Republican Lies category archive

Speaking the truth about gut out the vote: Pennsylvania House Republican Leader Mike Turzai.

Via everybody Bob Cesca.

At Tampabay dot com, Bill Maxwell examines Marco Rubio’s self-serving myth-making.

Maxwell does not mince words; he minces Rubio. A snippet (follow the link for the full deal):

The 41-year-old junior senator has made himself the protagonist, the shinning star, of an instant American myth. Forget that the major event of the narrative — told in the autobiography on Rubio’s Senate website — never happened. Rubio claims that his parents, Mario and Oriales Rubio, had fled Cuba after Fidel Castro installed communist rule. Immigration records show that Rubio’s parents came to the United States in 1956 (three years before Castro won power–ed.).

The core of Rubio’s political identity is false. How, then, does he rationalize his allusion to the heroism and sacrifice of exile in his memoir’s title?

“Exile is not a time frame,” he told USA Today. “Exile is an experience. . . .”

Let us translate that last paragraph.

Hmmmmm. How about, “Because I said so, Bub”?

Also, pigs fly, because I say they do.

At the Guardian, Michael Cohen considers Mitt the Flip’s exceptional mendacity, something in a class by itself, and why reporters don’t call it out more frequently and emphatically:

Granted, presidential candidates are no strangers to disingenuous or overstated claims; it’s pretty much endemic to the business. But Romney is doing something very different and far more pernicious. Quite simply, the United States has never been witness to a presidential candidate, in modern American history, who lies as frequently, as flagrantly and as brazenly as Mitt Romney.

Now, in general, those of us in the pundit class are really not supposed to accuse politicians of lying – they mislead, they embellish, they mischaracterize, etc. Indeed, there is natural tendency for nominally objective reporters, in particular, to stay away from loaded terms such as lying. Which is precisely why Romney’s repeated lies are so effective. In fact, lying is really the only appropriate word to use here, because, well, Romney lies a lot. But that’s a criticism you’re only likely to hear from partisans.

(Examples of Mitt mendacity at the link.)

The Commander Guy explains why Republicans lap this stuff up:

Modern society is complicated. Understanding the moving parts is hard. Why put in the time and effort to understand how the economy works or the health care system works or what climate science is about when you can just go with your feelings? Going with you feelings is far easier. While doing hard work and learning that the folk ways don’t work in modern society is unsettling.

Remember diagramming sentences?

I don’t know if that’s taught any more, but, as English is a language of word order, it damned well should be.

Bob Cesca gives a simple example.

Eric Zorn sums up Republican campaign strategy, which is, quite simply, to make stuff up (emphasis added):

The claim that Obama ruled like a monarch over Congress for two years — endlessly intoned as a talking point by Republicans — is more than just a misremembering of recent history or excited overstatement. It’s a lie.

(snip)

They seem to figure if they repeat this often enough, you’ll believe it.

Why do they lie? Because they keeping getting away with it.

The Philadelpia Daily News catalogs some of the results:

TO THOSE who think it’s no big deal to require a photo ID to vote in Pennsylvania, meet Wilola Lee, 59; Gloria Cuttino, 64, and Nadine Marsh, 84, who all have voted regularly for decades. Each has been told by her native state — Georgia, South Carolina and Virginia, respectively — that there is no record of her birth. As a result, they can’t get the birth certificates required to get the photo IDs now required to continue voting.

If the new Pennsylvania voter ID law is allowed to take effect at the November election, these women won’t be able to vote. They and seven other Pennsylvania voters are the named plaintiffs in the suit filed against the law six weeks ago.

And then there’s New York native Joyce Block, 89, of Bucks County, who does possess the necessary birth certificate and a Social Security card — but in her maiden name. The only record she has of her marriage to Carl Block nearly 70 years ago is in Hebrew, which wasn’t enough to get her a voter ID until her state senator intervened.

At the Chicago Trib, Dennis Byrne has a long paean to Chicago’s history of vote early, vote often. He leaves out one crucial fact:

Historically, ballot boxes have been stuffed in the counting room, not in the voting room (and more recently, in the Supreme Court).

That’s why, historically, it’s called “election fraud,” not “voter fraud.”

“Voter fraud” is a PR term to gut out the vote.

Despite what you hear in the wingnutosphere, there is no chance that Sharia low could ever trumph U. S. civil and criminal law. So why the fuss, other than to stir up hate to be harvested for votes?

Steve Chapman sees parallels between the rightwing hysteria over Sharia law and times from our history.

In the 19th century, Catholicism was regarded by many people in this country as thoroughly incompatible with Americanism. They saw it as a hostile foreign element that would subvert democracy. Today, a majority of the justices on the Supreme Court are Catholic, and they are taken to be as American as Mountain Dew.

We’ve come a long way in religious tolerance. Or maybe not. The belief that Catholics are irredeemably alien and disloyal has given way to the fear that Muslims pose a mortal threat to our way of life.

That distrust is behind a push in state legislatures to forbid courts from applying Islamic Shariah law in any case.

