Just Come Out and Say It: He's Lying

Opinion | thepilot.com

Sometimes I pity The New York Times.

I know they’re supposedly the “newspaper of record.” The “Gray Lady.” The venerable institution to which all serious print journalists aspire, or at least used to.

But I swear, sometimes those big-city scribes are as dumb as a dog chasing parked cars. Take, for instance, their recent wrestling with the question of when to call something a lie.

In the court system, judges sometimes have to decide if a witness, particularly a child witness, is competent to testify. An important question is whether or not the child can tell the difference between the truth and a lie.

To determine this, there are certain questions that the attorney calling the child typically asks. One of those is, “If I told you I was wearing an orange polka dot shirt, would that be the truth or a lie?” This often reduces the child to the giggles if, for example, the lawyer’s shirt is solid white. Then they answer, “That would be a lie.”

In 27 years of practice, I have yet to see a child witness fail the test of how to define a lie.

And yet the mighty New York Times seems to struggle with a concept a second-grader can master. Recently, their so-called “public editor” did an entire column analyzing whether it was proper for them to refer to Donald Trump’s now-abandoned assertion that President Barack Obama was not born in the U.S. as “a lie.”

Specifically, they ran the story of said long-delayed abandonment of “birtherism” under the headline “Trump Gives Up a Lie, But Refuses to Repent.”

Good for them, I say, since “Barack Obama was not born in the United States” is, like “I am wearing an orange polka dot shirt” when I’m doing no such thing, a lie. It is objectively and demonstrably untrue.

And yet the public editor of The Times, one Liz Spayd, felt the need to discuss at length whether the word was proper. “It is not a word we will use lightly,” she said, quoting political editor Carolyn Ryan.

Unfortunately, the polite reluctance to cry “shenanigans” in the face of the most obvious shenanigans is a societal loophole that manipulative sociopaths like Donald Trump drive through like a bulldozer.

People like Donald Trump lie so shamelessly, so rapidly, and so constantly that they simply overwhelm the capacity of traditional journalists to go, “Whoa. Wait. I don’t think that’s true” before they’re off to the next falsehood.

As I’ve noted before, an analysis of 4.6 hours of Trump speeches by the online site Politico found that Trump made, on average, at least one demonstrably false statement every five minutes. Factcheck.orgmarveled that “we’ve never seen his match” when it comes to bald-faced lying.

That’s just the problem. No one has — except maybe online, where one encounters the technique of “argument” known variously as the “Gish Gallop” or “proof by verbosity,” in which someone spews so many falsehoods so quickly that it would take hours to refute each one, so people with actual lives finally just give up and walk away, at which point the “galloper” declares victory.

Actually, given Trump’s usual bombastic, bullying style and his use of the live-action equivalent of the “Gish Gallop,” I’m convinced that he or someone working for him has made a study of internet trolling and adapted it to political campaigning. More than one person, after all, has observed that Trump is “an anonymous internet comment section come to life.”

This bodes ill for Hillary Clinton in the upcoming debates.

Clinton is, after all, a traditional politician who’s spent her whole career dealing with antagonists who play by civilized rules. Even in her triumphant 11-hour slugfest against the Benghazi witch hunters, she wasn’t dealing with anyone nearly as shameless and contemptuous of decorum as Donald Trump.

And while facing the torrent of BS sure to be pouring from Trump’s mouth, she can expect no help from the moderators. Chris Wallace of Fox News has flat out stated, “I do not believe it is my job to be a truth squad. It's up to the other person to catch them on that.”

That’s exactly what people like Trump depend on. Let’s hope Clinton is ready.

Just Not That Smart

Opinion | thepilot.com

We’re going to have to face a painful fact: Mitch McConnell and the Senate Republicans are just not that bright.

The body of the late Justice Antonin Scalia was barely cold before McConnell and his lackeys rushed to warn everybody not to politicize this solemn moment, about three seconds before they began politicizing it for all they were worth.

McConnell, Toddler-Terrifying Ted Cruz and Young Marco Robotto — sorry, I mean Rubio — declared that there’s an 80-year-old “rule” against a president nominating a Supreme Court Justice in the last year of his term.

They had discovered this rule by the research method known as “making stuff up.”

