From Pine View Farm

Republican Lies category archive

Lies, Damned Lies, and Trumpery 0

Joseph DiStephano dissects Trumps lies about taxes in the U. S.

Aside:

It won’t do any good. Trump is merely repeating a lie that has been Republican orthodoxy for over a generation.

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Lies and Lying Liars 0

Werner Herzog’s Bear points out that Donald Trump’s political success is built on decades of Republican lies. Indeed, Mr. Bear’s catalog of Republican lies rivals Homer’s catalog of ships. Here’s just a few from the list:

Trump perhaps understood something that others in the more august corners of our media have failed to see: the modern conservative movement is built on lies that are endlessly reinforced through the propaganda arms of Fox News and talk radio. I’ll name a few. The lie that cutting taxes on the wealthy leads to prosperity for all. The lie that people are poor due solely to their own laziness and other shortcomings. The lie that America is an exceptional nation that is the greatest country that ever existed. The lie that American history is an uninterrupted march of freedom. The lie that institutional racism does not exist. The lie that global warming does not exist. The lie that evolution is merely a controversial theory. The lie that there is a war on Christmas.

That’s just part of his list. Follow the link for the rest.

I do have one quibble.

I do not believe that “our media have failed to see” any of this.

I believe that our corporate media, with a few exceptions as unheeded as Cassandra, have actively chosen not to see it; they prefer horse-race coverage and the broadcast ratings it brings, false equivalences, made-up scandals such as Whitewater and Benghazi, and the on-the-one-hand-on-the-other-hand both-sides-do-it narrative to accuracy, principle, and truth.

Like little Beltway Pilates, they wash their hands even as they cash their checks.

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Rebound 0

House Report:  Republican budget cuts harmed Benghazi security.  Image:  Republican Elephant throwing mud at Hillary Clinton looks down at the mud all over his shirt and says, 'Whoops.  I got some on myself.

Click to see the image at its original location.

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Benghazi, the Sequel: Return of the Nothing Burger 0

Dick Polman.

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The Next Looming Scamdal 0

Prepare for the coming scamdal about the fact that there is no there, there in yet another Clinton scamdal.

The fact that the mud has not stuck will not keep Republicans, Fox News, and their dupes, symps, and fellow travelers, from continuing to throw the mud.

After all, it’s their mud. They created it out of lies and innuendo, they sustain it, it’s all they got.

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News from the Troll Booth 0

Picture of Trey Gowdy waving Benghazi report and saying,

In a sane world, they’d be hiding under a bridge somewhere.

Via Juanita Jean.

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“The Fact Check . . . Is Irrelevant” 0

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Truth Is a Defense 0

Anderson Cooper dissects the lies of Pam Bondi.

See the original interview.

Via Raw Story.

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/dev/null 0

I haven’t paid much attention to the Hillary Clinton email scamdal because I knew from the git-go that it was yet another Republican lie in a long parade of lies about the Clintons, a parade reaching back to and beyond the Republican fever dream that the Clintons somehow murdered Vince Foster.

One does not have to be a fan of the Clintons to be disgusted by the Republican lies.

Now Cynthia Dill has sacrificed her time to plough through the bureacratise of the report on Hillary Clinton’s email scamdal so we don’t have to. Her findings come as no surprise. As with an email sent to /dev/null, there’s no there there.

Here’s a bit (emphasis added):

This was no covert operation, for heaven’s sake. It’s not like Clinton was secretly selling arms to Iran and funding the Contras. The Clintons paid out-of-pocket for a few techies to work in their basement keeping this server humming and free from cyber breaches. Staffers from the Bureau of Diplomatic Security inspected the email system, looked at the logs and communicated with these people on a regular basis. The bureau even refused to help fix it when Hurricane Sandy disrupted power “because it was a private server,” according to the report.

Clinton reasonably believed her private server was allowed because the bureaucrats in charge of security allowed it. This present-day conviction for violating rule 12 FAM 544.2 after the fact means nothing of any consequence. Nobody was hurt. No security was breached. Who cares?

I think one reason that this particular scamdal has had some staying power is that, to most persons, an email server–hell, a computer–is a dark magic box, mysterious and alchemical.

An email server is, actually, nothing more than a program that relays mail from the persons who write it to the recipients over a network and from a network to the recipient(s).

You too can have your own email server, if you wish. I know folks who do. It’s a bit complex, but it’s not magic, it’s not alchemy, it’s not voodoo; it’s just a computer program. (If you think government servers are somehow magically more secure than other servers, think again. Governments don’t do security better than anyone else, except possibly Sony.)

(Be sure to check your ISP’s terms of service before setting up your own mail server; most US ISPs forbid public-facing servers–news, web, database, mail–unless you have a business-class account. That’s why I don’t run my own mail server–my ISP’s TOS forbid it for my level of account. Otherwise I’d set one up just to see whether I could make it work. I like crossword puzzles too.)

