Republican Hypocrisy category archive

Shaun Mullen, in a long and thoughtful post explaining Why Mitt Romney’s Assertion That He Can Fix The Economy Is Flapdoodle, lists three things Republicans hope you will forget:

Public opinion polls reveal that while voters in the swing states that Romney must win if he has a chance of ousting Obama are deeply concerned about the economy, they understand three things:

• That the president has been handicapped at every turn by obdurate Republicans like Ryan who would rather see him suffer in the polls than pitch in to turn the economy around.
• That even in this era of truth twisting, Romney and his handlers have lied continuously and shamelessly on an epic scale about virtually everything, including his own private-sector record.
• That Romney’s tenure as a venture capitalist who destroyed jobs no more qualifies him as an able steward of the economy than it did Herbert Hoover.

Read the rest for the full flapdoodle.

Blue Texan points out:

A Romney supporter complaining about the opposition lying is like a Bachmann follower decrying fear-mongering. It’s just ridiculous.

Follow the link for contesxt.

Dick Polman has this to say about Mitt the Flip’s latest Dixie dogwhistle, in which the Flipster invoked Reagan’s welfare queen imagery:

When I listen to Romney on this issue and see that ad, I am reminded of what the writer Mary McCarthy famously said of Lillian Hellman: “Every word she writes is a lie, including and and the.”

Chauncey Devega analyzes the tune and concludes that Mitt the Flip is playing a dangerous game. Here’s a nugget.

Mitt Romney is playing with fire. His race-baiting may win over some independents. It will also help to sure up enthusiasm for Romney among the Tea Party GOP base. But, Romney is walking a tightrope because as he continues to flirt with, and use naked racism, to win over white voters he is not necessarily bringing new voters in his camp. Those most primed for white racial appeals are going to vote for Romney anyway.

I help Devega is right, but it is wise not to underestimate the power of hate.

Follow the links, especially Devega’s. Read the whole thing. Educate yourself about the playbill and the intended audience for Mitt’s Dixie concert.

Contradict Me has a case in point. Follow the link–you won’t want to believe it.

Image via Bob Cesca’s Awesome Blog.

A snippet. Read the rest. It’s worth it.

Maybe it’s just me, Margaret, but I smell a rat. In the name of God, love of country and apple pie, the Republican Party’s biggest criticism is that President Obama is making healthcare affordable. They can’t even call it The Affordable Care Act. They have to call it Obamacare. What does Obamacare even mean? Sure sounds like “I hate poor people” to me. But I don’t always hear well at my age. Maybe it just means “I don’t like a black man as President.” Because I can’t for the life of me understand how else you explain their constant whining about taking care of the old and the poor. I thought that doing otherwise was the morally objectionable thing.

/blockquote

Chauncey Devega mercilessly dissects Mitt the Flip’s Southern Strategy Dixie dog whistles.

A nugget:

Mitt Romney’s mouth piece adviser’s suggestion that President Obama is incapable of understanding the “special” Anglo-American relationship because he is not of the “right” “racial stock” is prefaced upon a narrow understanding of who is an American and who is not. Among the general public, it is assumed that to be American is to be white. This is a repeated finding from public opinion surveys and other research.

By proxy, these racially driven attacks on Barack Obama are really an assault on Black Americans. We are positioned in the White Conservative political imagination as perennial outsiders and second class citizens. As the late Joel Olson smartly observed, in the American political tradition, and in a country founded as a herrenvolk society, to be black means to be an “anti-citizen.”

He’s quite right, you know.

I’m a Southern boy. I know how to decode the damned code.

Aside:

We recently came into possession of a DVD of Disney’s Song of the South. Until then, all I had seen of the movie were the animated bits about Br’er Rabbit that used air on Walt Disney’s television show when I was a young ‘un.

The casual implicit racism, which was quite mainstream when the movie was filmed less than a long lifetime ago, made my skin crawl.

That is the America of the Southern Strategy and the Republican Party.

I doubt that I could watch the movie again, however amusing the animated bits might be (and even the portrayals of the animals in those fables was infused with racist imagery).