Turns out, this situation where one of the Supremes shuffles off this mortal coil in the last year of a presidency just doesn’t happen all that often, certainly not often enough that one could glean so much as a guideline, let alone a rule, from history.

The Constitution — which the wingnuts claim to revere but apparently know jack-squat about — is very clear that the president “shall” nominate, among various other officers, “Justices of the Supreme Court” and appoint them “with the advice and consent of the Senate.”

So we have the spectacle of the president doing his constitutional duty, and the Senate saying, “We won’t advise, we won’t consent. Heck, we won’t even meet the nominee.” Having demonstrated their own uselessness as a Senate, they now appear to be dead-set on rendering another of the three branches of government as paralyzed as they are.

Where the “three no’s” (no meetings, no hearings, no vote) that McConnell et al. have promised to stick to are found in the Constitution has never been explained. Like the supposed “80-year rule” against nominating in an election year, this appears to be pure applesauce, as the late Justice Scalia was fond of saying.

Not only is this behavior by the Republicans against both the letter and the spirit of the Constitution, but it’s also foolish. If the Republicans hold the line on their promise to delay even a hearing till after the election, they’ll keep this issue open until Election Day.

They’ll give whoever the Democratic nominee is a perfect example of the kind of mulish obstructionism that people are so heartily and vocally sick of.

They are handing even a half-smart candidate a club the size of a California Redwood to thrash them with on a daily basis, and both Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton are not half-smart — they are both very, very smart.

The current course of action by the Senate Republicans seems perfectly calculated to lose not only the presidency but the Senate. When that happens, folks, stuff’s gonna get real, as the kids say.

Or consider this alternative scenario: A few Senate Republicans actually do their jobs, defy the leadership, and give the candidate nominated by the president a hearing.

Centrists and independents say, “Hey, maybe these guys are reasonable after all,” but the wingnuts scream, “OMG! We are betrayed again by the evil party establishment!” and tear the party to shreds before handing the raggedy, bloodstained banner of the presidential nomination to “outsider” Donald Trump.

Democrats win the presidency and the Senate, and get to replace not only Scalia, but Ginsburg, Kennedy and probably Breyer as well.

Majority Leader McConnell is leading his party into the political equivalent of the Valley of the Little Big Horn. He and his supporters in the Senate should turn their horses around and get the heck back to the high ground.

They should face the reality that President Barack Obama was indeed elected to that job, by large margins, and he’s going to do the job till the last day in office.

But they should also demand the sort of bland centrist that Obama will almost certainly give them to avoid a fight, then run for the rest of the year on who gets the next three appointments.

They've really not thought this through, which I suppose is no surprise to anyone. I hate to say it, but they’re just not that smart.

OK, that’s a lie. I love to say it.

The Creature From Planet Koch

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If you’ve turned on your TV at all in the past couple of weeks, you’ve seen the ad.

Funded by the billionaire right-wing Koch Brothers through the organization “Americans for Prosperity,” the ad features a gray-haired woman of a certain age, identified only as “Tricia,” railing against the Affordable Care Act.

“Obamacare is dangerous. It can’t be implemented,” says Tricia (described on the AFP website as “an AFP activist and cancer survivor”) in a hectoring, indignant tone that suggests that she thinks “Obamacare” is a synonym for “killing puppies.”

“Your well-being judged by a bureaucrat in D.C. is devastating,” she goes on to say. Powerful stuff, and it makes you think. Mostly it makes you think, “What the heck planet has this woman been living on?”

You don’t want bureaucrats intervening in your health care, “Tricia”? Then I assume, despite your apparent age, that you’re either not on Medicare or you’re not using it. You’ve also clearly never dealt with private insurance — you know, the type that’s going to still be covering most people now that “Obamacare” is coming into full effect.

Because I can tell you, if you had, you’d know that having people you don’t know giving the thumbs-up or thumbs-down on your health care decisions is pretty much the norm, whether those people are in Washington or in a corporate headquarters far, far away.

You like being able to pick your own doctor? Great, so do the rest of us — and we can, so long as our doctor or hospital is “in network.” Who decides who’s in “network”? News flash, Trish: It ain’t the patient, and it never has been, at least if you live in the same world most of us do.

