Republican Hypocrisy category archive

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The artist explains here.

Democratic Congresswoman Jackie Speier (D-Sanity) calls out Republican hatin’ on women:

Via TPM.

Republicans are framing an issue of non-government employees vs. government employees fighting over a shrinking pie. Current events in Wisconsin illustrate this.

If employees’ share of the pie is shrinking, doesn’t it make sense to consider whose share of the pie has been increasing.

Renee Loth considers this in the Boston Globe (emphasis added).

The problem is that wages and benefits for private-sector workers have collapsed. “People are squeezed,’’ said Harris Gruman, executive director of the Service Employees International Union state council. “Working-class people who’ve lost their own benefits are subsidizing workers in the public sector who still have these things. It’s an unsustainable situation politically.’’

The answer, Gruman quickly adds, is not to strip government workers of their health and security — a beggar-thy-neighbor approach that lowers everyone’s standard of living — but to improve the prospects of others. “The resentment is misplaced,’’ he said. “You need to increase private-sector unionization so those workers can start getting decent benefits again.’’

Addendum, Moments Later:

The Booman quotes Georgetown professor Joseph McCartin, who says much the same thing. An excerpt.

But an even more important factor is basically a 20- or 30-year period of failure in the private sector. What we are really looking at here is a private sector that for quite a long time now has not generated a lot of rising income for the great majority. It has not generated stable benefits for its workers, it has not generated increasing retirement security — in fact we’ve had income stagnation or decline, we’ve had rising indebtedness, we’ve had growing insecurity for retirement. The private sector has failed on a massive level. And the tenuous position that so many American workers find themselves in as a result of that now makes it suddenly appear that public sector workers are just living off the fatted calf. I think some of it has to do quite simply with the way in which so many nongovernment workers have been suffering, and legitimately so. You can go to those folks and say: Why are you paying for the pension of the guy down the street? You don’t have one!

Note that the “20- or 30-year period of failure” roughly corresponds to the period since the election of St. Ronnie Reagan and the Republican Party’s worship of voodoo economics.

John Cole nails it:

The fundamental thing you need to understand when talking to deficit hawks is that when they say something is painful or that cuts will hurt people, you need to recognize that what they really mean is that the cuts will be painful TO SOMEONE ELSE and hurt people THEY DON’T KNOW AND WILL NEVER MEET.

Democrats resist Republican attempts to oppress state workers based on claims of a budget crisis which doesn’t exist.

One more time:

Truman was correct.

The Republican Party is about making the rich richer and the poor poorer. All the rest in window dressing.

Jamie discusses the drive to buy a second engine from a secondary manufacturer for the F-35 (note that the plane already has a first engine from the primary manufacturer). Here’s a bit:

If John Boehner and the GOP was serious about cutting spending, then this white elephant wouldn’t be up for debate. The desires of the current President, former President and Defense Secretary would be upheld. But we know that the Boehner clan isn’t really about cutting spending. They just want to stop government from helping its people.

He winds up by hoping that the Teabaggers hold to principle rather than to party.

There’s irony in there somewhere . . . .

Bad at this job, and, in true Republican fashion, just making stuff up.

The particulars of the indictment start at approximately the 4:30 mark.

Fifteen second commercial at the beginning.

Via Steve Benen, who has commentary if you aren’t in the mood for video.

Shirley Sherrod sues Andrew Breitbart. Breitbart claims it infringes on his Constitutional right to lie and/or promulgate lies.

All snark aside, the United States is facing a political movement fueled by lies. It’s called “Republicanism.”

Without the lies, there would be no movement.

It would be gratifying to see the liars brought to heel.

Unlikely, but gratifying.

Bush officials are going to end up like the kids in a Family Circus cartoon.

All pointing towards the shadowy “Nobody” who actually ran the show when they were in office.

Joan Vennochi at the Boston Globe illustrates the difficulties facing Mitt the Flip in his attempt to shift with the political winds. A nugget:

So Mitt Romney must figure out another way to handle his role in health care reform, now that taking down ObamaCare is a Republican priority.

The father of RomneyCare can’t apologize for the health care law he backed in Massachusetts, not as he heads out on tour for his book “No Apology.’’

As usual, he is trying to have it both ways: ObamaCare is a usurpation of personal freedom; RomneyCare is a celebration of state’s rights.

In making the argument, the Bay State’s ex-governor is trying to duck the truth around the so-called individual mandate, the underpinning of both the federal and state laws.

She goes on to remind us that Senator Ted Kennedy used to refer to Romney as “Multiple Choice Mitt.”

Via Down with Tyranny, which has commentary.

Addendum, Two Days Later:

The Congressman has grieved the ad, claiming that he does not have the Congressional health care coverage, which he doesn’t. He has State of New Jersey health care coverage:

We started asking around among other New Jersey legislators and civil servants and, sure enough, we found out that the taxpayer-funded health care that New Jersey offers– and that Lance still uses– is much plusher and costs the taxpayers much more than the congressional option. So not only is Leonard Lance a hypocrite, who voted both to repeal healthcare for his hardpressed, taxpaying constituents and voted against an amendment that would have allowed for transparency about who in Congress gets government-subsidized healthcare and who doesn’t– but he went the extra mile to attempt to bully the station and Blue America and to mislead New Jersey voters by covering up that he uses government-subsidized healthcare for himself.

Follow the link for the full story.

Now on Craig’s List.

And I thought Craig’s List had shut down that sectio–oh, never mind.

Via Oliver Willis.

Addendum, Later that Same Evening:

He’s still married, but DelawareLiberal reports that he’s no longer a Congressman.

Addendum-Dee-Dum-Dum:

(Aside: “Dum-Dum.” Chuckle.)

