The I Shing's Journal: Quoting People Out of Context

There's a user on this system who shall remain nameless (but among my comments is the text below in reply to his comment) who uses a signature that I believe underscores the right-wing mentality when it comes to getting one's facts straight, which is, precisely, that actual facts don't matter.

Here is how the user's signature reads (copied and pasted in case it gets changed):
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"there should be an unlimited right to fill up your mailbox with e-mail." -- Democrat Robert C. "Bobby" Scott
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I looked up the transcript at house.gov, and here is what was actually said by Bobby Scott (copied and pasted from the transcript itself):
"But there should be unlimited right to fill up your mailbox with-- your e-mail mailbox-- with unsolicited bulk commercial e-mail?"

He was asking that question of Joseph Rubin, a witness at the hearing, during an exchange where Rep. Scott was trying to get Mr. Rubin to clarify his position about what "spam" really is, and how it might relate to various Supreme Court decisions and the First Amendment and all that. It was a long and complex exchange between several representatives and various expert witnesses, full of questions, answers, clarifications, and minute details, the way congressional hearings always are.

For this Slashdot user to alter the text and punctuation of that single line of the hearing, the transcript of which is 53 pages long, in order to make it appear that Rep. Scott supports the right of spammers to fill up people's mailboxes, is morally corrupt and utterly dishonest. If it wasn't for the awkward and outrageous wording of the statement as it appeared in the sig, I wouldn't have felt compelled to look it up, and might have taken it at face value myself, thinking that the spammers have a Democratic friend in Washington. Maybe they do, but I don't think it's Bobby Scott.

This is a common tactic by right-wing pundits, to pull a sentence by a member of the opposing party, yank it out of its context, edit it, and present it as a direct quote, and then, either directly or by implication, declare, "Ah-ha, this liberal Democrat is in favor of this disagreeable thing," when, in fact, the statement being "quoted" is a question, or was a paraphrasing of someone else's position. I've heard Rush Limbaugh do that countless times. A liberal politician could say, "Some people are assuming that I'm in favor of shutting down industry completely," and a right-wing firebrand like Limbaugh will trim off the "Some people are assuming" part and quote that politician as saying "I'm in favor of shutting down industry completely," and then yelp, "See? SEE? He's a monster! He wants to ship your jobs overseas and then raise your taxes!"

Even the mainstream press is guilty of this, but the right-wingers seem to have invented it.