“Tricia” mentions that she’s had cancer twice and gotten great care. So I assume she’s been on the same insurance all her life and never had to worry about not being able to switch insurance companies because her cancer would be a “pre-existing condition.” Not only that, but she’s probably also been able to afford to pay if a doctor she wants is not “in network.”

No, I think I know what planet “Tricia” is from. She’s an emissary from Planet Koch, the Billionaire Planet, where people can afford to have CEO-level corporate insurance or can pay health costs out of pocket and pick their doctor if insurance doesn’t come through.

But that’s not the planet where most of us live. Most of us live in a world where it’s a relief to not be terrified of changing jobs because a new insurance plan might call your kid’s asthma or your wife’s arthritis a “pre-existing condition” and refuse to cover it.

We live in a world where full coverage for preventive care makes sense. We live in a world where we look forward to finally being able to compare plans, including their costs, side by side, in an open marketplace.

We live in a world where we look forward to more stories like that of 61-year-old Arkansan Butch Matthews, who’d been paying for his own insurance for years and watching the price go up and up and up, but who recently went on Arkansas’ new exchange and found a better plan with a lower deductible for a thousand dollars less a month.

Those exchanges, by the way, may be the thing that scares the Koch Brothers, those Creatures from The Billionaire Planet, the most.

How many times have you heard someone say that they’d like to change from a job they hate, or they’d like to start their own business, but they couldn’t afford to lose their family’s health insurance? The fear of bankruptcy due to uncovered medical expenses is the thing that has kept people in thrall to lousy jobs and bad bosses for years. And that’s just changed.

True, a lot of people will still be getting health insurance provided for them (and picked out for them) by their employers. A survey by the International Foundation of Employee Benefit Plans found that fewer than 3 percent of employers were “at least somewhat likely” to drop coverage for full-time employees, and only .5 percent said they definitely would.

But what happens if employers do start cutting insurance benefits, say, by designating workers as “part time,” and more and more people go to the exchanges for their insurance? How will the Creatures From the Billionaire Planet keep the workers in line then?

Answer: They won’t. And that’s why they’re so desperate, and why they’re running dishonest ads like this one.

The Usual Gang Of Anonymous Right Wing Dimwits Continues The Lies On Voter Suppression

My wife Lynn, who's been a poll worker for the Carthage precinct past the five years and a registered voter here in Moore County since 1992, has a letter in the Pilot this week explaining why she's not doing it any more.

The usual gang of right wing fuckwits has showed up in the comments, anonymously attacking her (and me as well, although I'm used to it), and asserting the usual Rethuglican  claptrap about how "it's not a big hassle, why don't you stop whining, and (the biggest lie of all), we need to stop rampant voter fraud."

But even their own leaders are admitting it's not about fraud at all:

"The reduction in the number of days allowed for early voting is particularly important because early voting plays a major role in Obama's ground game. The Democrats carried most states that allow many days of early voting, and Obama's national field director admitted, shortly before last year's election, that "early voting is giving us a solid lead in the battleground states that will decide this election."

Conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly

" I guess I really actually feel we shouldn’t contort the voting process to accommodate the urban—read African-American—voter-turnout machine.”

Columbus Ohio GOP Chair Doug Preisse, on early voting

"Former Republican Party of Florida Chairman Jim Greer says he attended various meetings, beginning in 2009, at which party staffers and consultants pushed for reductions in early voting days and hours.
“The Republican Party, the strategists, the consultants, they firmly believe that early voting is bad for Republican Party candidates,” Greer told The Post. “It’s done for one reason and one reason only. … ‘We’ve got to cut down on early voting because early voting is not good for us,’ ” Greer said he was told by those staffers and consultants.

“They never came in to see me and tell me we had a (voter) fraud issue,” Greer said. “It’s all a marketing ploy.”

So it's not voter fraud they're mad at...they just know more early voters (and African Americans) vote Democrat. I mean, you can't really keep denying it when your party's own officials admit that it's not about voter fraud, it's about suppressing traditionally Democratic voters.

Well, I guess you can. If you're a pathological liar.

