Republican Lies category archive

Via BartCop.

Aside:

Oddly enough, the last time I looked, Communism was dead, dead, dead, except to the Republican Party, which seems determined to keep it alive.

Via BartBlog.

Thom explains how the big lie works, using the attempt to privatize public education as an example.

But the wingnuts can. And do.

They really can’t deal with the idea of a black guy in the White House.

Like the seducer pursuing the girl, Little Ricky will say whatever he thinks his prey wants to hear. You know what comes next.

The Booman tries to explain Little Ricky’s perspective.

Video via Raw Story.

Tony Norman points out the genius of the voter fraud fraud.

It’s easy to dress that wolf up in sheep’s clothing.

This brings us back to the irresponsible notion that the lack of actual widespread voter fraud in Pennsylvania is somehow evidence that poor, elderly, minority citizens and college students should be left to bask in their enfranchisement unmolested. In the grand tradition of fixing things that ain’t broke, the Republicans have come up with a process that increases the aggravation factor when it comes to voting.

None of the requirements for a photo ID will be impossible to meet, but it will make voting inconvenient. While the Republicans aren’t erecting literal barriers to voting, they can’t say with a straight face that they aren’t introducing an element of unprecedented Election Day hassle. That is the point.

In a nation already cursed with low turnouts, there is a fiendish elegance to voter ID laws. It’s a tactic exclusively designed to reduce the number of Democratic voters, who will be discouraged by long lines in their precincts caused by the new screening procedures.

Click to read the rest.

Reports of rampant voter fraud regularly turn out to be somewhere on a scale between hysterical lies and lying hysteria.

Facing South considers the recent kerfuffle in South Carolina:

As was suspected from the beginning, the fevered stories of “zombie voters” turned out to be fantasy. This week, state elections officials reviewed 207 of the supposed 950 cases of dead people voting, and couldn’t confirm fraud in any of them. 106 stemmed from clerical errors at the polls, and another 56 involved bad data — the usual culprits when claims of dead voters have surfaced in the past.

So the question is, how did this cheap B-movie fiction make it into the public debate in the first place?

Follow the link to see Facing South’s answer to the question at the end of the selection. My answer to it is that Republicans and their sycophants at Fox News will hype for any crackpot (non)story they can find to justifying keeping voters who are not likely to support them from having a say in elections.

Republicans know they are a minority party with no hope of becoming a majority. They have fixed on a strategy of remaking the electorate into one that favors them by excluding those who do not (how shall I put this diplomatically?) fall for their twaddle.

Via Bob Cesca’s Awesome Blog.

Outdated public records do not mean fraudulent votes.

Click for a larger image.

Via Some Guy with a Website.

At Bloomberg, David Abromowitz points out the the history of the Boys from Bain directly undercuts Republican orthodoxy that taxing capital gains deters investment:

Simply put, all of the investments made by Bain Capital LLC, the private-equity company Romney cofounded in 1984 and ran until 1999, occurred when capital-gains rates were much higher than they are today. Yet Bain consistently attracted massive amounts of private capital, and thrived.

Bain’s haul is further evidence that fair tax rates don’t hold back profit-seeking capitalists, at least until those rates reach a point that no one is proposing. From 1984 until 1999, the top rates on capital gains — the profit from investments as opposed to compensation for work — were often at 28 percent, and never lower than 20 percent. Indeed, in 1987, under President Ronald Reagan, the 20 percent rate rose to 28 percent — a 40 percent increase in potential taxation of Bain investment profit. (Yes, Reagan did raise taxes, even on capital.)

This will, of course, have no effect on Republicans, since their tax policies are founded on one principle: the principle that wishing will make it so.

No longer content with silent dogwhistles, members of the Republican Party have ratcheted up the racism as the election draws closer.

The latest is Congressman Pete Hoekstra’s re-packaging of the “yellow peril,” which Chancey Devega demolishes in a stunning takedown in a post whose title recalls the dog whistes, Me Love You Long Time, Me So Horny: More than Dog Whistles, Republican Pete Hoekstra Embraces the Yellow Peril Strategy.

Any but the most rabid racist today goes out of the way to avoid accusations of racism by using code words and dog whistles. So why does the GOP keep drawing the accusations?

George Monbiot, writing at the Guardian, thinks that conservatives have built themselves and their constituency into such a fact-free, hate-full fantasy world that the appeals work:

But what we now see among their parties – however intelligent their guiding spirits may be – is the abandonment of any pretence of high-minded conservatism. On both sides of the Atlantic, conservative strategists have discovered that there is no pool so shallow that several million people won’t drown in it. Whether they are promoting the idea that Barack Obama was not born in the US, that man-made climate change is an eco-fascist-communist-anarchist conspiracy, or that the deficit results from the greed of the poor, they now appeal to the basest, stupidest impulses, and find that it does them no harm in the polls.

Don’t take my word for it. Listen to what two former Republican ideologues, David Frum and Mike Lofgren, have been saying. Frum warns that “conservatives have built a whole alternative knowledge system, with its own facts, its own history, its own laws of economics”. The result is a “shift to ever more extreme, ever more fantasy-based ideology” which has “ominous real-world consequences for American society”.

Lofgren complains that “the crackpot outliers of two decades ago have become the vital centre today”. The Republican party, with its “prevailing anti-intellectualism and hostility to science” is appealing to what he calls the “low-information voter”, or the “misinformation voter”. While most office holders probably don’t believe the “reactionary and paranoid claptrap” they peddle, “they cynically feed the worst instincts of their fearful and angry low-information political base”.

. . . you’ll say anything.

Via Andrew Sullivan.

Every time I hear of a new effort by Republicans to keep voters from the polls, I remember hearing my Daddy talk about paying his poll taxes.

My ex-local rag reports on the Sheriff of Delaware’s Sussex County, whose ideal seems to be the Sheriff of Nottingham, despotic lord of all in his Shire and owner of all the deer in Sherwood.

A snippet

Over the last few months, Sussex County Sheriff Jeff Christopher has assailed his fellow county officials for overstepping their authority, proclaimed that God has brought him to his post to “fight for what is right” and declared that his job is a bulwark against tyranny.

His rhetoric places him in the company of a small but growing number of conservative county sheriffs who see themselves as the ultimate enforcers of the Bill of Rights and the Constitution, The News Journal has found.

Christopher is involved in a political standoff with county and state officials over the authority of sheriffs in Delaware.

It is most curious how wingnuts feel that they must rationalize lawlessness into lawfulness with pretzel logic and fabricated history. This is sovereign citizenship with a badge.

Leonard Pitts, Jr., cuts through the smokescreen:

Though lawmakers swear their only interest is to combat voting fraud (which is not known to be a rampant problem), it is difficult not to feel their true intent is to suppress the black vote (see note–ed.).

Granted, race is nowhere mentioned in the voter ID bills. It was not mentioned in bills imposing grandfather clauses, poll taxes and literacy tests either. All were officially race-neutral, yet the intention and effect was to bar blacks from voting.

As Richard Nixon once said of his War on Drugs, another “race-neutral” policy that somehow victimizes mostly blacks, the idea is to target African Americans while appearing not to.

Note: I think Mr. Pitts left out “other minorities, students, and poor people.”