Flapdoodler

Flapdoodle means nonsense, rubbish, bosh, hogwash.

Purveyors of flapdoodle are everywhere. As close as the TV or radio, certainly on the Internet and in hundreds of thousands of blogs.

But let’s focus on just one flapdoodler. Newt Gingrich. He is a rich example. Let us count the ways:

1. He touts sanctity of marriage yet is divorced twice, married three times
2. He touts fidelity in contracts and marriage; yet is divorced twice because of infidelity
3. He believes in honest dealing with others because it is the right thing to do. Yet he took book advances for political tomes
4. He took funds under false pretences while Speaker of the House and was disciplined by the House Ethics Committee; he resigned from the position, and from his congressional seat
5. He spouts freedom of religion yet insists on preaching narrow dogma to exclude others from the grace of a loving God
6. He is a college history professor and teaches an arcane political viewpoint without the academic credentials or source references in the field
7. He argues against lobbyists yet became one once he left congress
8. He was in the employ of Fannie Mae to the tune of $1.6 million dollars helping Fannie Mae diffuse attention to their problems during the mortgage melt down
9. He is friends with Wall Street commercial lenders, commercial banks, regular banks, investment houses and the mortgage industry; all of these were bailed out during George Bush’s TARP program and Barack Obama’s stimulus program. Yet he decries corporations feeding at the public trough!
10. He condemns big government involvement yet supported TARP and helped create the financial debacle that his party fostered in the first place; and that required TARP and the stimulus programs to fix
11. He doesn’t just disagree with Gay Marriage; he feels it would destroy freedom of religion, freedom of speech, and our democracy as we know it; and yet never provides the rationale of that position
12. He has stated that the Occupy Wall Street demonstrators should get a job and take a bath; he also has stated the demonstrators are occupying parks, streets and transit for which they have not paid taxes to produce; how does he know? Whose taxes paid for these items; his alone? No, OWS protestors pay taxes; many are working and sympathetic to those who are not; but they also are underemployed and decry that condition
13. He bewails those who speak up to alert the nation to the needs of the majority while the tiniest minority reaps most of the benefits of the American ‘system’
14. He spouts one liners and sound bite pearls of wisdom but none have content

In short he deals in flapdoodle. A lot of sound signifying nothing. And the reason he is often smiling is because he knows he is getting away with it.

The media, often assumed to be liberal biased, are really sopping up to conservative rhetoric; they want you to think they are being fair; they also see this as a direct challenge to President Obama. Yet they do not carry the opposite view. In this way news is made and audience is developed. Think ratings.

What they should be doing is determining fact from fiction and reporting on that. But it is easier to traffic in half truths and sound bites they know will rankle. So the media is actually a partner with the flapdoodlers. The American public doesn’t seem to care one whit about this. Is that because they enjoy this scrapping in public? Or is it because they simply can’t be bothered to do the hard work of discernment?

It takes time to read and study. It takes time to weigh evidence. It takes effort to analyze facts and determine which public utterances from Newt Gingrich are fiction. It seems like good entertainment.

Shame on the public. Shame on the media. But the biggest shame is on Newt. He should know better. In fact he does. He plays this game with the public all the time and he often wins doing it! But he is an intelligent person who deals in flapdoodle because he thinks he can sell trash as gold. And he does.

Shame on all of us.

November 26, 2011