Republican Lies category archive

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.

Steve Benen explains why right wing claims that President Obama is refusing foreign help in dealing with BP’s wild well goes beyond baseless into the well-known territory of being another Republican lie. A nugget:

Why not accept even more international help? Because, as the president has already explained, some of the offered assistance is redundant and unnecessary.

The second point to keep in mind is that the White House hasn’t granted a waiver for the Jones Act because there’s been no need to. There have been “15 foreign-flagged vessels” involved in the response. How many needed a waiver to participate? None. How many vessels have been turned away because of the Jones Act? None.

I have heard this particular lie repeated unchallenged several times in the past week at respected news outlets. I respect them a little less now.

Addendum, Later That Same Day:

Criswell Cesca predicts.

The Richmonder does the unthinkable and actually considers historical facts:

Tea Party extremists like to cite taxes and the founding fathers when they mouth their threats of political violence. In point of fact our founding fathers weren’t terribly tolerant when it came to tax protesters who took up arms against their fellow Americans.

Follow the link for the history.

Addendum, the Next Day

Per Cargosquid in the comments to this post, the discussion in the comments at the link is worth looking at.

By the way, the Parkway was a WPA project, one of those make-work projects with no lasting value from the last Great Republican Depression.

My elementary school was also a WPA project; it is now long worn out and closed, but only after teaching generations of students to read, write, and cipher.

I mention this simply to point out that government can do and has done good and useful and sometimes even beautiful things of lasting value which do not include blowing people up, despite what Republicans say.

Follow the first link for a link to a cybertour of the Parkway.

The most important thing in any argument is to define your premises.

Of course, if you start up with a premise that is demonstrably false, everything that flows from it will be falser.

Exhibit A: Cal Thomas (oh, why did I waste my time on him this morning?)

Addendum, after TWUUG:

The Booman has more on false premises and falser results.

Making stuff up, that is. Dick Polman:

Republican partisans went ballistic two weeks ago when Connecticut Democratic senatorial candidate Dick Blumenthal was caught lying repeatedly about his Vietnam war service – yet they’re currently quiescent about Illinois Republican senatorial candidate Mark Kirk, who admitted this past weekend that he had lied repeatedly about his own military record. Gee, what a surprise that they’re mute about this news.

Details at the link.

The Republican Party ran an ad charging that two Virginia Democratic Congressmen applauded Mexican President Felipe Calderon’s call for the U. S.’s reinstating its ban on assault rifles because a lot of U. S.-sold assault rifles are finding their way into Mexico. President Calderon said this in a speech during his recent visit here.

Turns out that the Congressmen both are on record against reinstating the ban (I think the Congressman are wrong about that but that’s me and they are from Virginia) and that neither one of them attended the speech.

The Republican Party, well, it likes its lie so much it’s just going ahead with it. From Steve Benen (emphasis added):

So, the Virginia Republican Party screwed up. It can happen to anyone. They got a little lazy, chose not to do their due diligence, and ended up looking stupid. They can just pull the dishonest attack ad, and go after Boucher and Perriello over something else.

Except, the state GOP is refusing to back down, and will continue to air the ad the party now knows is wrong. As the Virginia Republican Party sees it, Boucher and Perriello didn’t condemn the speech they didn’t hear, so therefore, it’s fair to suggest they might support the policy they oppose.

Afterthought:

This tells us all we need to know about the Republican Party.

It no longer feels the need even to pretend to be truthful.

Patrick Lockerby at Scientific Blogging takes on global warming deniers. A nugget:

This is the age of rapid public access to satellite images. If you want to know what is happening to the Arctic ice you can see for yourself. There are some people who don’t want you to look. They want you to read their drivel instead, and go away believing that the Arctic ice isn’t really melting, or if it is then that is nothing unusual. On Saturday, May 01, 2010, Paul Driessen wrote a piece of blatant propaganda called “(Desperately) Looking for Arctic warming”. It was “co-authored by scientist Willie Soon”.

(snip)

The article has been multiply published, . . . . Scientists are usually content to publish once and then let the media pick it up – or not. Propagandists, however, need to disseminate their BS themselves, since no discriminating journalist would take them seriously. I call the article blatant propaganda because that is what it is.

Follow the link to see him deconstruct the article misrepresentation by misrepresentation.

I heard about Meet the Facts dot com on this weekend’s On the Media.

Meet the Facts is an independent volunteer fact-checking project focusing on Meet the Press; it was started by two college students because David Gregory, the host of Meet the Press, refuses to fact-check his guests, claiming that members of the public can do their own fact-checking.

In addition to their fact-checking, Meet the Facts states how much time is required to fact-check each item to illustrate that, in fact (to coin a phrase), members of the public do not have the time to fact-check each item while also going to work, taking the kids to Little League, going to the store, and mowing the damned lawn for Heaven’s sake; they believe, indeed, that fact-checking is part of what conscientious journalists do.

I infer that they do not consider David Gregory to be a conscientious journalist, but that’s just me. Me, I haven’t watched a Sunday talker for 40 years and don’t intend to start now. I got better ways to waste my Sundays.

Here is their report on Mike Murphy’s claims on Sunday’s Meet the Press that (1) there is an illegal immigrant crime wave in Arizona and (2) the Obama administration has done nothing about it.

I’ll summarize the report for you:

Crap.

Follow the link above for the full analysis.

Lies work because persons repeat them without calling them out.

Addendum:

Meetthefacts considers criticisms of its conclusion in the case cited above.

Yglesias:

The GOP rushed to brand the Gulf Coast disaster “Obama’s Katrina.” But new reports make clear the Bush administration’s lax attitude toward regulation deserves much of the blame.

Read the whole thing.

Via the Richmonder.

Media Matters debunks myths and lies about Elena Kagan. A nugget:

CLAIM: Kagan’s policies regarding military recruiters at Harvard indicate that she is an “anti-military” “radical” who “defied” the law . Phyllis Schlafly claimed in her March 31 syndicated column that Kagan “defied the Solomon Amendment” — a statute requiring schools to provide the same access to military recruiters that they provide to other potential employers or lose federal funding. Liz Cheney called Kagan’s actions “radical,” and other conservatives have also distorted Kagan’s position regarding military recruiters on Harvard Law School’s campus. And The Washington Times published a 2009 op-ed referring to Kagan as “an anti-military zealot.”

REALITY: Kagan consistently followed the law, and Harvard students had access to military recruiters during her entire tenure as dean. . . .

Follow the link for the full story.

From Fact Check dot org:

Chris Cates, a Republican congressional candidate in Georgia’s May 11 special election, says in a new TV ad that Congress voted to give itself a pay raise, while denying senior citizens on Social Security a cost-of-living increase. He’s wrong on both counts.

They never stop.

Mike Hucksterbee needs to go back to fourth grade and study percentages. What he says just doesn’t add up.

Afterthought:

If Republicans stood for something other than making the rich richer and the poor poorer, they wouldn’t have to keep making stuff up.