Republican Lies category archive

The Rude One points out that one thing is not like the other thing.

Tony Norman.

The Boston Globe corrals Brett Kavanaugh’s flock of duplicity. Here’s some samples; follow the link for the list and the papers conclusion.

• Kavanaugh was asked if he was involved with a scheme to steal Democratic staff e-mails related to judicial confirmations. He lied about it. E-mails showed that he was involved.
• In 2006, Kavanaugh was asked if he was involved in the controversial nomination of federal Judge Charles Pickering. He lied about that too and said he was not.
• In 2006, Kavanaugh was asked about his role in the nomination of William Haynes, the Pentagon general counsel involved in creating the Bush administration’s interrogation policies. He lied about that.

Roy Eidelson explores the mind games that the right-wing deploys to further their agenda and how they are being used to protect the Supreme Court nomination of Brett Kavanaugh. Here’s a bit about one of them:

Superiority. “Pursuing a Higher Purpose.” They insist that tainted actions—such as the torture of war-on-terror prisoners—must be evaluated within the context of the greater good and America’s enduring exceptionalism.

Follow the link for the complete list with more detail.

Thom and Greg Palast discuss recent events in the Republican gut-out-the-vote effort.

Via Job’s Anger.

Robert Epstein, former Editor-in-Chief at Psychology Today among many other accomplishments, offers a construct for understanding why Donald Trump does and says what he does and says. The concept is “sympathetic audience control”; it does not refer to the individual’s controlling the audience, but rather to the audience’s affecting the individual.

Everyone, of course, is affected by this to some degree. We behave differently at the in-laws than at the neighborhood watering hole, differently in church than at a party or in a business meeting.

Epstein suggests that Trump manifests an extreme version of sympathetic audience control.

I find this completely consistent with Trump’s behavior as observed and reported daily; follow the link to determine whether or not you find his argument persuasive.

Here’s a bit (emphasis added):

Sympathetic audience control and a small time window produce most of the odd cognitive glitches. Moment to moment, Trump either sees a foe and shoots, or he sees a friend and is influenced. In that kind of perceptual world, Trump inevitably shifts his views frequently and has no trouble denying what he said yesterday. All that’s real to him is what friends or foes are saying inside those small time windows. All else is fuzzy, and that’s why he can so easily tell so many lies. From his perspective, lying has no meaning. Only reacting has meaning. Trump reacts.

Aside:

In a similar vein, Dick Polman mourns the death of truth.