Republican Lies category archive

Bob Cesca reports.

Haley Barbour may not remember Jim Crow, but Mike Littwin of the Denver Post does.

If you weren’t there or have that new ailment, “amnesia Barbour barbarica, read his reminiscence. A memory from 1962:

My father, who had worked at the local newspaper (in Newport News, Virginia, just across the James–ed.), put me in touch with an editorial writer there who showed me, in the pre-Google days, how to use microfilm. When I finished, a woman was there in his office. She asked what I was doing, and I told her I was researching a debate on integration.

When she asked which side I was taking, I said, innocently, “I’m pro-integration.”

“How would your mother like it,” she said, and I find it stunning even today, “if you brought home a little colored girl?”

Afterthought:

Oppression is seldom oppressive to the oppressor.

Addendum:

Shaun Mullen considers those who still don the gray and take to the barricades, though they do it today with pen, not with bayonet. A nugget:

Although this comparison is not perfect, it works well enough: The Germans have fessed up to their history, the Japanese have denied it, while the Lost Causers have simply rewritten it. That must not be forgotten as we slouch through 2011 and the inevitable ceremonies and controversies in which a perversion of the most tragic conflict in American history is yet again rubbed in our faces.

Read the whole thing.

Delaware Liberal reports on the Obama Hate Machine. A nuggget:

If you are a frequent reader of Delaware Liberal then you have seen example after example after example about the machinations of the OHM. One of the recent idiocies of the OHM is the notion that President Obama wants to give Manhattan back to Native Americans . . . .

Leonard Pitts in the Chicago Tribune:

We are gathered here today to mourn the loss of America’s mind.

It was last seen last month in Oklahoma. There, voters gave emphatic approval to a measure outlawing the use of Shariah law — a strict and often brutal interpretation of Islamic religious strictures — in state courts. Shariah is not known to be a problem in Oklahoma, or, for that matter, anywhere else in the United States, something even the bill’s backers concede. But, said the initiative’s sponsor, then-Republican state Rep. Rex Duncan, why wait?

Of course, by that reasoning, one can also justify laws regulating time travel, flying cars and pink unicorns pooping in public parks. Should we assume Oklahoma legislators are hard at work on laws to restrict these and other non-existent troubles?

It’s called the politics of hate.

It’s what the rightwing does best.

This is silly.

And the reason it’s silly is that the governor of Hawaii could show a videotape of the live birth and the loonies on the right would claim it had been doctored.

Democratic Gov. Neil Abercrombie wants to find a way to release more information about President Barack Obama’s Hawaii birth and dispel conspiracy theories that he was born elsewhere.

Abercrombie was a friend of Obama’s parents and knew him as a child, and is deeply troubled by the effort to cast doubt on the president’s citizenship.

Loons and whackjobs will not be persuaded by evidence.

Addendum, Later That Afternoon:

Andy Borowitz satirizes the silly:

Speaking to reporters in Kailua, Birther leader Orly Taitz said that Hawaii cannot be considered part of the United States “unless it can produce an authentic statehood certificate.”

Ms. Taitz said that she did a thorough title search on the islands and has concluded that rather than being a U.S. state, “the islands of Hawaii appear to be colonies of Kenya.”

Zombie lies never die, American Red Cross version:

The American Red Cross has been receiving calls and inquiries about erroneous allegations concerning a “ban on Christmas” that are based on an eight-year-old story about the British Red Cross. Unfortunately, this 2002 story is circulating again on the Internet, causing some people to think it is a new development and prompting questions about the American Red Cross policy regarding holiday decorations in its facilities.

Atrios, talking about something else, puts the phony war on Christmas in a nutshell:

Of course most of this complaining isn’t really religion based but tribal. I don’t really think Lou Dobbs or Bill O’Reilly are particularly religious people, they’re just mad that not everyone is “American” in precisely the same way they are.

Isn’t it just wonderful how Republicans want to give us more of what brought us this?

Click for a larger image

Via Atrios.

Truman was correct.

Via Bob Cesca.

Andrew Sullivan takes the dissecting knife to just one lie.

It’s quite an autopsy.

On Radio Times, historian Sean Wilentz traces the lineage of Glenn Beck to the John Birch Society and analyzes his smoke-and-mirror trickery.

From the transcript:

What interests me as an historian, is how Glenn Beck’s version of American history, it isn’t new. It isn’t hidden. It’s been out there for 50 years. It’s pretty much what the John Birch Society – that they’ve been teaching for 50 years.

It’s a version of history that demonizes the Progressive era, particularly Woodrow Wilson, sees it as the beginnings of America’s going down the road to totalitarianism, which ends, in Beck’s version, with Barack Obama.

It’s a version of history that is beyond skewed. One history professor said that, you know, it’s not worth a pitcher of warm spit. But of course, that’s what Beck expects us to say. He lives in a kind of, you know, Alice in Wonderland world, where if people who actually know the history say what he’s teaching is junk, he says that’s because you’re trying to hide the truth.

Follow the link above to read the transcript.

Follow this link to read the summary, listen to the show, or download the podcast.

Dick Destiny has more on the lunacy.

Eight false facts lies accepted as facts by Very Serious People, via Tom. Note how many of them form part of the basis of teabaggery.

1. President Obama tripled the deficit. Reality: Bush’s last budget had a $1.416 trillion deficit. Obama’s first budget reduced that to $1.29 trillion.

2. President Obama raised taxes, which hurt the economy. Reality: Obama cut taxes. 40% of the “stimulus” was wasted on tax cuts which only create debt, which is why it was so much less effective than it could have been.

3. President Obama bailed out the banks. Reality: While many people conflate the “stimulus” with the bank bailouts, the bank bailouts were requested by President Bush and his Treasury Secretary, former Goldman Sachs CEO Henry Paulson. (Paulson also wanted the bailouts to be “non-reviewable by any court or any agency.”) The bailouts passed and began before the 2008 election of President Obama.

4. The stimulus didn’t work. Reality: The stimulus worked, but was not enough. In fact, according to the Congressional Budget Office, the stimulus raised employment by between 1.4 million and 3.3 million jobs.

5. Businesses will hire if they get tax cuts. Reality: A business hires the right number of employees to meet demand. Having extra cash does not cause a business to hire, but a business that has a demand for what it does will find the money to hire. Businesses want customers, not tax cuts.

6. Health care reform costs $1 trillion. Reality: The health care reform reduces government deficits by $138 billion.

7. Social Security is a Ponzi scheme, is “going broke,” people live longer, fewer workers per retiree, etc. Reality: Social Security has run a surplus since it began, has a trust fund in the trillions, is completely sound for at least 25 more years and cannot legally borrow so cannot contribute to the deficit (compare that to the military budget!) Life expectancy is only longer because fewer babies die; people who reach 65 live about the same number of years as they used to.

8. Government spending takes money out of the economy. Reality: Government is We, the People and the money it spends is on We, the People. Many people do not know that it is government that builds the roads, airports, ports, courts, schools and other things that are the soil in which business thrives. Many people think that all government spending is on “welfare” and “foreign aid” when that is only a small part of the government’s budget.

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.