Republican Lies category archive

Brad Friedman in the Guardian:

And if anybody needed more evidence that the White House is absolutely right about Fox not being a news organisation, on Wednesday night primetime anchor Sean Hannity was forced to admit that he’d falsified footage of a recent Tea Party protest on Capitol Hill. When the attendance wasn’t large enough to give the impression of the angry Republican mobs Hannity might have hoped for, he and fellow Republican Michele Bachmann told viewers the crowd was tens of thousands of angry voters larger than it actually was while showing two-month-old footage from a completely different rally to underscore their point.

He goes on the point out, as have others, that videos don’t edit themselves and that Hannity’s claim that the error was “inadvertent” is–what’s the word?–laughably preposterous.

The Associated Press documents the lies in her book.

Okay, let’s be kind. Delusions.

Liar or nutcase? Nutcase liar? Lying nutcase? Inquiring minds want to know.

AP link via the Booman.

See the preceding post. The offense rests.

Via TPM.

Addendum:

Will Bunch, the Next Day (emphasis added):

For Fox News, which has stepped up its partisan cheerleading for the right wing since Barack Obama became president, size — of anti-administration protests, that is — matter. And when they run misleading footage to make a conservative rally appear to be much, much better attended than it really was, that accomplishes several things. It fires up the right-wing base — the people that GOP wants to get rowdy at town hall meetings or flood congressional phone lines. And the bogus report also pressures wavering lawmakers, especially those centrist Democrats looking for any excuse not to support health care reform. Using doctored footage to make a point is not news. It’s propaganda, and in America that makes it a serious matter, indeed.

. . . will re-form the status quo into something worse than it already it is:

And it is already pretty bad:

Americans are more likely than people in 10 other countries to have trouble getting medical treatment because of insurance restrictions or cost, an international survey of primary care doctors released on Wednesday found.

While the United States spends more than twice as much as other developed countries on healthcare, it lags well behind in key measures of quality, the annual survey found.

Here’s what the Congressional Budget Office’s preliminary analysis finds: It won’t cost as much as some other proposals and it pretty much accomplishes nothing.

The proposal would reduce the rolls of the uninsured by about 3 million in 2019, leaving about 52 million people without medical coverage, the CBO said. Also, the CBO said that premiums for some people, mostly the less healthy, would go up, feeding into Democratic criticisms that the Republican plan would allow insurers to “cherry pick” and enroll healthier, less costly people.

It will reform the status quo into the status quo antiquated.

But that’s what can be expected from those who think of the 1950s as some kind of golden age.

Any fool can file a lawsuit.

It is a one of the glories of American jurisprudence.

Fortunately, the law does not take kindly to fools.

A federal judge today (October 29) dismissed a lawsuit brought by individuals claiming that Barack Obama was born in Kenya and, as a result, does not meet the qualifications to be president. Along with bouncing the lawsuit, U.S. District Court Judge David Carter eviscerated the controversial lawyer representing the “birthers” who sued Obama. In a 30-page order filed today, Carter stated that he was “deeply concerned” that attorney Orly Taitz “may have suborned perjury through witnesses she intended to bring before this court.”

The inevitable result.

John McQuaid writes at the Guardian:

Clearly “news” is not what Fox is about. Republican media strategist Roger Ailes, the network’s founder and architect, has run a brilliant rhetorical game from the start: Fox adopts the outward forms of the establishment US media and pretends to hew to its standards – in order to undermine those very things. Fox claims to give its viewers the straight story, while proclaiming it’s the New York Times and CBS that are really biased.

Shaun Mullen has more.

Inevitable result:

Mendacity in Virginia.

Bob McDonnell, Republican candidate for governor and graduate of Pat Robertson’s Regents University, makes stuff up. It is a Republican tradition.

From Fact Check dot org (emphasis added). Follow the link for the full analysis:

Virginia Republican gubernatorial candidate Bob McDonnell’s new ad claims that Democrat Creigh Deeds’ policies would bring $7,800 in higher taxes over four years for Virginia households. The ad would be devastating, if it were true.

The rewards of failure in American politics is continued income. Frank Rich in the Toimes:

Those who demanded that America divert its troops and treasure from Afghanistan to Iraq in 2002 and 2003 — when there was no Qaeda presence in Iraq — bear responsibility for the chaos in Afghanistan that ensued. Now they have the nerve to imperiously and tardily demand that America increase its 68,000-strong presence in Afghanistan to clean up their mess — even though the number of Qaeda insurgents there has dwindled to fewer than 100, according to the president’s national security adviser, Gen. James Jones.

But why let facts get in the way? Just as these hawks insisted that Iraq was “the central front in the war on terror” when the central front was Afghanistan, so they insist that Afghanistan is the central front now that it has migrated to Pakistan. When the day comes for them to anoint Pakistan as the central front, it will be proof positive that Al Qaeda has consolidated its hold on Somalia and Yemen.

Making an error, very human.

Persisting in error, guaranteed Sunday network talk time.

Via John at Eschaton.

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.