Republican Lies category archive

This week, Bob Garfield of On the Media inteviews James Fallows regarding President Obama’s release of his birth certificate, focusing on the role of the media in birtherism. In the process, they look back on the history of the American press, from the time of Andrew Jackson forward.

Then Bob Garfield adds a comment:

So why do the mainstream media take the bait from the Donald Trumps of the world? Why do they add oxygen to the fires of political cynicism and stupidity? If they simply ignored this nonsense, wouldn’t the story just flicker out, once and for all?

Well, first of all, no, it wouldn’t. In the Internet world, and the FOX News Channel world, the mainstream media aren’t the arbiters of what stories live or die.

But beyond that, notwithstanding the President’s digs at the press corps, the media have nothing here to be ashamed of. They didn’t seize on the birther story because they regarded it as unsettled. They did so mainly to foster evaluation of supposed presidential hopeful Donald Trump, and of elected officials who keep doubt alive by framing the President’s birth as a matter of belief, not of fact.

When Speaker of the House John Boehner says, “I take the President at his word,” that slyly leaves open the possibility that the President is lying.

So Obama shouldn’t be ridiculing the messenger here. If anything, the President owes the press a debt of gratitude. If he wants the public to distinguish a responsible leader from a carnival barker, someone has to document the barking.

I often hear and see some of my fellow lefties complain that the media should just not cover the birthers and their fantastickal and fantastically stupid, bigoted claims, since there is no news, only falsehood, there.

As much as I wish the whole birther nonsense would go away, I find these complaints disquieting, not just on abstract First Amendment grounds (and, as my two or three regular readers know, I am a First Amendment purist), but also from the knowledge that censoring them can’t stop them. If this hokum came only from a few cranks at the barbershop, it would be unreported hokum.

Instead, persons who are, by virtue (that may be the wrong word, but oh, well) of their positions are newsworthy promote the lies, both implicitly and explicitly.

Attempting to censor the lie would not make it disappear.

Rather, it would goad the rightwing lie machine into higher gear.

Follow the link to read the rest of the transcript and listen to the entire segment or listen here:

James Carroll, writing at the Boston Globe, examines the DNA in the birth of birthers. A nugget:

The issue has been his character as — well, as the issue of a Caucasian mother and an African father. An inch below the surface of this discussion is the perceived offense not just of blackness, but of miscegenation, that peculiarly demonic legacy of a slave system which took for granted the white owners’ sexual exploitation of slaves, while outlawing interracial sex. The biological fact of Obama’s existence, not the bureaucratic fact of government records, is what generates the lunatic rage.

Via Kiko’s House.

Via ABL at Balloon Juice.

Afterthought:

It is truly difficult not to characterize birthers as being truly evil people.

Via Bob Cesca, who has a knack for catching these things.

Josh Marshall elaborates on his DSM for birthers. Here’s one classification:

Second comes what I now term ‘Forensic Denialist Long Form Birthers’. These are the folks who going on very theories deny or doubt the authenticity of the document released yesterday. Orly Taitz appears to be in this category, claiming, with no apparent reason, that an authentic document would have identified Obama’s father as “Negro” as opposed to “African.” More creatively, Jerome Corsi, author of the swift boat smear and leading birther now calls the Nordyke twins — two girls born one day after Obama — represent the “Rosetta Stone” of birtherism because the numbers on their birth certificates are lower than Obama’s notwithstanding being born a day later.

Follow the link for the rest.

Aside:

Racism has driven these folks nuts.

And gets trumped. Bearing false witness and all that.

Watch Lawrence O’Donnell trip him up in his own words.

Via Balloon Juice.

Paul Harris in the Guardian:

The birther “debate” should be reduced to this: it’s OK to mention birtherism, if one then immediately qualifies the mention with the rider that anyone who believes it is a moron or a cynic or both. And then one moves swiftly on.

Follow the link for his take on why this isn’t happening.