Marketing: Joe Quinn Is Doing It Wrong

So this guy's called my office a couple of times, identifying himself as "Joe Quinn" and claiming to be a potential DWI client. When Lynn asks him if he'd like to make an appointment, he gets rude to her and says he'll only talk to me (mistake #1, as Lynn is also my wife).

The area code on the message looks a little odd, so I check and see it's a NYC number. Then Lynn Googles it and finds out that not only is the guy trying to sell space on his crappy "legal referral website", there are multiple other testimonials from people talking about how he's been rude to other attorneys' staffs and lied about being a potential client. 

Marketing: Joe Quinn is doing it wrong.

Wingnuts Punk'd Again

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You know, I've never really been a huge fan of former Nebraska Sen. Chuck Hagel. I don't dislike him, mind you; he's just never been someone who excited me all that much.

He does get a lot of respect from me for being one of the first Republicans to buck his party and point out that George Dubbya's Wacky Iraqi Adventure was turning into another Vietnam. But when I found out that President Obama was nominating him for defense secretary, my reaction was, and I quote: "Meh."

What I saw of his confirmation hearings didn't stir up any more excitement. But, as so often happens with politicians in the Washington monkey house, I find myself rising to defend him, not because of his own merits, but because of the people attacking him and, more importantly, the way they go about it.

First, the Israel Lobby tried to paint Hagel as anti-Semitic for pointing out that there actually is such a thing as an Israel Lobby. Then Lindsey Graham announced that he intended to filibuster Mr. Hagel's nomination - the first time this had ever been done to a secretary of defense nominee - in a snit over the fact that, after hours upon hours of hearings, the only result of Republican attempts to create a "Benghazi-Gate" scandal has been to make former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton the most popular politician in the country, according to the Quinnipiac University Poll taken afterward.

Of course, Hagel had nothing to do with the Benghazi killings or the State Department, but let's not let that get in the way if Lindsay Graham's got some tantrumin' to do!

But for true crack-brained right-wing attacks, you've got to go to the Internet loony bin known as Breitbart.com.

After the death at an early age of its founder, Andrew Breitbart, some wondered if the muckrakers at Breitbart.com (who became famous for shamelessly doctored and deceptively edited "expose" videos of ACORN and Department of Agriculture employee Shirley Sherrod), would fade away. Sadly, it seems that the perpetually apoplectic Mr. Breitbart may have actually been a moderating influence, which should give you an idea of the level of crazy we're dealing with here.

On Feb. 7, a headline at Breitbart.com blared, "SECRET HAGEL DONOR?" The story, written by "editor at large" Ben Shapiro, claimed that the administration was refusing to turn over documents about possible foreign sources of funding for Hagel because one of those was a group called "Friends of Hamas."

Given the mainstream media's penchant for taking any unsourced and sketchy Breitbart.com story and running with it without bothering to check it out (See "Sherrod, Shirley," above), it's probably a miracle that this didn't blow up into another one of those scandals where the accusations turned out to be hollow, but not before they nearly destroyed people's lives and careers.

In fact, reporters began asking people like Mike Huckabee what they thought about the story, while never actually bothering to ask whether the story they were asking for comment on was true. But what does that matter? Friends of Hamas "has a ring to it," in the words of Lou Dobbs.

Well, the name may have a ring to it, but once again, there's no bell. No one - not the State Department, not the Treasury Department, not any reporter who stirred himself or herself long enough to do a simple Google or Lexis search - could find any record of any such group ever existing.

There's a reason for that: It was a joke.

On Feb. 19, New York Daily News reporter Dan Friedman wrote in an op-ed that the "Friends of Hamas" reference came from a mildly sarcastic hypothetical question he'd asked an anonymous Republican staffer on Capitol Hill.

"I asked my source," Friedman wrote, "had Hagel given a speech to, say, the 'Junior League of Hezbollah, in France'? What about 'Friends of Hamas'?"

He had no idea that anyone would take the names seriously. They were "so over-the-top, so linked to terrorism in the Middle East, that it was clear he was talking hypothetically and hyperbolically. No one could take seriously the idea that organizations with those names existed."

No one, that is, except a pack of right-wing pseudo-journalists with axes to grind and not enough journalistic ethics to even pretend to try to find corroboration, so long as the story has a "ring" to it.

