Republican Lies category archive

All sugar; no substance; rotten teeth a feature, not a bug.

Via Bob Cesca’s Awesome Blog.

The Republican Party tried to block this ad, claiming that it was false:

As Kommandant Klink would have said, “Request denied!” because the ad isn’t false.

While the Republican plan would turn Medicare into an unrecognizable monster (while they try to slip it through by grandfathering anyone 55 or older), it would retain the name.

Their plan is to create a Mr. Hyde, but keep the name, Dr. Jekyll.

Contrary to conventional wisdom, it’s a Republican thing:

Excerpt:

The conservatives and the right wing have been on the wrong side of history so long, their solution is change the facts.

One more time.

Pay attention to what Republicans do, not to what they say.

They just can’t help themselves. From TPM:

The national Chamber of Commerce is using misleading quotes from the local Tonawanda News in a TV ad to suggest the paper backs Republican Jane Corwin in the NY-26 election, according to the paper. Upset with what they claim is an intentionally phony endorsement, the newspaper’s editors are demanding that the Chamber pull the TV ad and that Corwin’s campaign disavow it.

(snip)

According to the paper, quotes referring to how Corwin will “end harmful spending” and support lower taxes are in fact from her own campaign appearances, thus putting the candidate’s words into the paper’s mouth. Local news outlet WKBW has video of the offending TV spot on its website.

Aside:

Regarding the Gingrinch and truth, as my old boss used to say, “Even a blind pig finds an acorn sometimes.”

Political blogs will frequently refer to rhetorical “dog whistles,” meaning statements that sound innocent until their connotations are dissected.

One famous “dog whistle” was Ronald Reagan’s references to “welfare queens.” It said, “welfare fraudsters,” (and anyone can deplore fraud, unless it’s committed by Wall Street banksters, apparently), but it meant “persons of the not-white persuasion.”*

At We Are Respectable Negroes, blogger chaunceydevega challenges us to understand the dog whistles, using the Gingrinch as his example:

As Darth Vader, Sith Lord, said to Luke in The Empire Strikes Back, to expose Gingrich’s racism is all too easy. The more productive task is to challenge ourselves to understand the logic of the neo-conservative, neo-liberal, colorblind White racial frame. It would be easy to ether Gingrich for his obviously racist comments–comments which are part of a long tradition of Right-wing race baiting that predates both Reagan’s “welfare queen” and “black bucks buying T-bone steaks on welfare” memes.

I think it would be more fun to rehab Gingrich’s logic.

Follow the link to see the rehab treatment.

________________

*One attempt to trace the history of Mr. Reagan’s remark to see whether it contained any truth concludes that it did contain an eensy-weensy itty-bit, but that the facts were completely contrary to the tune played on the dog whistle.

Am I the only person who sees parallels between Republicans’ making up history to suite their cause and Soviet Russia’s making up history to suite its cause?

Click to see the image at its original size and location

August J. Pollack, the cartoonist, comments. A nugget:

Mike Huckabee, fresh off realizing that pretending he’ll become president pays far less than doing stuff like this, has done this. Apparently textbooks, teachers, the media, general knowledge, and of course that old enemy of the right, reality have for too long hindered the true history of our nation.

Follow the link for more about the cartoon.

If you feel particularly brave (or foolhardy) Mr. Pollack links to the Huckabee Hucksters History site.

I’m not going to help the Huckster’s Google juice.

This has been another edition of What Brendan Said.

Facing South reports on continuing Republican efforts to make it difficult for persons to vote. From the introduction:

With Republicans taking power or strengthening their hand in many state legislatures — and the 2012 elections looming on the horizon — GOP leaders are seizing the opportunity to push a raft of measures they claim will restore integrity to the voting process.

But the new voting bills share some important features: They all work to restrict the franchise and shrink the electorate — in most cases, in ways that would decrease Democratic votes.

Lots of details at the link.

He’s quite wrong you know.

Republican lies never die.

Video via Bob Cesca.

Afterthought:

For that matter, they don’t even fade away.

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.