Leonard Pitts, Jr., tallies the score. Follow the link for the play-by-play and an analysis of why the score turned out the way it did.

Consider: Politifact has six categories for judging veracity. A statement is either true, mostly true, half true, barely true, false, or “Pants On Fire,” after the old schoolyard taunt that begins “Liar! Liar!” Politifact uses this designation for statements that are not only untrue but also make some “ridiculous claim.”

I reviewed 100 such statements on Politifact’s web site. By my count, of the 70 that originated with an identifiable individual or group (as opposed to a chain email or miscellaneous source), 61 were from the political right. That includes Rush Limbaugh saying President Obama is going to take away your right to fish, Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer saying beheaded bodies are being found in the desert, Sarah Palin claiming death panels will stalk the elderly — 90 percent of the most audacious lies coming from conservatives.

Addendum, the Next Day:

J. M. Ashby:

One area where Democrats consistently lose to Republicans is in the PR department, and the cause of that is multi-faceted but can be boiled down to one thing — Democrats don’t like to lie.

Heh.

In a long article at Philly dot com, Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele analyze the BIg Lie that American corporations are taxed too heavily (or even, in some cases, at all). A nugget from the introduction:

. . . a forecast made years ago by William J. Casey, a wily Republican from another era who liked to dabble in the intelligence world’s black arts inside and outside the country, and who helped craft the election of Ronald Reagan, is coming true. After taking office, President Reagan installed Casey as head of the CIA in 1981. After his first staff meeting at the agency, Casey was quoted as saying:

“We’ll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false.”

One of the more egregious falsehoods being peddled by the corporate tax cutters is that companies doing business in the United States are taxed at an exorbitant rate. Not so. Though the United States has one of the highest statutory rates on the books at 35 percent, the only fair way to measure what companies actually pay is their effective rate – what they ultimately pay after deductions, credits, and assorted write-offs. By that yardstick, companies in the United States consistently pay taxes at rates lower than corporations in Japan and many nations in Europe.

Via Bob Cesca.

The editorial page editor of my local rag has an excellent column on corporatist and Republican efforts to debunk scientific fact.

I can’t excerpt or summarize it adequately.

All I can say is go read it.

Lies and lying liars:

Via TPM.

Afterthought:

It’s somewhat surprising that John Kyl (R–Cloud Cuckoo Land) was willing to just come out and admit to just making stuff up. Republicans are not usually so open about their mendacity.

At Philly dot com, Chris Kelly considers how straw men (straw persons? straw crows? straw scarecrows? strawcrows?) are created and used to distract us from what’s happening.

A nugget:

Even the most specious arguments are granted legitimacy simply for having been made. Every opinion, however uninformed, is seen as inherently valuable. No argument is too preposterous or dishonest to share. If you are shameless enough to stand up and say it, someone is bound to agree and pass it along.

It’s how Rush Limbaugh, who recently signed a $300 million contract to build and destroy legions of straw men every day, can claim he is a spokesman for the working class. It’s how Sarah Palin can be talked about as a serious candidate for president, and how a weepy basket case like Glenn Beck can be held up as the “only sane voice in the media.”

It’s how so-called conservatives can insist that the Wall Street bankers who crashed the economy should keep their astronomical bonuses, but unionized public employees should give up their hard-won pensions. It’s how President Obama can tap General Electric CEO Jeffrey Immelt to help “reform” the corporate tax structure, even as the New York Times reveals that GE – with worldwide profits of $14.2 billion last year – paid zero U.S. taxes.

Via TPM.

Gary Younge, writing at the Guardian, considers the dis-semblance (as opposed to resemblance) of the Republican Party to reasonableness, particularly the tendency to campaign as “conservatives” and to govern as gun-toting theocrats.

Strategically the division between social and fiscal conservatism has largely been settled. With just a few exceptions only social conservatives (anti-abortion, anti-gay marriage, pro-gun) can get elected within the Republican party, so it has ceased to be much of an issue in primaries. Once nominated, candidates stress only fiscal conservatism for fear of scaring away centrists. Once elected they emphasise both, evidenced by the growing efforts to restrict access to abortion by legislators who barely raised the issue of abortion on the stump.