Worse, they don't have the sense to recognize sarcasm when they hear it. That's why the right, once again, has egg on its face.

It's been said (either by Joseph Conrad or Doctor Who) that you can judge a man by the quality of his enemies. Given the sorry state of Mr. Hagel's enemies, I hope he does get confirmed.

Don’t Facts Matter Any More?

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I recently pointed out that, despite the hand-wringing of the professional hand-wringing class, the current election is not even close to being the nastiest in terms of political rhetoric.

All that said, there’s one thing that’s striking about this one, one thing I have not seen before. That’s the degree to which one side has not only decided to entirely abandon the entire idea of being factually accurate, but has also decided to be completely up front about doing so.

Shortly before the Republican National Convention, Neil Newhouse, a pollster working with the Romney campaign, appeared on a panel organized by ABC News. He was asked about the frequently repeated and just as frequently debunked claim that President Obama had “gutted” the work requirements of welfare reform.

This allegation was a blatant and shameless distortion of a proposal by the Obama administration to grant exemptions from the federal requirements to state governments — but only to those who could show they had alternative plans to put more welfare recipients back to work.

Every single fact checker from every source that examined the allegation pronounced it false. Former President Bill Clinton, who was lauded in Romney ads as the person who created the welfare reform proposal, said the Romney claim was untrue. (And if you needed any more evidence that the world has gone insane, seeing Republicans holding Bill Clinton up as an example of good policy-making should make up anyone’s mind.)

Even conservative Newt Gingrich had to admit that there was “no proof” that the administration had done to welfare reform what the Romneyites said it had.

Yet when questioned about the fact that the Republican candidate had approved an ad to which The Washington Post’s fact checker had given “four Pinocchios,” its highest rating for mendacity, Newhouse didn’t even attempt to defend the truthfulness of the ad. His response: “We’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact checkers.”

Wow. We knew these guys had chutzpah, but that one was really mind-boggling. It’s not unknown for both sides to stretch the truth in a campaign, but most of the time when confronted, they at least try to provide some justification. I mean, even Gingrich tried to cover himself by using the old “well, we don’t have any evidence that Obama did this, but it sounds like something he’d do.”

Newhouse basically said, “Every fact checker says it’s a lie, and we don’t care.”

Of course, why should they? We do, after all, live in a media environment where the “public editor” of The New York Times feels the need to wonder whether “Times news reporters should challenge ‘facts’ that are asserted by newsmakers they write about.” (Answer: Yes.) And they’ve known for years that the Beltway press is reluctant to jeopardize their all-important access by saying “wait a minute, that’s not true.” They might stop getting invited to the good cocktail parties or make the advertisers angry if they do.

Fortunately, that seems to be changing in the face of the relentless tide of pure, brazen BS flowing from the Romney swamp. Recently, CNN’s Soledad O’Brien committed an act of actual journalism when she responded to Romney surrogate John Sununu’s noisy repetition of another debunked Romney talking point: that Obama had “gutted” (they seem to like that word a lot) Medicare by $717 billion.

O’Brien pointed out that sources such as the Congressional Budget Office, Factcheck.com and CNN’s own analysis had refuted the claim. Sununu became furious, rudely shouting at O’Brien that she should “put an Obama bumper sticker on her forehead” when she said such things. O’Brien’s calm response was enough to warm even my cold and cynical heart: “You can’t just repeat it and make it true, sir.”

The main thing Romney’s snake-oil campaign is depending on is that a depressingly large number of Americans truly do not know the difference between a fact and an opinion. Confront many people with facts that conclusively refute some crazy allegation they’ve made, and they’ll huff, “I’m entitled to my opinion.”

That’s true, as far as it goes. As the saying goes, however, you aren’t entitled to your own facts. Again, the American press has done an abysmal job of educating people as to the difference.

Their idea of “objectivity” has been “Republicans say this, Democrats say that, who do the polls say is winning?” In a world where a presidential campaign spokesman feels no qualms about blithely stating, in effect, “Fact checking? Who cares?” actual reporting of actual facts — and confronting those of either party who’d misrepresent them — is more important than ever.

Insanity Is The Most GENEROUS Explanation

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Thirty-three times in 18 months.