Dick Polman documents ex-Congressman Lee’s credentials as part of the “family values” crowd:

Did this guy quit his seat too quickly? One might argue that he’s entitled to his own fantasy life, that it’s nobody’s business what he does on the side as long as he does his job. But here’s the rub: Congressman Lee was a devotee, during his truncated tenure, of the belief that morality should be legislated. (Quelle surprise!) He voted to extend institutional bigotry in the military, requiring gay soldiers to stay in the closet. He co-sponsored the current House Republican effort to curb the number of poor women seeking Medicaid abortions.

That’s your and my morality that he would legislate, not his own.

And that, my friends, is where the hypocrisy thing comes into play.

Dick Polman explains at Phlly dot com. A nugget:

After his reelection, Reagan signed the Tax Reform Act of 1986, which imposed the largest corporate tax hike in history ($120 billion over five years), while closing $300 billion in corporate loopholes. In that same law, Reagan agreed to exempt millions of low-wage earners from paying any income tax.

In today’s conservative parlance, such deeds would be assailed as “socialism.”

And imagine how he would be attacked today for his tolerant immigration policy. In 1986, he signed the last major reform law, mandating a path to citizenship for agricultural and seasonal workers – and offering amnesty to illegal immigrants who had lived here continuously for many years. If Reagan were campaigning with that record today, he’d get whacked so hard by the Republican right he would end up like chastened ex-reformer John McCain, yelling, “Build the dang fence!”

This would be just another case of local political skulduggery, were it not for the Republicans’ constant caterwauling about the almost non-existent problem of fraudulent voter registrations.

That elevates it to just one more testament the GOP’s institutionalizing hypocrisy as a party strategy.

State prosecutors yesterday filed forgery charges against an Upper Darby GOP operative who is accused of falsifying signatures to help place U.S. Rep. Pat Meehan on the Republican primary ballot last spring.

The Attorney General’s Office charged Paul V. Summers, 59, of Drexel Hill, with seven counts of forgery in connection with the nominating petitions he submitted for Meehan in March. Agents say that the petitions contained dozens of forged signatures.

Several Delaware County residents told investigators that they hadn’t signed the forms, and some residents identified the names of relatives “who had died or since moved out of the area,” according to the criminal complaint.

Republicans do not a deficit of duplicity, just duplicity on the deficit.

Scott Lehigh describes how it works. A nugget:

IT’S BECOME a favorite Republican refrain. This country needs to have “an adult conversation’’ about our fiscal problems. And who can argue with that?

Now, when responsible, ratiocinative grownups address a problem, they start with a basic question: What caused it?

But that’s not the approach the GOP is taking when it comes to the long-term federal budget deficit.

I was in college about the time that “Black Studies” became a discipline and February became “Black History Month.”

The reasons for these were that white folks had warped or ignored (or both) the history of black persons in the United States since well before the Civil War.

The South and its partisans had tried to portray black persons as suited only for slavery, so as to justify the peculiar institution with false religion and pseudo-science; George Fitzhugh’s abominable Cannibals All was the epitome of this.

The rest of the country, having turned its back on the freed slaves and looked the other way as Jim Crow laws and other methods reduced them and their descendants to practical, if not legal, servitude, had no desire to remember its perfidy.

The purpose of “Black History Month” has always been to put black history in balance as part of American history, not to turn black history into something apart from it.

Some persons resent this. They want to forget and hide the past, perhaps even recreate it . . . .

In the Chicago Trib, Clarence Page comments of the recurring objections to the existence of Black History Month:

. . .every time I begin to think we can relax special efforts to remember this nation’s grand racial epic of sorrow and triumph, I am jerked alert by current events that show how easily history can be forgotten or twisted, even by major newsmakers.

For example, there was Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann’s recent mythologizing of the nation’s Founders at an Iowans for Tax Relief rally.

“How unique, in all of the world, that one nation … was the resting point for people from groups all across the world,” she said, getting a bit carried away from reality. “It didn’t matter the color of their skin, it didn’t matter their language, it didn’t matter their economic status. … Once you got here, we were all the same. Isn’t that remarkable? It’s absolutely remarkable.”

It was remarkable, all right, but the slaves owned by many of the Founders, including some of our early presidents, would not recognize the nation’s early days as she described them.

Or there is Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour’s December recollections in The Weekly Standard of growing up in the midst of the civil rights revolution in his state: “I just don’t remember it as being that bad,” he said. Lucky for you, Governor.

Er, yeah.

The communications director for Maine’s new, tea party-backed governor told staffers last month they would be using the state’s bureaucracy to get Republicans re-elected, according to a letter obtained by a Maine blogger.

Dan Demerritt, the communications director for Gov. Paul LePage, may have called for a violation of the law when he reportedly announced in an email to the governor’s closest advisers that “once we take office, Paul will put 11,000 bureaucrats to work getting Republicans re-elected.”

See the email here.

No scruples need apply.

Less than two weeks on the job, Colorado Secretary of State Scott Gessler says the $68,500 a year salary doesn’t pay enough.

That’s why Gessler, a Republican, says he is going to be moonlighting as a lawyer for his old law firm – a firm known for representing clients on elections and campaign law issues, the very areas Gessler is now charged with policing as secretary of state.

So, why did he run for the damned job?

He’s a member of the same party that thinks public employee salaries and pensions are too high and must be destroyed.

Words fail me.

Via Balloon Juice.

Where was he when George W. Bush and Walmart were closing the deal?

U.S. Rep. Randy Forbes strongly criticized President Barack Obama’s lavish White House state dinner for Chinese President Hu Jintao, saying Friday that American leaders were wrong to honor China’s success rather than challenge its growing influence.