“Sometimes you hit innocent people, and I hate that, but we’re at war, and we’ve taken out some very senior members of al-Qaida” — Sen. Graham (here)

This quote boggles the mind. So we’re at war—a war without defined objectives that we can achieve, a war that will therefore last forever. And since we’re in this eternal war, it’s ok to kill innocent people, as long as we kill some “very senior member of Al-Qaida” at the same time. Sorry innocent victims of US drone strikes, you are acceptable collateral damage, according to the US military, the Sec. of Defense, and the President. Since the war will never end, innocent civilian deaths will never end, and every drone strike will create more grieving families, more anti-US sentiment, and more terrorists. And besides that fact that this strategy is actually hurting the US in our efforts against terrorism, let’s not lose sight of the fact that *it’s wrong to kill innocent people*. And how do we actually know that the intended targets were worthy of execution? Because the military said so? That’s not good enough.

The convoluted logic behind this is untenable. The lies and misdirection from this administration would be laughable if innocent people weren’t dying. I fear that Obama’s legacy won’t be about all of the good work he’s done for health care, the economy, unemployment, gay rights, women’s rights, and bringing home troops from Iraq and Afghanistan. He’ll be remember as the president who shredded the fourth amendment, kept Guantanamo Bay open, detained and killed people without trial, prosecuted whistleblowers with vigor never before seen, and led us into the Internet Age with a baffling focus on secrecy and unchecked expansion of executive power.

Eric Holder’s defense of the Swartz prosecution might be the final straw for me. Obama must be held responsible for the heinous acts of his subordinates if he does not fire them. At present I am viewing Obama with a strong cognitive dissonance. Sometimes I love what he’s doing, and sometimes I oppose him with all of my heart and soul.

For now I will focus my political energies on the insidious effect of money on Congressional campaigns. Look for more from me on that issue in the near future. But if Obama’s quixotic resolve for secrecy continues, I will have no choice but to break from him and withdraw my support from his administration. And doing that would break my heart.

At 11:18 P.M. Eastern Time on November 6th, NBC called the 2012 Presidential race for Barack Obama. But before Obama had even delivered his victory speech, the 2016 race had already begun. Republicans contenders from all over the country weighed in on why Romney had lost, the future of their party, immigration reform, and every other national issue under the sun. What was striking about these statements was their heterogeneity. The day before, the disciplined Republican Party was all rowing together, parroting Romney’s talking points on all the issues. But the day after, it was a different story, with 2016 contenders and their surrogates trying out new ideas and positioning themselves as the future leader of the party.

If you’ve been paying attention to Presidential politics for the last two years, you know that both candidates and their surrogates have been saying exactly the same thing, every single day, for a long time. The political apparatus of this country was paralyzed. Congress limped along without accomplishing anything, Obama worried about how his actions could be construed by swing voters, and Romney hammered away at the President with the same old talking points.

And if you’ve been pay attention to polling, you know how little all those speeches mattered in the end. From the summer until Election Day, the polls barely moved. Obama remained stubbornly popular among his core demographics and had a comfortable margin in plenty of swing states for the final months of the campaign. In June, Romney’s only hope was a systematic national bias in the polls, and it was the same story on Election Day. Even the boost from Romney’s outstanding performance in the first debate evaporated after a few weeks, and it was never enough to make him the favorite. Historically, polling is accurate and people have made up their minds weeks and months before Election Day.

So am I saying that the last six months of the campaign don’t matter? No, but I am saying that they are boring. Once both candidates are widely known, polls are stubborn things. Modern candidates are so scripted and guarded that they never stray from their talking points, reducing the chance that a major gaffe will move the polls. Why did The Onion post a fake op-ed by Obama in favor of reparations for descendants of slaves? The joke was that a candidate would never take a bold new stance during a campaign. Truly, all the sound and the fury of late stage Presidential campaigns—the breathless debate over who won the day, wall-to-wall coverage of non-events, Drudge’s siren—signifies nothing. There is a gigantic mismatch between demand for campaign news vs. actual significant news. So the news coverage consists entirely of ginned-up controversy, uniformed analysis of poll numbers, and talking-head “debates” with the intellectual depth of sports talk radio. Needless to say, all of this fake news is a waste of time.

Political insiders used to have a rule of thumb: ordinary voters tune into the election after Labor Day. The 2012 race is a clear repudiation of that, because Obama’s early summer gambit of spending every dollar on hand to define Romney as a heartless corporate raider was so successful. But the broader point is true: most voters don’t tune into the race until a few months before Election Day. This is unfortunate, because what voters want is an unvarnished look into who the candidates truly are, and an earnest debate on the issues facing our country. The debates get such high ratings because they break this trend. The candidates are forced by the questions to stray from their talking points, giving voters a peak at their true personality.

Fellow citizens, do the opposite of what the crowd does! Only pay attention to the race until Summer 2016, then tune out. At that point, the candidates will have settled on their talking points, and unless the polls are very close, you’ll have a good idea of the eventual winner. From now until then, dozens of contenders, in both parties, will be trying out completely new ideas with voters, and having a genuine debate about the future direction of this country. Some of these ideas will crash and burn, some will become part of a candidate’s platform, and a select few will become law. During this time, campaigns are shoestring operations, without Secret Service protection, and candidates have unscripted interactions with ordinary voters. A real issue debate happens between candidates, and primary voters make their preferences known. You can watch candidates learn about the issues by talking to voters, talking to experts, and finally stake out a position.

