-By Ken Marrero
Public debate is critical to the American political experience. Organizations and politicians take their message to voters, highlight strengths and weaknesses of the issues and submit their solutions. On election day, we see who the People choose.
Integral to the process, yet seldom mentioned, is for each party to be honest and operate in good faith. They must make arguments and quote statistics they believe to be true. They must not misrepresent their opponents or deceive participants. They may later be found wrong, but they may not intentionally deceive. This post is necessarily one of the longest I’ve written. I thought it better to address each point well than to gloss over one or more dismissively.
Joshua Holland, Progressive author and editor and Senior Writer at Alternet, recently wrote “The 9 Biggest Conservative Lies about Taxes and Public Spending.” It should serve as a model of how not to conduct the public debate necessary to arrive at good decisions for our nation. Holland doesn’t seem interested in debate. At times, he is less than truthful himself while outing Conservatives as liars. And he is mostly wrong. Let’s look at Holland’s points.
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On Joshua Holland’s ‘9 Conservative Lies’”