Republican Lies category archive

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.

Renee Loth in the Boston Globe.

The Republican vision of America is a cramped place of limited prospects — not blue-sky, just blue. To hear them tell it, we live in can’t-do nation. We can’t educate our children. We can’t afford a first-class transportation system. We can’t regulate the safety of our air and food and water. We can’t operate highway rest stops or public parks. We can’t even keep our criminals in prison.

And we really, truly, can’t tax rich people a penny more to help pay for these other things.

Read the whole thing.

It’s Republican woo-woo science.

Via the Booman Tribune.

Wisconsin Governor Walker is apparently a repeat offender. Rachel Maddow reports on how he made up a financial crisis in Milwaukee to bust a union. Now Milwaukee is paying significantly more than before for a lower level of service.

Via The Richmonder, who’s on a roll this week.

Chris Matthews on the Republican Party’s odious Southern strategy.

Via Bob Cesca.

If Fox News Channel’s lies were not so dangerous, they would be pathetic and silly. But they are, so they’re not.

Bill McKibben tells of learning, at age 50, that he is a Communist, at least in the whacked out world of Glenn Beck:

Since I don’t actually watch Mr. Beck, I didn’t know about it until e-mails began to arrive, informing me that indeed I was a communist. My first reaction was: I’m not a communist. I’m a Methodist.

But then I reconsidered. What exactly was I doing when those e-mails arrived? I was downloading an iPad app, At Bat 11, which lets me (for only $14.99) hear the broadcast of any baseball game anywhere in the country. Since I live in New England, I use it to track our beloved Boston squad, whose moniker I had never before deeply contemplated. Now – well, enough said.

And the next morning, on my first full day as a communist? I spent most of it outdoors, at the annual New England festival for young cross-country ski racers. More than 500 kids from across the region were competing, and I was standing on the toughest hill cheering. And here’s the thing – at least with the first- and second-graders, I was cheering for everyone equally. Not only that, but did you know where this particular type of skiing was invented? Norway.

Read the rest of Mr. McKibben’s red reminiscences at the link.

Addendum:

Field weighs in on the latest (at least for a minute or two) lie.

If you don’t want to spend the whole three and a quarter minutes watching, fast-forward to the two minute mark.

Via The Richmonder.

Shaun Mullen wonders who was the worst Secretary of Defense (or Secretary of War, to use the original name of the office) in U. S. history.

He narrows it down to two persons,

• Donald Rumsfeld, who’s currently making the round the talk shows flogging his new book, a tua culpa, or
• Robert McNamara.

You can follow his reasoning at the link. Here’s the tie breaker:

Like Rumsfeld, McNamara was a control freak who thought he had all the answers, lacked the crucial element of common sense and surrounded himself with sycophantic acolytes. Like Rumsfeld, he presided over an unpopular war built on a foundation of false assumptions and outright lies. Like Rumseld, there was an amorality to his actions. And like Rumsfeld, he squandered the respect of his generals and admirals.

But without McNamara, there still would have been a Vietnam War, while there would not have been an Iraq war without Rumsfeld.

Q. What would you get if Snooki entered politics?