Republican Lies category archive

PoliticalProf explains how wingnuts are trying to turn “religious freedom” on its head. A nugget (emphasis added):

So my local paper published a letter to the editor on Sunday, the upshot of which was a claim that if the writer were required to live in a country that had gay marriage, that would violate her religious freedom. “What will happen to those of us who believe gay marriage is wrong?,” she asked. ”I feel that this will infringe on my religious rights which is unconstitutional.”

(snip)

Indeed, the writer’s version of religious “freedom” in this case is nothing of the sort: it embodies the use of State power to enforce a particular religious value. Which is pretty much exactly what religious freedom is not.

Cut through the wingnut crap. Read the rest.

The Booman nails the lie. A nugget (emphasis added):

Their entire aim is to reduce the number of votes cast, and to do it in a way that assures that more Democratic votes will be lost than Republican. It’s that simple. It’s a version of cheating.

Now, the Republicans and much of the press respond that this is just of flip side of the Democrats’ push for vote-by-mail, early voting, etc. But this is a representative democracy, and encouraging citizen participation is not the flip-side of discouraging citizen participation. They are not equally partisan exercises. One act is legitimate, and the other is illegitimate. One act helps people exercise their rights, and the other seeks to take away their rights.

Read the rest.

In my local rag, Roger Chesley tells the story of one of the persons the Republican Party of Virginia wishes to disenfranchise. A nugget:

Carter is 85. She was born at home in Baltimore, and she never had a birth certificate. After Carter moved to the commonwealth in the 1950s, she eventually got a state ID card – she’d never learned how to drive because “the highways petrified me.”

When that card expired in 2006, the state wouldn’t renew it. The 9/11 attacks brought stricter regulations.

Carter, who spoke to me by phone from her Richmond home, told me she had to contact a genealogist, research the 1940 census and request help from the federal government. The six-year effort finally ended in 2012, when her new documents passed state muster.

She testified about this before lawmakers debating photo ID legislation.

Carter had voted for years in Virginia with no problems. But if the state’s new photo ID law – signed this week by Gov. Bob McDonnell – had been in effect, she would’ve been turned away at the polls.

Virginians will have to start showing photo proof as of July 2014.

Read the rest.

The true “voter fraud” is the Republican Party’s campaign to gut out the vote.

Chris Honore discovers that Republicans lie. A snippet:

What is clear is that as narrators of their convictions on a myriad of issues the Republicans are decidedly unreliable. They say stuff, lots of stuff, knowing that it’s either completely disingenuous or simply flat-out untrue, convinced that if they rinse* and repeat it will eventually sound credible to the voters.

Who woulda thunk?

Do read the rest, which details the path to this discovery.

_________________

*Methinks he misplet “Reince.”

George Smith remembers who put the lie in the Great and Glorious Patriotic War for a Lie in Iraq.

Via C&L.

The Rude One commemorates the beginning of the Great and Glorious Patriotic War for a Lie in Iraq with eight haikus.

Here’s one; click for the rest.

Legacy I

Cheney, Rumsfeld, Bush,
Et al, got away with it.
We failed history.

Lies Republicans tell themselves are many. Brent Larkin dissects one of the latest:

Because Ohio was the mother of all swing states, Republicans have focused on this state as the textbook example of their urban legend — repeatedly attributing much of Obama’s win here to the president’s receiving about 100,000 more black votes in 2012 than he did in 2008.

(snip)

“Why did 100,000-plus more African Americans in Ohio vote for President Obama than turned out four years ago?” wrote Stevens. “It’s not irrelevant that Obamacare is most popular with African Americans.”

Until now, there’s been little or no public rebuttal of the Republican theory about Ohio, which many seem to accept as gospel.

What makes that so surprising is that the theory is demonstrably false. Worse yet, it’s not even close to being true.

Anything beats admitting voters recognized that their candidates were cartoons and their ideas ideas are harmful to the citizenry and inimical to the polity.

Follow the link for the arithmetic.

Dan Simpson explores the impetus behind the Republican gut out the vote efforts under the camouflage of states’ rights* to establish voting requirements.

He finds it in a desire to roll back the clock to 1859 or so:

It (efforts to restrict the franchise–ed.) tends instead to be found in small pockets of the country, sheltering a minority view. It tends to be found especially among rich, white men, people who hold a disproportionate amount of the economic and political power in America. The results of the last elections and demographic data indicate, however, that the country will take another direction.

(snip)

Rich, white males aren’t stupid, and thus they are taking dead aim at cutting down the number of minorities who can vote and making life in general more difficult for women. They are doing so by taking advantage of the small, dark corners of this country they still control.

_____________________

*Remember, when someone says

. . . because states’ rights, that’s why!

ask

states’ rights to do what, exactly?

You won’t get a straight answer. You’ll get legalistic-sounding platitudes, but you won’t get a straight answer.

A case of Republican projection.

Warning: Loud promo at the end.

George the Worst’s Great and Glorious Patriotic War for a Lie in Iraq continues to bestow its bounty:

Ten years and $60 billion in American taxpayer funds later, Iraq is still so unstable and broken that even its leaders question whether U.S. efforts to rebuild the war-torn nation were worth the cost.

In his final report to Congress, Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction Stuart Bowen’s conclusion was all too clear: Since the invasion a decade ago this month, the U.S. has spent too much money in Iraq for too few results.

Read the rest.

Hold Republicans accountable.

Do not allow their efforts to erase George the Worst from the record succeed.

And this surprises us how?

A Dominican woman who once said in a video (broadcast on Tucker Carlson’s website–ed.) that she had sex with a New Jersey senator for money is now acknowledging that the allegation was false, according to a sworn statement released by a lawyer enmeshed in the scandal.

The attorney, Vinicio Castillo Seman, told reporters at a Monday press conference that the 23-year-old woman, identified as Nexis de los Santos, now claims in a sworn statement that she not only “never went to bed with” U.S. Sen. Robert Menendez but she never actually met him.

Tucker Carlson has already issued a fall-back fib.

Jonathan Chait encapsulates the cynicism of the “both sides do it” crowd in this snippet about one of David Brooks’s recent columns:

The rest of the column is dedicated to flaying Obama for the GOP’s refusal to compromise.

Please do read the rest.

The irony is that pretty much everyone has noticed that Communism is dead, dead, dead.

The Republican Party contains the only persons interested in keeping it alive.

They’ve long known that scared people don’t think clearly. That’s why they like scaring people. Q. E. D.

Via Raw Story.