What Do You Know?

People constantly make the mistake that the people around them hear, read, see and are interested in many of the same things that they are interested in. 

Wrong, buffalo breath.

We may have kept up with the news on Fast & Furious and one of Obama's most notorious lines, But Bud Norman at Central Standard Times discovers that when he used “you didn’t build that” as a joke, a woman who was there was puzzled. We are fortunate in that we get a great deal of information from multiple sources and fail to realize that there are still a lot of people who get their view of reality from a press that shields them from information that they consider to be harmful to the Left.

Her ignorance of the speech left us looking perplexed. After all, the speech had been widely reported by almost all of the media, touched off a week’s worth of debate among the chattering classes, been highlighted by a widely disseminated advertisement from the Romney campaign, and it’s “You didn’t built that” line had immediately become as iconic an epigram for Obama’s administration as “I didn’t have sex with that woman” had been for Bill Clinton’s. We had assumed that the phrase was by then as ubiquitous as a catch phrase from “Laugh-In” or “Seinfeld,” and that even the most obstinately ignorant Americans would be aware of it, so it came a surprise that such a sentient woman could have somehow been aware of it.

People do manage to avoid hearing of such things, though, and often enough that we really shouldn’t have been surprised by the woman’s apparently blissful ignorance. We can recall another conversation with a young fellow who boasted of how the current administration had gone three years without a single scandal, which he clearly regarded as a most remarkable accomplishment. We asked if he didn’t consider the Fast and Furious operation, with its Keystone Kops plotline and massive body count, or find the Solyndra fiasco, with its mix of high-minded “green” idealism and corrupt cronyism, to be scandals. We then threw in the resignations of admitted communist Van Jones and the Mao-admiring Anita Dunn, the Justice Department’s lax attitude towards black supremacist voter intimidation, and a few other choice contretemps, asking if he didn’t find any of these the least bit scandalous. He was not only unfamiliar with any of the stories, but dubious that they had happened at all, and angrily demanded to know if we had heard these scurrilous lies on the Fox network.

We may think that people who support Obama are aware of these issues and are simply ignoring them.  We would be wrong; they may often be the victims of the MSM.