 That’s how many times the Republican-controlled House has voted to repeal all or part of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (which they call “Obama-care”), even though they know that such a measure is doomed to fail in the Senate.

Even if such a bill through some miracle managed to somehow survive the Senate, it would certainly be vetoed by President Barack Obama. The most recent vote came this past Wednesday.

I’ve often said that a key quirk in the wingnut psyche is the absolutely unshakeable conviction that if something fails repeatedly, it’s because they just didn’t ram their heads against the wall hard enough. “The economy crashed despite big tax cuts? That just means we need more tax cuts to grow the economy!” And so on.

There’s a fine line between perseverance and insanity, and Cryin’ John Boehner and his merry band of fools crossed that line so long ago that they can’t even see it in the rearview mirror anymore.

Of course, it’s entirely possible that this wasn’t some form of mental illness on the part of the Prince of Orange and his crew. There are some cynics who say that the Republican leadership knew the measure, like the 32 before it, was doomed to fail. There are some who even say that the whole thing was a political stunt.

They say the whole thing’s a ploy to get House members staked out on their positions on the health care reform bill so that those votes could be used against them in the upcoming election, when those impressive voiceover announcers who only seem to surface at election time will be intoning “Congressman Schmendrick voted with Obama” with the type of voice-of-doom gravitas that suggests that they equate that voting record with unqualified support for child molestation.

But that’s hard to believe, don’t you think? I mean, that would make the Republican leadership seem like a bunch of completely politicized hacks who would take one of the 42 remaining days they’ve allotted themselves until the end of the year to address the people’s business and use it for the sole purpose of creating sound bites.

That would be a crassly cynical act by a party that’s decided to abandon the idea of addressing any real progress on jobs, immigration, national security, energy independence or any substantive issue at all, a party whose one and only priority is not governing, but winning.

That can’t really be it, can it? I mean, I know that’s what Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said was his party’s “No. 1 priority” a while back, but he was joking, right? Because that would make them seem pretty useless to the average American.

No, I’ve got to go with insanity here. Another indicator that the Republicans are suffering from some sort of mental breakdown is the things they say about the ACA that are completely divorced from the reality of the actual bill.

Quotes like Mitt Romney’s assertion that “Obamacare puts the government between you and your doctor.” Or his claim that “Obamacare means 20 million American will lose the health insurance they have and want to keep.”

Or the oft-repeated claim, most recently seen in an ad from one of those shadowy anonymous SuperPACs attacking Florida Sen. Ben Nelson, that the health care law’s cost will be $2 trillion, “double what we were promised.” Or the claim from Florida Gov. Rick Scott that a company with 20 employees “could go out of business” because of the law’s requirement to buy insurance (even though companies with fewer than 50 employees are exempt from that requirement).

All of these assertions have been rated “false” by the nonpartisan fact-checking site Politifact. The “business with 20 employees” canard from Scott was given the lowest rating for truthfulness: “Pants on Fire.” And yet Republicans keep repeating these and other proven falsehoods over and over and over again.

Now, some people would insist that that means they’re all a pack of liars who have such complete contempt for the American voter that they think you’ll believe anything.

To believe they’re not seriously delusional would mean that they believe, as Adolf Hitler stated in “Mein Kampf,” that “in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility … for the grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it, even after it has been nailed down, a fact which is known to all expert liars in this world.”

And that can’t be right. They can’t really think that way. Can they?

If Romney Ads Just Told the Truth

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The 1990 movie "Crazy People" stars Dudley Moore as an ad executive who suffers a nervous breakdown and starts writing ads based on honesty about what the products are really about.Ads like: "Metamucil: It Helps You Go to the Toilet. If You Don't Use It, You'll Get Cancer and Die." And "Jaguar: For Men Who'd Like [sex] From Beautiful Women They Hardly Know."

After his bosses have Moore's character committed to an insane asylum, the ads accidentally get released to the public and become runaway hits. The bosses, after finding out that they can't replicate Moore's success, turn to him and his fellow inmates to create ads for the new "honesty in advertising" craze.
I think about that movie a lot when watching political ads. I wonder what would happen if "honesty in advertising" took hold in the Romney campaign:

VOICEOVER: Mitt Romney. Some liberals call him a flip-flopper. He was for a path to citizenship for illegals, then he was against it. He opposed amendments to define marriage as between one man and one woman, then supported them. He supported a universal mandate for people to buy health insurance, then called it socialism. He said he was a moderate "through and through," and now he says he's "severely conservative." Sometimes, even he can't remember what his positions are.

