We live in a time of crises. I know you have heard this before, but it is not an economic crisis that I am writing about today. It is not a housing crisis, nor is it a dust regulation crisis.

We are suffering from crisis levels of bullshit washing upon the United States in tidal waves the size of mountains.

It is time that the term “bullshit”, and no other, be used to describe what we are ingesting with a feverish appetite in this country. Harry Frankfurt, a philosopher at Princeton, distinguishes bullshit from old fashioned lying in this way,

When an honest man speaks, he says only what he believes to be true; and for the liar, it is correspondingly indispensable that he considers his statements to be false. For the bullshitter, however, all these bets are off: he is neither on the side of the true nor on the side of the false. His eye is not on the facts at all, as the eyes of the honest man and of the liar are, except insofar as they may be pertinent to his interest in getting away with what he says. He does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose.

(Frankfurt, Harry G. (2005). On Bullshit. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.)

Bullshit is not lying, when you lie you are actively telling something you know to be untrue, it is the conscious act of making statements without regard for merit or accuracy that constitutes bullshit. Bullshit serves the purpose of creating a reality that is usually unconcerned with factual reality, and often devoid of it entirely.

There are a few participants in our political system that have bombed the damn holding this tide from sweeping across this country, and one cause in my mind. America’s two political parties, Republicans in particular, and the mainstream media in this country are the culprits, and money is the cause.

While both political parties are guilty of malicious use of factually-lacking arguments, it is clear that the Republican party has made policy of disregarding all concern for factually based arguments of merit. From denial of climate change to creationism to “trickle-down” economics to the values of deregulation, the policies of the Republican party have steadily moved away from any basis in merit or fact, and exist only to further a worldview and policy outcome for the industries whose lobbyists bought them lunch and those whose vote they cynically pursue. When they say “the American people” they do not mean you, or me, but the very few American people who fund their campaign war chests. When they argue for deregulation, to “give more freedom to our job creators,” they do so knowing full and well that deregulation caused the near-depression we are only just now beginning to recover from.

In a perfect world bullshit artists are given little credibility, and therefore, very little avenue for persuading the American public into wildly misinformed decisions; however, we have a complicit media environment in this country that has led to the embrace of bullshit as a political mainstay. The first cause is the intellectually dishonest idea of objectivity and non-bias in the media. There is no such thing as a human being without bias, we are beings of bias from the moment we are born and begin to perceive the world. Regardless of this fact we insist on maintaining this idea of “objective” news analysis, forcing MSNBC to give the credence  and credibility of one side of my television screen to someone denying the facts of climate change despite the lack of merit in their argument.

Fox News has made a mantra out of this idea and sold that bill of goods like the good preacher with his hand out while driving a $100,000 Mercedes Benz to church. They have profited hugely since the adoption of their disingenuous slogan, “Fair and Balanced” while systematically misinforming the American public for decades. Something close to 30% of their viewers still believe Saddam Hussein was tied to 9/11, a close number to that believed that we found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.(Misperceptions, The Media and The Iraq War.) Neither of these are facts, but they serve the political ends of the worldview they support, therefore they bullshit the American public as far as the day is long with half-truths and innuendo. It is not only destructive of the facts, it is destructive to the absolute need for an informed public in a democracy.

The left of the media is no less guilty. David Gregory, moderator of the once credible NBC Sunday news show Meet The Press, allowed a candidate who has called any discussion of his numerous adulterous and failed marriages “despicable”, despite his “conservative values” run for the Presidency, to say quite ironically to his face that “questions about the character, the judgment, the record of a presidential candidate [are] not an attack” in defense of his own attacks on his opponent. This statement was not at all challenged by the “objective” David Gregory, along with numerous other statements lacking factual accuracy made in this same interview. By remaining silent in the face of a lie you allow it to exist as a truth, making Gregory absolutely complicit in the perpetuation of misinformation.

One beautiful exception is Rachel Maddow, among the few television news anchors who continue to invest themselves in in-depth research and factually based argument, who lashed out this week at political fact checker Politifact. In her very clear and concise argument Maddow excoriates the problem prone “fact” checker for engaging in some bullshitting of its own in characterizing two statements made by the President, which were judged as “true” in their analysis, however listed as “half-true” in their final judgement. Maddow does not pretend to live without a bias, she has long been a strong progressive voice, however her presentation of facts and pursuit of the truth are second to none in this country that I am aware of. Politifact, in seeking to appear objective, has continued to show a willingness to bow to a fear of appearing to have a liberal bias when, in reality, it is the facts themselves that have a liberal bias.

There is a reason for this divergence. Rachel Maddow does not concern herself with attempting to appear unbiased, and neither do the facts she presents so well. In the film Good Night and Good Luck, Edward R. Murrow is portrayed as saying, “I simply cannot accept that there are on every story two equal and logical sides to an argument.” With this statement I wholeheartedly agree, though it is a dramatization in this case he has been quoted making a similar statement. Murrow, one of the finest and most respected newsmen this country has ever seen, also warned us of the deterioration of facts in his 1958 speech to the Radio and Television News Directors Association.

We are currently wealthy, fat, comfortable and complacent. We have currently a built-in allergy to unpleasant or disturbing information. Our mass media reflect this. But unless we get up off our fat surpluses and recognize that television in the main is being used to distract, delude, amuse and insulate us, then television and those who finance it, those who look at it and those who work at it, may see a totally different picture too late…

He goes on.

This instrument can teach, it can illuminate; yes, it can even inspire. But it can do so only to the extent that humans are determined to use it to those ends. Otherwise it’s nothing but wires and lights in a box. There is a great and perhaps decisive battle to be fought against ignorance, intolerance and indifference.

He was exactly right; the picture that we now see is tilted and poorly presented, and it is destroying the country at the heart of that portrait.