Republican Lies category archive

They’re losing before the Nobel Committee. Listen here:

Fact Check dot org looks at statements by Congressman Boehner of Ohio on “Cap and Trade” and flatly declares, “That’s not true.”

Not that it was spin. Not that it was “shaded.” Not that it was half-truths.

Just that it was flatly “not true.”

He is, of course, a Republican. Lies are all they got.

As I was saying to someone today, it’s a bum rap.

As I said, the Republican Party needs villains. If it can’t find them, it will invent them.

Watch for an official Republican Party version of this, coming soon to a tea party on your street:

Via Atrios.

Calling out the lies.

Click for a larger image

Via Glenn Greenwald, who reminds us that (emphasis added)

. . . everything the Republican leaders said about Iraq turned out to be false, fictitious, imaginary — and their false-pretense war led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent human beings.

Everything.

Transcript here.

The issue isn’t that Congressman Joe Wilson (Embarrassment–SC) is a nutcase. It’s that he’s one of a party of nutcases.

Fact Check dot org calls out “Conservatives for Patients’ Rights” (there’s an oxymoron if you ever saw one). A nugget:

Lose your own doctor? Many people experience that today, if their employer changes insurance plans, if they change jobs, or if they become uninsured for any reason. Wait longer for care? Given the shortage of family doctors, which is only expected to worsen, we can expect wait times to increase even if the system remains untouched. Pending overhaul legislation aims to ease that, in fact, by increasing certain payments to physicians and making other adjustments to encourage training of primary care physicians.

Rationing? That occurs on a regular basis today, whenever insurance companies or government programs like Medicare reject claims, or when the companies drop people who have become ill for not disclosing often minor and unrelated preexisting conditions. Under pending legislation, insurance companies would be unable to deny coverage to individuals because of preexisting conditions.

And when it comes to losing one’s insurance, that’s another everyday occurrence under today’s system, as millions of people who have lost their jobs in the recession have found. Under the pending proposals, individuals could lose their current insurance plans, though for different reasons; small businesses might decide to buy coverage through a newly created health insurance exchange, for instance, rather than stick with their current plans. The big difference? For the vast majority, if not all, people, “losing your insurance” would simply mean switching insurance plans – not losing coverage, as many do today.

Follow the link for the full analysis.

FactCheck dot org. Follow the link for the full analysis:

Our inbox has been overrun with messages asking us to weigh in on a mammoth list of claims about the House health care bill. The chain e-mail purports to give “a few highlights” from the first half of the bill, but the list of 48 assertions is filled with falsehoods, exaggerations and misinterpretations. We examined each of the e-mail’s claims, finding 26 of them to be false and 18 to be misleading, only partly true or half true. Only four are accurate. A few of our “highlights”:

• The e-mail claims that page 30 of the bill says that “a government committee will decide what treatments … you get,” but that page refers to a “private-public advisory committee” that would “recommend” what minimum benefits would be included in basic, enhanced and premium insurance plans.
• The e-mail says that “non-US citizens, illegal or not, will be provided with free healthcare services” but points to a provision that prohibits discrimination in health care based on “personal characteristics.” Another provision explicity forbids “federal payment for undocumented aliens.”
• It says “[g]overnment will restrict enrollment of SPECIAL NEEDS individuals.” This provision isn’t about children with learning disabilities; instead, it pertains to restricted enrollment in “special needs” plans, a category of Medicare Advantage plans. Enrollment is already restricted. The bill extends the ability to do that.
• It claims that a section about “Community-based Home Medical Services” means “more payoffs for ACORN.” ACORN does not provide medical home services. The e-mail interprets any reference to the word “community” to be some kind of payoff for ACORN. That’s nonsense.

It’s not about the cost of medical care. It’s about the cost of affording medical care.

In the last 10 years, the healthcare insurance industry has increased their profits by 450%..

They just can’t stop.

One wish these sorts of denunciations weren’t necessary, but a spokesman for the American Medical Association writes in to rebut the RNC’s suggestion that “GOP voters might be discriminated against for medical treatment in a Democrat-imposed health care rationing system.”