The 2016 race will be particularly interesting because the demographics of this country are changing fast, and both parties need to adapt or risk going the way of the Federalist Party after the War of 1812. The Republican Party is suddenly leaderless. They never really warmed to Romney and have repudiated him after his “gifts” comments about minority voters. Someone will step up and fill that void. Just like the Republicans, the Democrats will have a wide-open primary. Although both Vice-President Biden and Secretary Clinton have great name recognition among Democratic primary voters, plenty of us are looking for a fresk new face to lead the party. Look for prominent governors and senators to weigh in on national issues, take “vacations” to Iowa, and sound out big-money donors over the next few months.

But once the primaries are over and the parties have settled on their nominees, talking points will ossify and the race will get boring. At that point, I say turn off MSNBC, turn on Netflix, and just wait the election out.

Imagine a person of above-average intelligence watching Fox News. He’s laughing—and rightly so—the show he’s watching is full of ridiculous claims and conspiracy theories seemingly plucked from an alternative reality. He feels pity for people who believe all this nonsense. How can otherwise successful people be so irrational when it comes to politics? Luckily, he thinks, I am immune to all that.

He shouldn’t let his guard down so easily. The insidious nature of right-wing propaganda is that it targets everyone. Are you a dyed-in-the-wool true believer? Follow me to birth certificates, secret Muslims, and Vince Foster. Not impressed by that? Why don’t you sample trickle-down economics and gold-backed dollars? No sale? How about creationism and global warming-denial?

Our hero breezes by all that unscathed. But then a new commentator comes on, an Ivy League professor. This guy start off with a joke about the nuts on Fox News—he’s an outsider! He proceeds to work the phrase “cost-benefit analysis” into a criticism of Obama’s economic policy. Nevermind that he used the phrase incorrectly. Nevermind that he’s a history professor who knows nothing more about economics than the average person. His criticism sounded plausible—and who has time to really look into these things? Let’s just file it away as “maybe true” and move on.

Before our hero watched Fox News tonight, he though Obama was doing a good job on the economy. Now he thinks there are two sides to the story. A few months later, he can’t remember the arguments, or even where he heard them, but the doubt remains. Fox News wins!

Sometimes it’s hard to tell when you’re being manipulated. And sometimes we want to be manipulated. Stephen Colbert coined the term “truthiness” for when an idea just feels so true, it has to be true. Those methods of right-wing manipulation are well known. Lesser known is what I described above—the inception of an idea designed to cause doubt and uncertainty in the victim. Don’t be a victim! Check Snopes before you reshare stuff on Facebook. If you find an amazing story on an opinionated site like Drudge Report, ask yourself, why isn’t this being reported on neutral news sites? It could be a massive cover-up by the mainstream media, or the story could be made up. Which is more likely? You don’t have to fact check everything you read. But if you don’t, please don’t file away random stuff you hear as “maybe true.” File it away as “false, pending some proof.”

Everyone has heard that seatbelts actually kill more people than they save. How has such a manifestly untrue idea survived for decades? Because people love to tell it to their friends. People love counterintuitive ideas. It makes them feel smart to deliver such surprising news. If someone discovers that seatbelts are an enormously successful lifesaver, would they eagerly repeat that? No, that’s boring. But a person (let’s call him Newt) who has found out that he doesn’t have to wear his seatbelt anymore can feel smug and conceited. He thinks that scientists and politicians who want to save lives by requiring seatbelts just don’t understand reality, but he does. He doesn’t need to spend any time looking into the subject, it’s settled in his mind. And he can fancy himself an iconoclastic intellectual. And it allows him to pursue his desired behavior—driving around without a seatbelt on—without any consequences.

This human tendency is not universally harmful, since not all counterintuitive ideas are false. And I’m not out to change human nature—that’s not going to happen. But it does explain why certain false ideas have such sticking power. It partly explains why people click on hyperlinks with titles like “Why chocolate makes you thin”, or “Twelve Reasons Steve Jobs was a Bad CEO.” And it partly explains the worldview of people living in the echo chamber of Fox News, The Drudge Report, and conservative social media.

Imagine you are a high-income person and you want lower taxes for yourself. To bring in votes for this idea, you must convince voters it will benefit them personally. So you spread the idea of cutting taxes on high-income people to stimulate income and job growth for everyone. It’s wrong. It doesn’t work. It’s been tried many times and failed. The non-partisan CBO just released a report that singled out this idea as the single most costly idea currently under consideration to avert the fiscal cliff. But it does have one thing going for it—it’s counterintuitive. You cut taxes for people who are making plenty of money, and that helps low-income people!

Imagine our friend Newt driving around (sans seatbelt of course) listening to talk radio. He hears the “tax cuts for high earners” idea and latches onto it. Adopting this position is a huge boost to his ego. He goes from knowing nothing about economics to having a position on the deficit, job growth and taxes. He considers his own understanding of the issues equal to that of an expert. After all, when he listens to talk radio, watches Fox News, or chats online with conservative friends, they all agree with him.

But wait!, you say. There are academics who support cutting taxes for high-earners, with papers and everything. I’m well aware of that, and this post isn’t about tax policy. Suffice it to say that some academics start with their conclusion and work backwards, and they are written to be waved around during speeches, not rigorously studied. Once politicians and though leaders discovered that facts and empirical evidence are highly persuasive, they made up their own.

When you evaluate an idea, look past its initial appeal to shock and amaze your friends in conversation, and ask yourself, “where is the evidence?” Things that are true can be measured and verified: chocolate makes you fat, Steve Jobs delivered amazing value to shareholders, and seatbelts save lives. In the end, the truth wins out.