Tony Norman points out the underlying hypocrisy of the gut out the vote movement. After citing Pennsylvania’s legal stipulation that no cases or prosecutions for voter fraud are known to exist in Pennsylvania, he observes:

Despite the fact that there are plenty of laws against voter impersonation and ballot fraud, Republicans want to add another layer that would shed thousands from the rolls to prevent a crime that doesn’t exist.

Now, imagine if this was a debate about gun control. Wouldn’t conservatives be the first to scream that enforcing existing gun laws is all we need to do to stem the tide of death and violence and that adding new laws would only threaten Second Amendment rights?

In Florida, Mitt the Flip brought forth two companies to prove that they succeeded all on their ownsome, without government interference or assistance.

Tampabay dot com looked into the claims and found slight flaws (details at the link):

The campaign held a morning event to highlight A.D. Morgan Corp. and Value Enterprise Solutions as Florida small businesses that became successful because of the pluck of their owners and the benefits of the free enterprise system.

Government, in other words, had nothing to do with it.

But the Romney campaign couldn’t have picked more puzzling examples. Far from not needing big government, the Tampa companies have embraced government and benefited from it.

Jon Stewart asks,

Do you really want to hang entire your campaign on a willful out-of-context misunderstanding?

To answer Mr. Stewart (not that he’ll ever notice me), “Of course they do. It’s all they got.”

Via the Richmonder.

In the midst of a longer post about something else, Field sums up civility on the campaign trail, as defined by Republicans: it’s for the other guys (emphasis in the original).

Of course, as is to be expected, he (Mitt the Flip–ed.) blamed it all on O, and he charged him with running a dirty campaign which is beneath the dignity of the POTUS. (Funny, he wasn’t so worried about the dignity of the office when his peeps were shouting him (President Obama–ed.) down while he was addressing the country. Or, for that matter, when Donald Trump and his birther friends were questioning his legitimacy as president.)

Anyone who welcomes support from Rush Limbaugh, Michael Savage, and the lot, then complains about “incivility” is talking through his hat.

In other news, Chauncey Devega wonders about sociopathy.

Image via Field.

The Denver Post tries to bring some sense to our political discourse about the Supreme Court decision on the Affordable Care Act. A snippet:

Before last week’s court ruling, Romney didn’t believe the mandate was a tax. Why pretend he believes it now?

Yet in a move that puts him in accord with other Republicans, Romney on Wednesday repudiated statements made by his staff just two days earlier that maintained he still believed the mandate was a penalty, not a tax.

“The majority of the court said it is a tax, therefore it is a tax. The majority has spoken,” Romney said. “There is no way around that.” (See note below.)

Oh, please. Does Romney accept as gospel everything else the court says? Look, there are many politically important issues to debate regarding the Affordable Care Act, but the question of whether the individual mandate is a tax or a penalty is not one of them. The question is of interest to constitutional scholars, of course, but in practical terms it makes no difference in how the act affects individual Americans.

They are certainly correct.

And unlikely to be noticed. Truth is irrelevant to propaganda.

________________

Note below:

The Supreme Court also once said that all black people were slaves for life and could never be freed.

When Congressman Grayson alleged that the Republican health care plan was

Don’t get sick. Die Quickly.

he was roundly derided by Republicans.

Now their actions are proving him correct.

I have not wasted time and effort theorizing about internal motives of Supreme Court justices in their rulings. They are unfathomable and irrelevant.

It’s the rulings that count.

Nevertheless, the discomfiture of wingnut world at what they see as Chief Justice Roberts’s apostasy is rather delicious.

. . . because we see the evidence every day. A snippet from a column about the Affordable Care Act decision, by Robyn Blumner (emphasis added):

If Romney hadn’t decided that he wants the presidency more than personal integrity, he might have savored the victory for a program modeled after the one he helped establish in Massachusetts as governor — with an individual mandate.

Via PoliticalProf.

Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley sums up Republican health care policy. From TPM:

The only health care mandate they can embrace are transvaginal probes for women.

More here.

The fact that there’s a black man serving as president just drives some Republicans gaga. Sadly, some of them are in a position to inflict their fantasies on the rest of us.

Thom Hartmann details the hypocrisy.