Repeating incredible lies is its own reward.

It is a perverse aspect of our discourse that, the bigger the lie, the bigger the speaking engagements and the more uncritical column inches one gets.

Skippy quotes a Politico commenter who pretty much nails it:

besides, we all know what this is really about, as nobody cared about any presidents birth certificate until we elected a black one.

It’s all about the hate, the bigotry, and the odious Southern Strategy of the Party of Old White Men, Rich Folks, and Haters Republican Party.

Growing up white under Jim Crow, I heard all kinds of rationales about why white folks were superior and needed to keep black folks in line to preserve Our Way of Life(TM). A lot of the arguments involved “mongrelization” (for heaven’s sake, look around you: mongrelization was apparently quite all right when worked it in one direction, just not in the other. Jesus, deliver me from the hypocrites and liars, especially those who invoke Your Name.)

Aside: My parents were children of their times, but thank God I didn’t hear that stuff at home. They taught me through example to be equally polite to everyone and to treat everyone with respect.

Somewhere I have a copy of George Fitzhugh’s Cannibals All, a justification of chattel slavery written shortly before the Civil War. I bought it for one of my courses in Southern History, my field of study in college. I was never able to read it, not because I was or am any kind of enlightened angel, but because it must be one of the worst-written books ever published.

It’s still all about bigotry, plain and tall.

Pah!

’nuff said:

The notion that we should respect the ideas of others, listen to their reasoning and embrace our diversity has taken a beating lately.

People like Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly and the eternally puzzling Glenn Beck pile up tens of millions of dollars by flouting those rules every day.

Teaching children tolerance in modern America is like trying to teach an inner city kid he shouldn’t aspire to be a pimp: If the only successes he’s ever seen are people doing the opposite of what Mom and Dad preach, who’s he going to believe?

Here come the e-mails: “Why single out conservatives? Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow are just as bad.”

Fair enough — but there’s still a difference: Taken as a whole, the conservative screamers are either lying or shockingly, incomprehensibly wrong. As a result, their lockstep followers are making decisions based on beliefs that don’t pass the laugh test.

The Guardian looks at health care for the uninsured in America. Read the whole thing. Here’s a doctor’s comment on the fight against reform:

Such scaremongering has dismayed and infuriated Sharon Lee, the doctor who now treats Manley in Kansas City. “I’m very angry, very angry,” she says. “Many of the people I treat have already been in front of a death panel and have lost – a death panel controlled by insurance companies. I see people dying at least monthly because we have been unable to get them what they needed.”

Revealed in an article at MasterNewMedia. A snippet:

• A potentially dangerous news story may be ignored by mass media. Most people believe that something which has not been reported just does not exist.
• A news story may be presented as a “wild accusation”, especially by someone authoritative. People that have a large consensus or cover important positions in politics, economics or the military may leverage their reputation to label a a fact as false and preposterous.
• A big media coverage of an important event may create enough distraction to deviate the attention of people from a real issue.
• A rumor that is neither confirmed or denied may generate confusion and doubts in a large audience.
• An individual or group of people may be forced or payed to provide false information that generate fake news stories.

Sound familiar?

Via GNC.

At Guardian, Michael Tomasky comments on the poll that showed that persons who get their news from Fox are not only uninformed, but fervently believe stuff that just isn’t true about the current kerfuffle over health care:

I guess I say this often, but if one group of people are so intent on telling blatant lies, what can be done? I mean, if I were to allege that the Guardian has a secret plot to charge you 10 quid a day to look at my blog, and I were given TV time to trumpet this charge, and I lodged it fiercely and insistently, and the Guardian came back and said that’s not true and where’s your proof, and I said something like, I can’t reveal my proof because the ruthless agents of the Guardian will try to destroy my career, but anyway just look at the Guardian’s history, because the Guardian is a liberal/left publication and you just know from that history that they want to impose a tax on everything; and the Guardian still denied it, and I kept repeating it and repeating it, and I got other people to repeat and repeat it, eventually, a huge percentage of people inclined to be suspicious of the Guardian would believe me, even though I was talking completely out of my ass, pardon me.