It’s worth the three minutes it takes to read.

Classy.

A deputy prosector in Johnson County, Indiana, has resigned his job after it was revealed that in February, during the large protests in Wisconsin over Gov. Scott Walker’s anti-public employee union bill, he e-mailed Walker’s office and recommended that they conduct a “false flag operation” — to fake an assault or assassination attempt on Walker in order to discredit the unions and protesters.

Words fail me.

Bill Shein on the voter fraud fraud. A nugget:

But we don’t have a problem with voter-impersonation fraud, in which someone shows up at the polls claiming to be someone else. It almost never occurs. Since voter-impersonation fraud is the only crime prevented by requiring voters to have photo ID, such a requirement does nothing to improve our electoral system.

(snip)

The United States has a long, dark history of making it difficult for certain groups of Americans to vote – something that is now unconstitutional. Where’s the Constitution-defending Tea Party on this issue? Oddly, pushing restrictive voter ID laws wherever it can.

Real election fraud occurs when partisan officials move polling places, improperly purge voter rolls, allocate voting machines in ways that create long lines in certain precincts, and so on. Or when corrupt elections officials engage in illegal shenanigans. Voter ID laws won’t address these problems. But instituting professional, nonpartisan election administration would. Where’s the fast-track legislation for that?

Read the whole thing and don’t let the voter fraud fraudsters defraud your fellow citizens of their votes.

Back in the olden days, when I was a young ‘un, there was constant talk about the “credibility” of public figures.

Politicians and journalists had to have “credibility” (which, I note, was not the same as being “credible”).

The underlying tone seemed to be that there was some quality of credible-ness that existed separately from truthfulness.

If you spoke the truth yet lacked “credibility,” no one would believe you; you were as a tinkling bell or a sounding brass. (Alternatively, if you had “credibility” you could say any old damn thing you wanted to and get away with it. See “Southeast Asia: Domino Theory”). (I think this is roughly what “gravitas” means in political discourse today.)

Clearly, truthfulness and credibility have drifted either farther apart.

James O’Keefe’s maliciously edited videos cause people to lose their jobs, even though he has repeatedly proven that he and truth live in different zip codes.

Megan Carpenter comments on the recent kerfuffle involving O’Keefe’s recent NPR hatchet job (which even Glenn Beck’s website agrees is “heavily edited”):

Of course, the real story is never what it seems with O’Keefe. From the selectively edited Acorn videos to his abortive efforts to “take down” Senator Mary Landrieu (Democrat, Lousiana), which resulted in criminal charges, to his sophomoric attempts to get a CNN reporter in a room with him and a variety of sex toys, the mainstream media has had plenty of warning about his love of “truthiness” and disregard for actual facts. And, as with most of O’Keefe’s videos to date, releasing selectively edited, embed-friendly clips got him exactly the coverage (and notches on his Flipcam) that he wanted – even as the full footage showed that almost everything he claimed to have discovered was untrue.

Yet, O’Keefe’s lies are treated as truth.

Until they are not.

Elsewhere, appearing on On the Media, NPR’s own Ira Glass wondered why NPR refused to fight back.

I don’t know the methodology that somebody would use, but I feel like public radio should address this directly, because I think anybody who listens to our stations understands that what they’re hearing is mainstream media reporting. We have nothing to fear from a discussion of what is the news coverage we’re doing.

As somebody who works in public radio, it is killing me that people on the right are going around trying to basically rebrand us, saying that it’s biased news, it’s – it’s, you know, it’s left wing news, when I feel like anybody who listens to the shows knows that it’s not. And we are not fighting back. We’re not saying anything back. I find it completely annoying and [LAUGHS], and I don’t understand it.

You can read the transcript at the link or listen to the interview here:

Republicans will continue the lies as long the lies get results.