Republican Hypocrisy category archive

rickrocket looks at the new Webster’s Republican Dictionary of political usage.

A sample. Follow the link for more:

• If you increase the budget in defense spending (and you are a Democrat), you are gutting the military budget.
• Also, if you receive a tax cut (from a Democratic administration), you are paying more taxes and should protest.

Mainly because after a while I just can’t deal with the inanity any more and have to turn on a Law and Order rerun or something.

Susie caught it.

Nice catch.

A lawyer is a hired gun, sure, but a hired gun whose first allegiance is supposed to be to the rule of law and whose second is to the client. Clients should be represented within the rule of law.

A lawyer who places his client above the rule of law becomes a whaddya-call-um, “mouthpiece.”

These guys were mouthpieces:

A coalition of left-wing advocacy groups filed legal ethics complaints on Monday against 12 former Bush administration lawyers, including three United States attorneys general, whom the groups accuse of helping to justify torture.

The coalition, called Velvet Revolution, asked the bar associations in four states and the District of Columbia to disbar the lawyers, saying their actions violated the rules of professional responsibility by approving interrogation methods, including waterboarding, that constituted illegal torture.

By writing or approving legal opinions justifying such methods, the advocates say, the Bush administration lawyers violated the Geneva Conventions, the Convention Against Torture and American law.

Back in my tech support days, I would frequently talk with techs from Minnesota. Generally, they were embarrassed by their governor of the time, Jesse Ventura.

I remember telling one of them after he expressed his discombobulation, “Let me tell you how the rest of the country reacts to your governor.

“Most persons find it very refreshing to see a politician who speaks his mind without consulting the polls and spin doctors first. Sure, he shoots his mouth off from time to time. But he speaks honestly. That is a nice change.”

Watch Mr. Ventura cut through the wingnut hypocrisy and doubletalk:

Via the Great Orange Satan.

I’m old.

I remember BTV: Before Telly Vision.

Then there was radio. My father, always a news junkie, would listen to the news on the old AM radio on the kitchen table, wiggling the little wire antenna to get better reception. I have vague memories of some of the voices coming out of that radio: stories of Mr. Truman going for walks around Washington, Joe McCarthy’s rants about Communists in the State Department, progress reports from the Suez War.

And tales of brainwashing.

For those who think that brainwashing has something to do with Scrubs, here are some links. The single best dispassionate, academic discussion of the topic is probably here, at Robert Carroll’s Skeptic’s Dictionary.

If you don’t want to follow the links, here’s the 50-cent tour:

During the Korean War, a number of UN prisoners of war held by the North Koreans and the Chinese Communists signed confessions and were heard on broadcasts confessing to war crimes and attesting to their having converted to Communism.

In looking back, it appears that no brains were actually “washed”–that is, no one’s mind was fundamentally changed. Rather, under pressure of torture and sensory and social deprivation, persons were coerced into saying and signing things that, of their own will, they would neither have said nor have signed. When the fear and the torment and the mistreatment ended, their victims returned to their original convictions and beliefs, at least to the extent that they had not been driven to or beyond the fringes of their sanity.

In an article in July of last year, the New York Times reported

The irony is that the original author of that chart, Albert D. Biderman, a social scientist who had distilled interviews with 235 Air Force P.O.W.’s, wrote that the Communists’ techniques mainly served to “extort false confessions.” And they were the same methods that “inquisitors had employed for centuries.” They had done nothing that “was not common practice to police and intelligence interrogators of other times and nations.”

Brainwashing was bunk: no secret weapon to control the human mind existed, America’s best experts concluded in the 1960s. Yes, the Communists used time-honored and terrifying interrogation tactics during the cold war. Some, like waterboarding, had been perfected during the Spanish Inquisition. But Mr. Biderman concluded that “inflicting physical pain is not a necessary nor particularly effective method” to persuade prisoners of war.

(Aside: From time to time, we hear the term “brainwashing” applied to what could more accurately be called “deception”; in those cases, the truth is available to those who would think critically, but the lie is couched so persuasively as to fool hearers into thinking that it is the truth and that no further investigation is required. One such lie is the claim that “torture works” to uncover truth.)

The tactics of brainwashing, the same tactics which Albert Biderman characterized in the Times as serving mainly to “extort false confessions,” are the tactics of the Previous Federal Administration’s “enhanced interrogation techniques.” (It is no coincidence that the term, “enhanced interrogation techniques” originated with those crusaders of liberty, the Gestapo.)

So what have we learned after the 50-cent tour?

• We have learned that the techniques of torture and the techniques of brainwashing are the same.
• We have learned that those techniques, however they are labelled, will cause persons to say things they do not believe–that is, lie–to make the pain go away.

What can we conclude?

• We can conclude that brainwashing or torture do not “work”–they produce neither lasting change in convictions nor truth.
• We can conclude that we need a new kind of washing, a washing that cleanses the filth of apologies and apologists for torture from our public discourse.

