Republican Lies category archive

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.

Takers take from those who make, in this case, from someone who made sandwiches.

Behind the counter at a convenience store in Princess Anne, Elvira Orellana worked 72 hours a week, making sandwiches, cleaning the kitchen and ordering the ingredients to prepare oxtail, curry chicken and cheese steaks.

Her employer paid her $648 a week — $324 less than she was owed under laws that require that workers earn time and a half for clocking more than 40 hours a week. When she complained, Orellana said, her boss threatened to cut her wages and then fired her.

More tales of the takers at the link.

TPM tells me that

Maine Gov. Paul LePage (R) on Friday warned students at an elementary school that newspapers represent a menace to the state, the Bangor Daily News reported.

“My greatest fear in the state of Maine: newspapers,” LePage told students at St. John Catholic School in Winslow, Maine. “I’m not a fan of newspapers.”

which leads in nicely to Harvard professor Lawrence Bobo’s (no relation to David Brooks) discussion of rightwing intellectual inquiry as something hermetically sealed in a mayonnaise jar and buried under Funk and Wagnall’s back porch. If you wonder why Republicans so easily tout and believe stuff that just isn’t, that hermetic seal explains a lot.

A snippet:

Of course, there are those who will claim that MSNBC — the cable news network of the left — is at least as biased as, if not even more biased than, Fox News. They can even point to a Pew Research Center report, “Winning the Media Campaign 2012,” that shows that the “tone” of MSNBC coverage of Romney was more negative than Fox News coverage of Obama. One has to wonder if this is because the basic accuracy or truth quotient from the Obama campaign itself was higher?

There is a deeper problem of delusion here, fed by a closed, self-reinforcing sound bite universe of howling distortions that span television news (e.g., Fox), radio (e.g., Limbaugh) and the right-wing Internet (for example, Public Policy Polling shows that half of GOP voters believe that ACORN stole the 2012 election for Obama). Ironically, the depth of this problem is revealed by the suggestion from Jindal and Barbour that stupid comments alone are what got the Republicans in trouble and is keeping them in trouble. I don’t think so (though this doesn’t help).

Via Bob Cesca’s Awesome Blog.

Paul Krugman reminds that, when it comes to Republicans, watch what they do, not what they say,

So when Mr. Romney made his infamous “47 percent” remarks, he wasn’t, in his own mind, saying anything outrageous or even controversial. He was just repeating a view that has become increasingly dominant inside the right-wing bubble, namely that a large and ever-growing proportion of Americans won’t take responsibility for their own lives and are mooching off the hard-working wealthy. Rising unemployment claims demonstrate laziness, not lack of jobs; rising disability claims represent malingering, not the real health problems of an aging workforce.

And given that world view, Republicans see it as entirely appropriate to cut taxes on the rich while making everyone else pay more.

Now, national politicians learned last year that this kind of talk plays badly with the public, so they’re trying to obscure their positions. Paul Ryan, for example, has lately made a transparently dishonest attempt to claim that when he spoke about “takers” living off the efforts of the “makers” — at one point he assigned 60 percent of Americans to the taker category — he wasn’t talking about people receiving Social Security and Medicare. (He was.)

In a similar vein, Guardian columnist Ha-Joon Chang explains that the folks who flatter themselves that they are the “makers” are actually the takers.

Ta-Nehisi Coates tears the sheet off the Republican gut-out-the-vote efforts:

I’d like to double-down on that point. Efforts to disenfranchise black people, have always been most successful when they worked indirectly. After the initial post-war Black Codes were repealed, white supremacists turned to less obvious modes of discrimination–poll taxes, grandfather clauses and literacy tests.

These were cloaked under a colorblind argument–“We don’t discriminate against black people, we discriminate against people who can’t read the Constitution.” By “read the Constitution,” they meant “recite the Bill of Rights by heart.” And they’d ask you to do this after reducing your school funding to a pittance. I say this to point that this is not a “new” racism. This is how it scheme went before the Civil Rights movement, and this is how the scheme works today.

Thom reviews the history of the Electoral College and its roots in chattel slavery, as well as Republican efforts to use the voter fraud fraud to institutionalize actual election fraud.

Aside:

WordPress says it has fixed the bug that was messing up scheduled posts with video embeds. This post is also a test of the fix. If the embed doesn’t work, click here to view it.

Update:

The bug appears to have been exterminated.