Distortion

One of the tricks of the trade for politicians is to use extreme rhetoric to incite emotional response and yield public support. Unfortunately this tactic seems to be used more often to promote bad ideas than good ones. Good ideas have a way of slowly winning public support as good, intelligent people think them through. Bad ideas are usually very popular in the beginning if deceptively presented or cleverly promoted.

The WSJ just put up a great op-ed on this by Bradley Schiller. Yes things are bad. No this is not the great depression. It's obviously not even the late 70's/early 80's. But every day we are hearing the drum beat of calamity and catastrophe. To be perfectly honest I liked the campaign slogans of hope and change a lot better!