used it, by now the speechwriters have had time to look it up. At this point, whether it's honest ignorance or a deliberate bogon, there's not really any excuse for it, and anybody discussing the speeches where it's used should be pointing it out and correcting it. Any time you hear them say Obama is inexperienced, think. "You mean like Lincoln was? Or Reagan? Or Bush?"

If they want to say Obama's insufficiently experienced, that's a matter of interpretation/opinion (which calls into question the speaker's grasp of history, but they can still have that as their opinion). But to call him the least experienced candidate in history is, quite simply, untrue.