Monday, January 13, 2014

Do newspapers have sockpuppets?

I've been wondering about that for a while now. The Tampa Bay (formerly St. Pete) Times publishes some amazingly dense letters in their Your Letters section of the editorial page. I've always wondered whether people are really that dumb, or blindly indoctrinated, or perhaps they're just trolls -- writing what they think the paper wants to hear so they'll get published. Now I'm sort of wondering if someone in the editorial section dreams these things up to keep various memes going.

In today's paper, the suspiciously named F.M. Younglove of Brandon trotted out the class warfare meme using Mitt Romney as punching bag. He writes in part:
The man who isn't president (Mitt Romney) is a perfect example. When a person can make $22 million a year and pay less than 14 percent income tax, it is safe to say progressive tax rates are all but gone.

Really?! Didn't we clear this up during the election? Didn't we point out that Romney's supposed low tax rate was actually a capital gains tax, since Mitt doesn't actually have a job -- he just lives off his investments. So he's paying taxes on money earned that was taxed previously. That's double taxation on his money, dumbass! And didn't we point out that the Romney's donate something like half their income to charity? And even if this foolishness was true, 14 percent of $22 million is over $3 million in taxes! How much did Mr. Younglove pay last year? I doubt he'll pay that much in his lifetime, if he even exists, and Mitt pays that EVERY F*CKING YEAR!!

I mean, this is a dead issue. These facts have been out there for over a year, and this moron hasn't heard any of them? Like I said, I find it hard to believe an actual person wrote this stupidity.

And I'm not even going to get into the letter by Orfeo Trombetta. Seriously?! Try something believable like Joe Smith, guys.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Clearly you don't understand just how slowly misinformation seeps down to the low information troglodytes known as 'the average lefty'. This guy probably just heard about 'how little Romney pays in taxes' just last week. I have written in to my paper several times and it has always been both scathing towards a lefty or left position and published, to their credit. It was always pretty straightforward and to the point, though, not to mention true. Are you really surprised they print the dribble out of far lefty moths, though? They can't have a 'responsible journalist' (if there still is such a thing) still write an article like that this far after it was so strongly debunked, but they can keep the low info trogs (or LIT for short) satisfied by letting them sound off themselves to other LIT.
Tuerqas

postaldog said...

You are probably right, and I have little doubt about the cognitive dissonance that infects all liberals -- they simply refuse to believe anything that interferes with their stupid world view (see anything on AGW). I'm just amazed at the stuff that appears in the letters section. The writer's names seem so bizarre that I'm hoping the paper's editors are just making this nonsense up. But I wouldn't be surprised if it was an actual person, just saddened.