Republican Lies category archive

Republicans try to convince persons to throw away their votes.

One must ask oneself, why are they afraid of voters?

Actually, one needn’t ask oneself.

Their policies are inimical to the polity, therefore they fear the polity. Can there be any clearer evidence than an advertising campaign such as this one?

The prosecution rests.

I heard a local teabagger on this show say that we in the United States pay more taxes than do Europeans. In other news, up is down, black is white, and pigs fly.

Here’s an analysis.

Here’s a chart from the New York Times (full story here):

WMDs. Trickle-down economics. Birtherism. And so on.

Why? Because “Making the rich richer and the poor poorer” is probably not a vote-getter.

John H. Richardson theorizes:

Liberals can be annoyingly self-righteous and swept away by hyperbole — calling George W. Bush a moron, for example — but I don’t see much deliberate lying. Certainly nothing on the scale of Fox or Limbaugh.

I have two theories about this. One is that the conservative intelligentsia is deliberately training the Republican base to be irrational. I can almost see them chortling: “If we can get them to believe the earth is only 6,000 years old, we can get them to believe anything!”

But while this theory provides a little consolation, I don’t actually think it’s true. Far more likely is theory No. 2 — that Republicans have lost all confidence in their ability to convince the American people with honest arguments. Their triumphalism about November conceals a stink of desperation.

Read the whole thing. His email exchange with celebrated fabricator Dinesh D’Souza is worth the price of admission by itself.

Via Balloon Juice.

John Cole:

. . . but this entire “enthusiasm gap” is something I simply do not understand. It is something where I have a legitimate blind spot, because for me, even if I am not that thrilled about voting for Democrats (and I’m going to have to bring an air sickness bag and put menthol cream under my nose while voting for Oliverio this fall), I am entirely enthusiastic about voting against the Republicans. I don’t like a lot of things the Democrats have done, and Obama has sure pissed me off on any number of issues, but the other guys are CRAZY.

Jay Bookman, at the Atlantic Journal-Constitution, rounds up some of that crazy.

Eugene Robinson dissects Hayley Barbour’s fantastickal tale of growing up integrated. A nugget:

The governor’s assertion that segregation was a relic of the past “by my time” is ludicrous. He was 16, certainly old enough to pay attention, during the Freedom Summer of 1964, when civil rights activists James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner were murdered by the Ku Klux Klan near Philadelphia, Miss. He was a young adult, on his way to becoming a lawyer, when the public schools were forced to integrate. I’ll bet Barbour could remember those days if he tried a little harder.

Equally wrong — and perhaps deliberately disingenuous — is his made-up narrative of how the South turned Republican. Barbour’s fairy tale doesn’t remotely resemble what really happened.

I am about the same age, perhaps a little older than Mr. Robinson, and a little younger than Mr. Barbour. All three of us grew up in the Jim Crow South, though by law Mr. Robinson and I could not have attended school together. We are old enough to remember . . . .

Barbour is lying. He’s lying to himself, or lying to the rest of us, or some combination thereof.

Whichever it be–whether he’s delusional or mendacious–he reveals himself to be untrustworthy and unqualified for public positions.

George Smith watches the tricks. A nugget:

Yes, stealth electromagnetic pulse attack certainly explains the spectacular growth in people applying for food stamps. They can’t buy groceries anymore after they were thrown out of work because Iran launched a surprise EMP attack and we didn’t notice.

Via TPM.

The Booman reads Charles Krauthammer so I don’t have to.

Watch him take apart the lies and misrepresentations.

Bob Cesca has more.

The freedom to hate:

In related news, Adam Serwer looks at the backstory:

The conservative media lied about the location of the project, they lied about Rauf’s background, they lied about the project’s funding, they lied about when the project would be built, and they lied about Rauf’s political beliefs. And it would have been one thing if it had just been a small group of people lying, but they had an entire cable news station to lie for them, and politicians who were willing to amplify their smears. This controversy isn’t about the “political climate.” It’s the fruit of a conscious, deliberate, and sustained effort.

Video via Hanlon’s Razor.

The failure of anyone, federal, state, or local, to attempt to stop lynching, not just in the South but elsewhere, for centuries, is one of the most shameful facets of American racial prejudice.