Let them have their freedom of speech.

Let us stop believing and let our agents in the media stop reporting what the inquisitors and their sycophants say as if it contained any other than the rantings of the deluded, the foolish, the power-mad, the sadistic.

Torture is their pornography.

It need not be ours.

The “conscience of a conservative.”

I really can’t improve on this.

. . . and the lack thereof.

Andrew Sullivan:

For the GOP to have remained mute under the massive increases in spending and borrowing under Bush but to make resistance to the Obama stimulus package a litmus test for conservatism reveals that the deepest principle of the Republican base is partisanship.

Apologists for torture are fond of invoking the “ticking time bomb”:

“What if [unnamed bad guys] had your [member of family] and you could save [him or her] by encasing said bad guy in an iron maiden? Well, huh, well, what do you say not, smart guy? So there! Nyah nyah nyah.”

(Granted, this example does give their argument a dignity and persuasiveness which it does not actually possess.l

Frank Rich in the Toimes cuts through the crap:

In other words, the ticking time bomb was not another potential Qaeda attack on America but the Bush administration’s ticking timetable for selling a war in Iraq; it wanted to pressure Congress to pass a war resolution before the 2002 midterm elections. Bybee’s memo was written the week after the then-secret (and subsequently leaked) “Downing Street memo,” in which the head of British intelligence informed Tony Blair that the Bush White House was so determined to go to war in Iraq that “the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.” A month after Bybee’s memo, on Sept. 8, 2002, Cheney would make his infamous appearance on “Meet the Press,” hyping both Saddam’s W.M.D.s and the “number of contacts over the years” between Al Qaeda and Iraq. If only 9/11 could somehow be pinned on Iraq, the case for war would be a slamdunk.

But there were no links between 9/11 and Iraq, and the White House knew it. Torture may have been the last hope for coercing such bogus “intelligence” from detainees who would be tempted to say anything to stop the waterboarding.

Ultimately, no sophistry can render evil into good.

A pandemic is, at this point, no more than a possibility, though the flu has already spread to Europe. The financial symptoms are already severe.

A deadly swine flu outbreak that originated in Mexico took its toll on airlines and cruise operators across the globe on Monday as traders feared a repeat of the SARS epidemic that ravaged Asia.

Mexico City’s streets were empty Sunday as an estimated 1,614 people in Mexico contracted the swine flu, killing 103 people.

(snip)

“Given that the virus strain is apparently transmissible from human to human, a feature that none of earlier bird flu outbreaks displayed, there is reason for concern,” said analysts from the Swiss brokerage Sarasin.

Bloomberg reports that the financial and commodities markets are also taking a hit:

. . . the yen, dollar and Treasuries gained as the swine flu outbreak spread. Mexico’s peso fell and grain prices retreated.

Over at ASZ. Steve reminds us that the Republican Party thinks that the Centers for Disease Control is just so much pork. Follow the link for documentation and citations:

They are the ones who ridiculed the beefing up of pandemic preparedness when it was part of the Obama stimulus package. Yes, led by Karl Rove Republicans in the House and Senate went to war over pandemic preparedness measures put forth by congressman David Obey, who now seems prescient compared to these GOP bozos who have threatened our lives, once again, by making sure we are not prepared. (Wasn’t Katrina a big enough warning for them?)

I think this is perhaps because

• pork is the only policy that Republicans understand and that
• money expended on the public health does not make the rich richer (except possibly Big Pharma), nor the poor poorer. It is therefore pork that is unacceptable to the Party of Nope.

Disregard their words and look at their actions: Making the rich richer and the poor poorer is the core belief and practice of Republicanism. Anything that does not further that goal is unacceptable.

A tortuous path.

I read this last night; I cannot come up with any commentary other than the bumper sticker I saw on Saturday: “If You’re Not Outraged, You Haven’t Been Paying Attention.”

Phillipe Sands in the Guardian–read the whole thing:

The world is watching as America attempts to come to terms with the abuse it unleashed in the aftermath of 9/11 and trying to digest the full implications of last week’s extraordinary events. With a wide-ranging Spanish criminal investigation into torture at Guantánamo threatening to embarrass the US, Barack Obama decided to declassify legal memos sent under the Bush administration in the hope the country would move on. The opposite has happened. Ever more documents set out in meticulous detail the full extent of the cruelty: who was abused by whom, how they did it and what was done. The truth has been revealed in stark detail, from the number of times waterboarding was used to the legal deliberations that led to it.

(snip)

It was difficult to understand how the senior lawyers involved could have authorised torture. So I spent 18 months trekking around the US, meeting many of the officials involved. For the most part, these were ordinary, decent people. Some spoke openly and – I thought – honestly. Others plainly didn’t. The higher up the political chain I went, the greater the hubris.

Afterthought: The Booman on the apologists for evil.

. . . apply for the dole. From Delaware Liberal:

. . . Governor Rick Perry of Texas wants his state to secede from the Union. Yet today he wants America’s help.

