By Dave Lindorff
I was reading the latest smug piece by New York Timescolumnist Timothy Egan, when I came across the most amusing example of being what you're criticizing.
Egan, in a piece titled "The Dumbed Down Democracy," bemoaned the spreading ignorance of the American electorate.
Not only are 10 percent of Americans illiterate, Egan groaned. They're also "politically illiterate." Expressing mock astonishment, he wrote, "I give you Texas. A recent survey of Donald Trump supporters there found that 40 percent of them believe that Acorn will steal the upcoming election."
He goes on: "Acorn? News flash: That community-organizing group has been out of existence for six years. Acorn is gone, disbanded. dead. It can no more steal an election than Donald Trump can pole vault over his Mexican wall."
In Egan's view, it's those Trump voters who are ignoramuses.
Egan goes on: "We know that at least 30 million American adults cannot read. But the current presidential election may yet prove that an even bigger part of the citizenry is politically illiterate -- and functional. Which is to say, they will vote despite being unable to accept basic facts needed to process this American life."
Example?
Well, Egan says, "If Trump supporters knew that illegal immigration peaked in 2007, or that violent crime has been on a steady downward spiral nationwide for more than 20 years, they would scoff when Trump says Mexican rapists are surging across the border and crime is out of control."
Maybe he's right (though I've heard supposedly well-educated college grads tell me they believe the same stuff), but then Egan goes on to write: "If more than 16 percent of Americans could locate Ukraine on a map, it would have been a Really Big Deal when Trump said that Russia was not going to invade it -- two years after they had, in fact, invaded it."
I don't know what knowing that Ukraine shares a long border with Russia has to do with knowing Russia supposedly invaded the place in 2014, but in any case, Russia never invaded Ukraine. Only in the New York Times would you read such bullshit propaganda.
Egan apparently doesn't know that there has been no evidence of Russian troops fighting in Ukraine, though there are NATO troops, including US ones, there. And as for Crimea, a former part of Ukraine populated by about 90 percent ethnic Russians, it came under Russian military protection not by way of an invasion, but because with the government in Kiev threatening an ethnic cleansing campaign against Russian speakers living in eastern Ukraine and Crimea (where Russia had a long-term lease on its Black Sea naval base), the 20,000 Russian troops stationed in Crimea, also by treaty with Ukraine, simply took control of that territory...
For the rest of this article by DAVE LINDORFF in ThisCantBeHappening!, the uncompromised, collectively run, five-time Project Censored Award-winning online alternative news site, please go to: www.thiscantbehappening.net/node/3272 [1]