Truth, fact and opinions

As much respect as I have for my American contacts, most of the time I am thankful that I am not myself American.

This is never more the case than when their politicians start skewing the facts for their own benefit, and always promise better times ahead when they are in power.

Repeating facts, when inconvenient, is to be avoided.

Truth is a meddlesome quantity to be avoided where and whenever possible.

And opinion is never, ever, mistaken.

And there will always be better times for everyone, without exception, if they work hard usw. And opportunities will always exist.

And Cinderella and Snow White were real people, and it is a myth to spread their wonderful stories as fairy tales no doubt. One day the prince will come - it is bound to happen.

And never mention anything that you did or got wrong. Or alternatively spin it to make it sound like somebody else's fault.

This is not a problem of one side, both do it, but the Republicans are far worse than the Democrats in this respect. As they are backed by Rupert Murdoch, democracy's answer to Josef Goebbels, this should not be surprising.

Reading (admittedly selective) items from what is coming out of the Primary debates, you learn:

1. That he who must not be mentioned (GWB) is not part of the argument nor of the situation (responsible or not, he is simply not mentioned - which is like having a rotting tooth and ignoring tooth decay).

2. All the events in 2008 involved with the second biggest financial crash in US history never happened or are irrelevant.

3. In line with 2 - Newt Gingrich claims that the unemployed are responsible for their own unemployment (they want to be, you can get food stamps etc, so why would you want to work? The official statistic that there are 5 unemployed for every vacancy, 20 to 1 in parts of Ohio, is an irrelevance). To be fair to Mitt Romney and Ron Paul, this argument does not match their thinking.

4. Vote for them, things are bound to improve (using the same old solutions which failed notably in 2008, and actually cutting taxes to increase revenues, which was responsible for massively increasing the national debt in the first decade of this century). Really? Sadly a substantial number of the voters will believe this nonsense.

The list could be extended by some margin.

Eventually people will be spun by arguments that have no basis in reality, by facts that ignore the circumstances, by history that is made to fit beliefs rather reflect events. And so on and so forth.

For a country where honour was once a meaningful concept, the elements of Soviet Pravdaism or Goebbels-style propaganda seem to become more obvious by the day. Repeat the lie often enough, people will believe it - if they do not have the intelligence to challenge the stories that they are told.

Fortunately that capacity still exists, but the voices of reason seem to have more and more difficulty making themselves heard.

Europe does not have problems?

Plenty, too far many - sadly. But I would still rather be here. But sadly what happens in the US does affect us (see what I have written on this subject before), so we cannot simply ignore them - and the quality of debate suggests that the prospect of Americans leading us all out of the crisis and back to prosperity seems less and less likely by the day.

Eventually if you ignore a problem, it does not go away. The more you distort the truth about a problem, the problem does not go away. The more you want to ignore the painful remedies to a problem, the problem does not go away.

It is time for facing painful truths, admitting to them, and hunkering down to deal with them. Spinning fairy tales was never the answer, nor is it now.

Postscript. Facts are not Conservative or Liberal. Facts are facts!