I give up. How do you counter [View all]

[COLGATE4]

the absolute witches brew of lies, distortions and half truths that the Rethugs and their willing handmaidens in hate radio and RW TV land of Faux spew into peoples' conscious and subconscious over the course of years now?

Had occasion to talk to a young guy who's putting in edging for some flower beds around the house. Turns out he's 20 years old, married a girl who he didn't love at 17 because she had a kid with another guy who left her and had nowhere to turn, is expecting his fourth kid soon and is struggling to start his own edging business. He loved to chat and I wasn't in any hurry. Somehow the topic of the November election came up and he asked me who I was going to vote for - I told him Obama.

He thought about it and then told me, "well, he (Obama)'s OK but I won't vote for him." So I asked him why. "It's because he's adding 14 billions of dollars in defect to the economy every year". I did my best to try to explain to him the deficit Obama was left with because of things like the Bush off-balance sheet wars, Medicare prescription drug expansion, etc, and he seemed to be getting it. But then, when I thought I might have actually made some progress he floored me with "well, it's really because of Obama's Health Plan that was caused when the Congress couldn't pay for the debt last year".

I tried my best to explain to him what had happened with the debt ceiling hostage negotiations last year and the Bush tax cut extensions, but I could see it just wasn't making any impression. What was apparent was that he had ingested a steady stream of RW talking points day after day, year after year and, although he had them all mixed up in his mind and didn't really understand any one of them clearly, what was clear is that his mind was made up. He's voting against Obama. Period.

How do we reach people like this nice kid who's one of the people Obama's policies will MOST help when they've been poisoned with the steady drip-drip of Rethuglican invective? Wish I knew...