In the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Tony Norman summarizes the history of attempts to restrict the franchise. He starts with the colonial period, in which only land-holders could vote, and works his way through poll taxes and literacy tests up to today. If you are unfamiliar with the history of the franchise, his article is a good three-minute cram course.

He reminds us:

Of course, these efforts were never couched in terms of disenfranchising whole classes and categories of people. In America, voter suppression is always about “ensuring the integrity of the ballot box.”

Of course, oh yes, certainly, yes-indeedy-do.

Via Contradict Me.

Facing South reports. A nugget:

But the GOP’s bogus war on voter fraud is not about insuring clean and fair elections, nabbing lawbreakers, or upholding constitutional precepts. It’s about winning elections on the cheap. It can only do that by tipping the vote number balance toward having more likely GOP voters and fewer likely Democratic voters. It’s hardly coincidence that the majority of those targeted for voter purges are black and Hispanic. And it’s even less of coincidence that the bogus vote purge campaigns are zeroed in on the key battleground states of Florida, Ohio, Wisconsin, and Colorado and New Mexico where election officials are also mounting similar purge campaigns

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In the Sacramento Bee, Vanessa Williamson tells of her talks with teabaggers. She found them well-informed about political tactics, but, when it came to actual policy, not so much.

But along with this pragmatic engagement in politics, tea party members we interviewed held wildly inaccurate views of what is in, or not in, public policy. Tea partyers confidently told us that the Affordable Care Act of 2010 (“ObamaCare” in their parlance) includes both death panels and the abolition of Medicare – although both claims are flat-out untrue. They know process, but flub content – the exact opposite of many liberals, who often have detailed knowledge of public policies but are often extremely vague about how U.S. politics, and especially local politics, actually works.

At times, the level of misinformation in tea party circles reached conspiratorial proportions. At a tea party meeting in Massachusetts, people discussed the possibility that the “smart grid” (an electrical infrastructure improvement approximately as controversial as road repair) was in fact a plan that would give the government control over the thermostats in people’s homes. Where are these smart, educated Americans getting such terribly inaccurate information?

Where indeed? Read the rest to find out.

Republicans in Florida are preparing to steal yet another election.

Remember how well it worked out the last time.

Stuart Fischoff meditates on the staying power of the “birther” myth. A very small nugget (emphasis added):

In effect, a large segment (Truth: I almost typed pigment) of the population can never accept the legitimacy of Barack Obama as President of the U. S.

Really, that’s it, in one word: In Wingnut World, pigment is a constant theme coloring (ahem!) everything else.

Annette John-Hall tackles the gut out the vote efforts, speaking with Faye Anderson of the Election Protection group and the Pennsylvania Voter ID Coalition. A nugget:

Though she’s lived in Philly for three years, Anderson’s a non-driving, native New Yorker who takes the $1 Bolt bus to her old stomping grounds in Brooklyn as much as she can.

“I never got a Pennsylvania ID because I still have three years left until my New York one expires,” Anderson explains. “So here I am, a Stanford lawyer and a founding member of the voter’s coalition and if I didn’t have a passport, I wouldn’t have an acceptable form of ID to vote in Pennsylvania. I know you can be a responsible person and not have an acceptable form of ID.”

There is nothing new about gut out the vote. Facing South reports:

A video produced by students at Duke University’s Center for Documentary Studies in collaboration with the voting-rights watchdog group Democracy North Carolina puts these laws in historical context. It looks at the expansion of the franchise during Reconstruction and the rise of interracial fusion politics, and subsequent efforts by the Democratic Party — then a party of conservatism and white supremacy — to turn back the clock.

Now coming to an election near you. Robyn Blumner considers the most recent attempts to disenfranchise voters. A nugget:

Funny that this is being done by immigrant-heavy swing states with Republican secretaries of state. Both Colorado and New Mexico made a media splash with dire claims that noncitizens were registered and likely voting in large numbers. But a closer look by the nonprofit Brennan Center for Justice found that those states had drawn indefensible conclusions about noncitizen voting and had refused to release evidence that backed up their claims. The allegations of voter fraud, the center suggests, were smoke and mirrors and couldn’t be trusted.

The same can be said for all the dead people voting in South Carolina. That state’s attorney general, Republican Alan Wilson, claimed recently that more than 900 votes had been cast by dead people. But after the South Carolina Election Commission looked into the claim, it didn’t hold up. There was no evidence that anyone had fraudulently voted in the name of someone dead.

She’s taking them to court.

Applewhite said she has voted in every election since she voted for John F. Kennedy in 1962, but this year, Pennsylvania’s harsh new voter ID law means that she and the others who have no government issued photo ID will be unable to cast a ballot this fall. She has been named as the plaintiff in a suit brought against the state by the NAACP and the ACLU.

Ms. Applewhite has tried for years to obtain a photo ID, but to no avail. NYU School of Law’s Brennan Center for Justice estimates that 25 percent of black adults have no form of state-issued photo ID, as opposed to only eight percent of white adults.