COLUMN: Don't be fooled

Why do progressives like Jeff Bourget accuse others of what they are preparing to do themselves? In his column Friday, he accused someone of buying “into whatever the conservative spin doctors tell him without a shade of truth.” He then accuses the person of not doing basic fact checking, right before he launched a series of falsehoods.

Jeff, If you tell me that something is a fact that I know to be wrong, I will suspect that you know the truth as well, and you think I won’t catch your deceit. If you are just repeating whatever the progressive talking heads told you and you aren’t enough of a critical thinker to see how they are misleading you, then I feel sorry that you think it is people with a different position than yourself that are the ones that are being fooled.

I will correct the record on just the first untruth I saw, as it would take a book to correct them all. Jeff claimed that only 3 percent of Planned Parenthood’s funding pays for abortions. This is false, and even Planned Parenthood doesn’t claim this. They claim that abortion services only account for three percent of the “services” they provide. By using the term “services” they count providing a packet of condoms as equal to providing an abortion. In other words, if you went to the grocery store and bought thirty two items and then a new car on the way home, would it be true that you only spent three percent of your expenditures that day on a car? Of course not, unless you think that Enron used sound accounting practices.

Why do progressive talking heads think that their followers will be so easily fooled? Perhaps a better question is why so many of their followers are.

LAWRENCE SPENCER

Kootenai County