Republican Lies category archive

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.

TPM reports:

Ex-FEMA director Michael Brown said on Fox News last night the Obama administration wanted the oil spill to happen — and let it get really bad before stepping in so they’d have a good reason to scrap offshore drilling.

Today, Press Secretary Robert Gibbs struck back.

Attempting to blame the government–local, state, or federal–for BP’s incompetence and penny-pinching is beyond skullduggery, though the determination of the Republican Party to destroy the federal regulatory apparatus comes into play.

But by now we know that they will say anything and everything to advance their cause. Truth is not an issue in WingnutWorld.

The Rude Pundit addressed this oil-gusher-is-Obama’s-Katrina sort of garbage last week (If you follow the link, remember that the Rude Pundit’s nom de blog is well-deserved; his language is such that I had to expurgate the quote, and this was the mildest paragraph of the lot).

But until this happens, good, sweet conservative bags of . . . who need so desperately to drag this president down, the Gulf of Mexico oil leak is a corporate-created disaster, and it actually serves to demonstrate, starkly, and with a . . . sheen, as if the ocean floor is in the midst of a prolonged sweet crude ejaculation, the utter failure of deregulation and the . . . notion that capitalistic enterprises can police themselves when it comes to safety and environmental standards, whether it was, in this case, BP or Transocean or whoever. In other words, once again, as with so many things, this is about your ideology belly-flopping, much like, you know, when Katrina showed how years of neglect of the levees would lead to a nightmare.

As Harry Truman pointed out:

You can always count on the Republicans, in an election year, to remind the people of what the Republican Party really stands for. You can always count on them to make it perfectly clear before the campaign is over that the Republican Party is the party of big business, and that they would like to turn the country back to the big corporations and the big bankers in New York to run it as they see fit.

Times have changed. The Republican Party has not.

The Republican Party, now and ever the Party of Privilege.

All the rest is camouflage.

The wingnut mafia has started to float a theory that the oil gusher in the Gulf resulted, not from an accident, but from sabotage.

This seems to serve two purposes:

• Divert the attention from Big Oil.
• Provide an enemy about whom to panic (see my post from Monday on the rhetoric of panic).

Noz deconstructs the argument:

. . . that just shows how stupid they are. isn’t offshore drilling just as bad an idea if the gush is due to negligence of sabotage? in this age of terrorism, wouldn’t the potential for sabotage be yet another reason that offshore drilling is a really bad idea?

if you’re going to come up with a conspiracy theory to suit your political purposes, maybe you should make sure it actually suits your political purposes.

Afterthought:

A reader of TPM suggests that an undercurrent to this is to drum into persons dear little ears until they believe it that the government’s response was slow.

That’s why they make stuff up:

Pointing to McConnell’s distortions of what Democrats intend to do with their bill, (Paul–ed.) Krugman tore apart McConnell’s political positioning on ABC Sunday morning.

“Anyone who says we need to be bipartisan should bear in mind that for the last several weeks, Mitch McConnell has been trying to stop reform with possibly the most dishonest argument ever made in the history of politics, which is the claim that having regulation of the banks is actually bailing out the banks,” Krugman asserted. “Basically the argument boiled down to saying that what we really need to do to deal with fires is abolish the fire department, because then people will know that they can’t let their building burn.”

And banksters like to play with matches.

It’s Bubble World.

What Brendan said.

Making stuff up. It’s what they do best. It is, in fact, all they got.

McClatchy:

In articles and speeches, on radio and TV, conservatives are working to redefine major turning points and influential figures in American history, often to slam liberals, promote Republicans and reinforce their positions in today’s politics.

The Jamestown settlers? Socialists. Founding Father Alexander Hamilton? Ill-informed professors made up all that bunk about him advocating a strong central government.

Theodore Roosevelt? Another socialist. Franklin D. Roosevelt? Not only did he not end the Great Depression, he also created it.

Joe McCarthy? Liberals lied about him. He was a hero.

If you are too busy to read the article, watch the video.

Via Balloon Juice.

Of course, if you ever tried that with your Mama, you found out quickly not only that everybody else isn’t doing it, but also that hardly anybody is doing it. And got asked, “If everybody else was driving their car off a cliff, would you do that too?” (Not that this is the voice of experience or anything like that.)

Nevertheless, “everybody else (meaning Democrats) is doing it” seems to be part of the Republican Party’s defense for the violence and threats of violence against Democrats surrounding the health care vote (See Note). As is normally the case with Republican Party claims, there’s not much there but intellectual dishonesty.