And now Republicans are trying to quibble over what constitutes a lynching. From TPM:

It turns out, says Jeffrey Lord, whose bio lists him as “former Reagan White House political director”, that for all our thought that Sherrod was a victim of a smear, she’s actually a terrible liar after all. Her story about a relative being lynched by a white sheriff almost 70 years ago, Lord reveals, is a terrible lie.

This one’s really one for the history books under the subheading of right-wing #outragefail, as the young folks might put it. Lord starts off vaguely sympathetic and works up into a crescendo of high-dudgeon because Sherrod says her relative was lynched when in fact he was arrested by a sheriff and then beaten to death on the courthouse steps while allegedly resisting arrest even though he remained handcuffed through the fatal beating.

“Lynching” referred to the killing, not to the weapon.

For a detailed take-down of Lord’s lie, see the Inverse Square.

Words cannot measure the depth of disgusting to which this falls.

Media Matters has the timeline of the Shirley Sherrod smear. It is instructive in demonstrating how quickly the smear spread.

Meanwhile, Steve Benen discusses how conservative outrages tend to be manufactured nonsense.

StevenM analysizes why the Breitbarts and the other components of the Republican smear machine exist. A nugget:

But this was really not a surprise event. The right wing has been gunning for every prominent African American they can find from Van Jones to ACORN to Holder himself to Sherrod. They don’t care how they get them. They don’t care about the individual person, or what they have or have not actually done. One’s as good as the other. They are place holders, almost figures in a distant landscape. The right wing is building a narrative, the kind that their followers like: vague, juicy, filled with anger, built on the notion that Obama brought the angry blacks into power and that its going to be reparations all the way down. Fighting it may be hard, but the Obama Administration has to fight it or its going to go down under it. Resentiment, especially when aimed carefully at outsiders and other races, is a very powerful force in people’s lives. It is a marvelous tool for right wing demagogues and for corporatists because it moves people to anger, despair, and lashing out but it hardly ever moves them to question authority or the monied. In other words, its a perfect electoral strategy for a do-nothing party focused on returning to the status quo ante. Get people riled up, beg for money, get your voters out, and then see them subside into quiescence right after the mid terms.

There aren’t enough banksters to elect Republicans, so they peddle fear to the rest of the electorate.

In this corner, Republicans, who claim the stimulus did not help save or create jobs.

In this corner, reality:

Starting in June 2009, Congress set aside about $100 billion to provide a two-year cushion to school districts through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. Many districts have spent all the money they received and are having to shut down programs and lay off employees, according to a report released today by the national, independent Center on Education Policy.

What happens when wingnut lies are challenged by facts (if you’re short of time, focus on the last two minutes):

There’s not enough grains of salt in the world to counteract wingnut lies.

Via Bob Cesca.

Dean Baker reveals what’s behind the Republican Party’s sudden concern about deficits.

It is possible that Congressional Republicans, who were willing to vote for hundreds of billions of dollars of war expenditures without paying for them, or trillions of dollars of tax cuts without paying for them, are actually concerned about this sort of increase in the national debt. It is possible that this is true, but not very plausible.

The more likely explanation is that the Republicans want to block anything that can boost the economy and create jobs. Throwing people out of work may not be pretty, but politics was never pretty, and it is getting less so by the day.

Well, no, they don’t. They want a fantasy land that never existed.

In the Guardian, Michael Tomasky looks at the America John Boehner-Boner grew up in. Some nuggets:

In the America John Boehner grew up in, the top marginal tax rate on wealthy earners was 90%. It had gone up there during the war, and five, 10, 15 years after armistice, no sizable group, Democrat or Republican, felt any strong urge to lower it.

In the America John Boehner grew up in, private-sector union membership was around or above 30%. Today’s figure is 7%. The right to form a union was broadly accepted. Outside of a few small turbulent pockets, there was no such thing as today’s union-busting law firms hired by management to go into workplaces and intimidate workers.

In the America John Boehner grew up in, the country had a president – a Republican president – who believed the following:

Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes that you can do these things. Among them are a few Texas oil millionaires, and an occasional politician or businessman from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid.

From Fact Check dot org. Follow the link for the full analysis and citations:

Q: Did carbon dioxide emissions from the volcanic eruption in Iceland negate five years’ worth of effort to control CO2?

A: Not even close. Carbon dioxide emissions from the volcano were small relative to human activity, and partially offset by the shutdown of European air travel.