Have cake.

Eat it too.

Sign the petition here.

John Cole, talking sense:

At some point they (Republicans–ed.) are going to figure out that for most of us, we don’t care if the person has a ( R ) or (D) behind their name when they were instituting a policy of torture. That is what is so depressing (to me, at least) about the Ari Fleischer’s and the Thiessen’s of the world. They honestly seem to think this is nothing more than a partisan witch-hunt, the same old Washington gotcha poltics. It isn’t. When you torture people, you have crossed a really clear line. Innocent people are dead. Lives have been ruined. Our international reputation has been destroyed.

The reason Republicans think it’s just politics is because they no longer have any moral core; politics is all they believe in. They sold out their moral core for the politics of hate and fear.

The Booman:

But the important thing is that the torture revealed that there was no connection between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein. Maybe Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld knew that waterboarding could produce false confessions and that is precisely what they were hoping for. But, if they were looking for the truth, they got some measure of it. Even under sustained and relentless torture, they did not get useful information connecting Saddam to al-Qaeda or the 9/11 attacks. And, if they really thought that such a connection existed and would justify invading Iraq, they should have been disabused on that score.

Therein lies the reason for the torture: To support Bush’s phony war.

And it didn’t work. They weren’t able to get the false confession they wanted.

This is sick-making.

An hordette in search of an enemy. Terry Mancour sips tea parties in the Guardian:

So what did motivate (the teabaggers)? Mostly hatred for Barack Obama, pure and simple. The American public rejected them and their failed policies. Blaming him for the profound self-pity that arises out of getting your arse royally kicked in an election was a factor. They held signs insisting that Obama was simultaneously a socialist and a fascist, a radical Muslim and a radical black Christian, a hopeless incompetent and an evil genius.

These accusations were designed to incite strong feelings, even hatred, among the conservative base. Open calls for secession in Texas and repeated calls for “revolution” (even though we just had a well-attended, well-executed election cycle) from policies that hadn’t even had time to take effect yet across the board were noteworthy. Plenty of teabaggers were proudly discussing their second amendment-protected personal armories and their willingness to use them, should real revolution come. Against whom, they couldn’t really say.

And there’s that black guy in the White House, and that’s just so foreign to their sensibilities that it all has to be a plot, a conspiracy, a secret plan by unseen forces working through “that negro” (one actually said that to me) to enslave the good hard-working American white folk and take away their freedoms to go to church and own guns and get married and not pay taxes – despite any real evidence to back that claim up. Indeed, some cite the very lack of evidence as proof of the conspiracy.

But after you scrape away the billionaires who founded and funded this “grassroots effort”, subtract the large number of liberal observers and amused media people, take away the faked-his-birth-certificate conspiracy crowd, remove the whacky costume-clad exhibitionists and the right-to-life-and-ammunition culture warriors, and I think you’ll find that most of the teabaggers were just pissed-off, middle-class white people who got screwed in the economic downturn and are looking for someone to be angry at.

Walter Brasch has more commentary at ASZ:

But, these protesting masses aren’t the rich, and they aren’t being forced to give up more of their income. In fact, the Obama tax cuts benefit about 95 percent of all Americans.

The idea of a Tea Party was probably that of CNBC commentator Rick Santelli, who ranted against any government assistance for persons who lost their homes through foreclosure. Pushing the tea bagging of America were Fox mouths Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly, Glenn Beck, and dozens of other conservative talking mouths who are among the top 5 percent, and whose seven-figure incomes would be reduced under the Obama plan to restore fiscal sanity to America.

Well, I guess it’s true. Americans really are revolting.

Of course, facts never stopped a Republican before. Dick Polman analyzes Rick Perry’s secessionist fantasies.

The fact is, Texas can’t secede even if it wanted to. In the 1845 language that brought Texas into the union, there isn’t a single word about any secession option. One might also suggest that the secession issue was settled forever in 1865, after 600,000 American soldiers lost their lives fighting over it. The bottom line, however, is that the U.S. Supreme Court settled it in an 1869 ruling…which means that the so-called Texas secession option has been judicially dead for the last 140 years.

From the decision in Texas v. White: “When, therefore, Texas became one of the United States, she entered into an indissoluble relation. All the obligations of perpetual union, and all the guaranties of republican government in the Union, attached at once to the State. The act which consummated her admission into the Union was something more than a compact; it was the incorporation of a new member into the political body. And it was final. The union between Texas and the other States was as complete, as perpetual, and as indissoluble as the union between the original States.”

The current Texas governor, we can assume, isn’t really as dense about Texas history as he appears. This was all just a calculated bid to gin up the GOP extremists (for political reasons that I will mention shortly). His calculation is actually easy to spot. Because while Perry purports to be outraged by big government in Washington – last week he called it “oppressive” and condemned its “interference with the affairs of our state” – in reality he is in constant pursuit of big government’s bucks. And whenever he brings that “oppressive” money home to Texas, he brags about it.