I heard a particularly egregious example today–something that has kept me awake tonight. I was catching up with podcasts after the Big Final Move and listened to the Radio Times political roundup from last Friday. From the website (follow the link to listen to the show):

This week saw the passage of the biggest domestic legislation in a few generations, in a narrow partisan vote, when President Obama signed the landmark health care bill into law. It also saw Republicans launch a campaign to repeal the Democratic agenda and Obamacare, as well as a rash of threats that caused great consternation in the Beltway and beyond. Joining Marty to make sense of it all are MATTHEW YGLESIAS, a Fellow and blogger at the Center for American Progress Action Fund, and CHRIS STIREWALT, political editor, columnist and blogger for the Washington Examiner.

I have no idea who Chris Stirewalt is. Never heard of him before.

Nevertheless, he tried to excuse wingnut Teabagging brick-throwing, vandalism, and threats by saying, in essence, that “Democrats do it too” and, as an example, cited the “9-1-1 Truthers“–those folks who think that the September 11, 2001, attacks were an inside job by the U. S. Government. (Frankly, Truthers make the Area 51 folks seem restrained.)

I don’t know the voting patterns of the “Truthers”; no doubt somewhere along the line the some of them have voted for a Democrat here or there; some of them have no doubt voted for Republicans or even Zoroastrians for all I know.

To imply, as this bozo Stirewalt did, that the Truthers are in some way a manifestation of or subset of the Democratic Party in the way that the Teabaggers represent Republicanism, is unsupported by anything.

I can see three possible explanations for Mr. Stirewalt’s doing this:

• He is robotically repeating claims he has heard elsewhere and therefore should not call himself a journalist because he is unwilling to research facts.
• He actually believes his claim and therefore should not call himself a journalist because he is incapable of researching facts.
• He knows his claim is a lie, but is desperate to find an “everybody else” that “is doing it” and any old everybody else will do.

I’m betting on the last one.

Note:

The other part of the Republican defense seems to be, “You shouldn’t be complaining about the violence. Doing so just fans the flames.” It’s sort of like the abusive husband who claims, “Well, she made me hit her.”

A pome, not by Henry Gibson.

Someone shot a bullet into the air.
It came to Earth in Cantor’s lair.
So Eric said, “Vandalized!”
Said the cops, “Not in our eyes.

“The shot was fired vertically.
It descended spinningly.
Falling, falling, it struck Eric’s glass.”
Thus Eric fibs, for he’s an ass.

Inspiration here. Commentary here.

And it grows up bent.

Behind this is a truth: The facts of history do not list to the far right. Wingnuts recognize this, so they manufacture their own facts, such as their bogus idea that the Founders created the United States as a Christian nation.

As they wrote Constitution when the European religious wars of the Reformation were recent history; had lived, many of them, obligated under British rule to support an established church; and witnessed persons persecuted by the British colonial rulers because of their religious beliefs, the last thing the Founders wanted was to establish a church. Hence, the establishment of religion clause in the First Amendment.

Manufactured facts have the troubling characteristic of not being factual.

There is another word for manufactured facts which are not factual.

Lies.

H/T Karen for the link.

Tom Levinson explicates the “GOP War on Knowledge” which seeks to discredit opponents by claiming that they are too smart, too knowledgeable, too grounded in reality:

More broadly, the game now is to paint one side — the side that did not author our current disaster — as a hopelessly out of touch and inherently incapable group of impractical experts, folks who know only theory and have none of the so-called common sense needed to recognize that the succour of the rich and powerful is the alpha and omega of sound policy. It’s Spiro Agnew updated for the digital age, with the pointed headed intellectuals now turned into mindless social engineers recrafting America to match some abstract (probably French) social theory.

Read the whole thing.

(Aside: Hofstadter was right.)

A commenter to this post said:

What they need to do is stop the direct to consumer advertising, like all the other countries, with the exception of New Zealand.

I agree.

The advertisements for prescription drugs directed at private citizens put a lie to the theory that market forces will encourage businesses to act morally (remember that private citizens cannot purchase prescriptions drugs without a prescription; all they can do is pester their doctors for prescriptions).

Market forces encourage business to sell more stuff using any means possible.

For example.

Note that this article talks about the FDA’s failure to regulate. If the FDA is failing to regulate (and it is), it is not because the persons who work there don’t care.

It’s because 30 years of Republican Economic Theory and Faith in the Fee Hand of the Market have spayed the FDA.

The FDA is a gelding, as are most other regulatory agencies.

Republicans, under the tutelage of their corporate masters, have made it so.

E. J. Dionne, musing over a conversation he had with Joe Biden:

For Republicans, American power is rooted largely in military might and showing a tough and resolute face to the world. They would rely on tax cuts as the one and only spur to economic growth.

Obama, Biden, and the Democrats, on the other hand, believe that American power depends ultimately on the American economy and that government has an essential role to play in fostering the next generation of growth.

The question: Should TR’s “bully pulpit” be used to bully or to lead?