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Decoding De Code, Voter Fraud Fraud Dept. 0

Emily Mills parses the testimony in the suit against Wisconsin’s gut-out-the-vote law.

Read it.

Meanwhile, regarding a related issue, Roger Chesley, writing in my local rag, parses the press releases about Virginia’s voting restoration kerfuffle.

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Nattering Nabobs of Negativism, Republican Style 0

Coleen Carlstedt-Johnson considers the complaints about Hillary Clinton and decides that there’s no there there. Here’s her take on one of them (emphasis in the original):

She’s too guarded. You would be a little circumspect about what you said and how you said it, too, if you had suffered 25 years of brutal verbal abuse, lack of respect and outright degradation by the opposing party. If I were she, I’d be suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. Wouldn’t you prefer a president who thinks about the ramifications of her statements before she speaks, rather than someone who blurts out what is expedient at the moment, then changes his stance, so that you can never rely on what he says?

Follow the link to see what she said about the others.

Remember, the Clintons have been targets of a quarter-century of conservative calumny. It’s effective to the extent that the lies have been repeated so relentlessly that folks who don’t pay close attention have come to accept them as true.

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Cavalcade of Calumny 0

Chris Busby reflects of the media’s inability to dig out from under Donald Trump’s blizzard of lies. A snippet:

Trump’s endless parade of lies, half-truths and slander put the media in an awkward position. Writing in The New Yorker this week, Adam Gopnik observed that “Trump’s lies arrive with such rapidity that before one can be refuted a new one comes to take its place. … The media eventually moves on, shrugging helplessly, to the next lie. … If the lies are bizarre enough and frequent enough, they provoke little more than a nervous giggle and a cry of ‘Well, guess he’s changed the rules!’”

From where I sit, the broadcast media doesn’t even try to keep up. Print media is a little better.

They don’t report, not any more. They just repeat.

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Haters Gotta Hate 0

Jack Ohman strugges to understand the Hillary haters. A nugget:

Why do these guys hate Hillary? I don’t know if it’s that she reminds them of their strict mother, their Catholic school nun, their first wife, their second wife, or their lack of any female presence in their life, but this spitting, aneurysm-inducing venom is spectacularly overblown even in an election year.

She might even lose to a guy who runs (enables) beauty pageants, which is the human equivalent of a stockyard auction for women. Last poll I saw, 65 percent of GOP women will vote for this sexist clown in November.

Do read the rest.

Frankly, I don’t see “likeability” as a qualification for anything, except perhaps game show host. Con artists are always likeable; being likeable is essential to the con. A significant percentage of voters found President George the Worst likeable, and you know how well that worked out.

Hillary Clinton has been the target of an almost three-decade campaign of conservative calumny. Persons view her through a veil of Republican lies, unable to tell where the lies end and the person begins. In the meantime, they choose to support Donald Trump, who is a veil of lies.

Words fail me.

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The Voter Fraud Fraud 0

Republican Voter ID laws were a con from the git-go (we knew that, of course), and the Republicans supporting them knew they were a con (we were certain of that also, and now certainty becomes knowledge). From AmericaBLOG:

Todd Albaugh, former chief of staff to a Republican state senator in Wisconsin, testified in federal court yesterday that his state’s voter ID law was passed in order to make it more difficult for Democrats to win elections.

According to Allbaugh, as reported by the Wisconsin State Journal, “State Sen. Mary Lazich, urging fellow Republican senators to enact a voter ID requirement in a closed-door meeting in 2011, told her colleagues to consider its impact in the Democratic strongholds of Milwaukee and the state’s college campuses” and “Congressman Glenn Grothman, serving at that time as a state senator, said in the same meeting that he supported voter ID because it would help Republicans win elections.” Allbaugh also quoted Grothman as saying in a closed-door meeting with his Republican colleagues that “What I’m concerned about here is winning,” with respect to his justification for voting in favor of the law.

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The Voter Fraud Fraud 0

I’m not so certain as Wasserman is about the “flip,” gaming electronic voter machines, but we have already seen that Republican find no trick is too low. The “strip” is well precedented.

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“Everybody Must Get Roger Stoned” 0

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Tax Frauds 0

They pop up every year (and it’s not who you think it is).

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“And That’s the Way It Was” 0

Actually, no, it’s not.

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The Voter Fraud Fraud 0

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The Voter Fraud Fraud, Lost in Translation Dept. 0

The Republican gut-out-the-vote effort continues.

The Spanish-language voter guides from Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach’s office include two errors about registering to vote in the state, while the English guides do not include the same errors.

The Spanish-language guides said that voters could register up to 15 days before the election, while the English version included the correct deadline, 21 days before the election, as the Daily Kos flagged last week. And while the English guides told voters they could use their passport as a photo ID, the guides in Spanish did not include a passport in the list.

According to the story, Kansas is calling this an “administrative error.”

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