ROMNEY: "I'm not familiar precisely with exactly what I said, but I stand by what I said, whatever it was."



VOICEOVER: But there's one thing Mitt Romney is consistent about and always has been. He's a Republican. Barack Obama isn't a Republican. So there.

BANNER: Mitt Romney. Vote for him. Because he's the Republican.

ROMNEY: I'm Mitt Romney, and I approved this message. At least for now.

Or how about this one:

VOICEOVER: Some liberals say Mitt Romney has a problem with the truth. He's claimed that Barack Obama didn't say it was unacceptable for Iran to have a nuclear weapon and that military options were still on the table.

OBAMA: "When I say we're not taking any option off the table, we mean it. ... I think both the Iranian and the Israeli governments recognize that when the United States says it is unacceptable for Iran to have a nuclear weapon, we mean what we say."

VOICEOVER: He's claimed that his position on the auto industry bailout was "exactly what President Obama followed." But in 2009, he wrote an op-ed piece in The New York Times urging lawmakers to "let Detroit go bankrupt."

VISUAL: Picture of newspaper headline: "Let Detroit Go Bankrupt by Mitt Romney."

VOICEOVER: He claimed that Barack Obama never mentioned the deficit or the debt in the State of the Union Address when he mentioned it six times.

VISUAL: Clips of President Obama talking about the deficit and the debt in his Jan. 24, 2012, State of the Union Speech. Fade to the Politifact website's "Pants on Fire" symbol.

VOICEOVER: But there's one thing you can trust about Mitt Romney: He, you know, looks like you. And Barack Obama is ... well, you know.

BANNER: Mitt Romney. Vote for him. He may be a liar, but he's not ... well, you know.

ROMNEY: I'm Mitt Romney, and I approve of this message. If you don't, then you're just calling everyone racist who doesn't agree with you.

Or this:

VOICEOVER: Some liberals, like the ones who write The Wall Street Journal's "Market Watch," say that Massachusetts under Mitt Romney was 47th in the nation in job creation. That during his tenure, Massachusetts' job growth was at 0.9 percent, far behind the national average of more than 5 percent. Some other liberals have said that Romney's top economic adviser has said that outsourcing American jobs to other countries is a "good thing." Meanwhile, under President Obama, we've had two years of positive job growth after suffering massive losses under the last Republican president. Liberals say these things, and ... well, yeah, they're true. But you should ignore all that and vote for Mitt Romney anyway, because he knows how to create jobs. Because he says he does.

BANNER: Mitt Romney. Never mind the facts. He'll create jobs this time. Really.

This is, after all, the essence of the messages I keep hearing from so-called conservatives turned born-again Romneyites: "Yeah, we don't really like him, but he's not Obama." Why not be up front about it?

How Can They Believe All That Crap?

Charles Johnson, in his blog post The New Tribalism at TPMCafe, explains how the teabaggers and other wingnuts continue to accept and embrace repeatedly discredited memes that are demonstrably untrue:

Within the tribe there's no need to be concerned with facts or accuracy; if the goal is to demonize a hated opponent, for example, anything and everything goes, including smears known to be false. That's because the objective is not to convince an impartial observer -- it's to reinforce the tribal bonds, the sense of belonging to something, with its own shared reality. That shared reality doesn't have to reflect actual reality; anybody who doesn't share it is by definition not part of the tribe, and therefore an enemy.

So, the next time you hear someone fuming about "death panels" or "Obamanation's Secret Muslim Agenda" or "Government takeover of health care/the financial industry/etc" remember: reason won't work. Reason just shows you're not one of the tribe, you're one of "them," and "they" must be resisted at all costs.

This isn't to say you shouldn't correct try to correct misinformation. People who haven't already made up their minds, the impartial observers Johnson mentions--in other words, people who aren't already part of the "tribe," need to hear it.

But forget trying to convince someone who's already in. To your hard core wingnut, it's not about the truth: it's about the tribe.

Tea Party Candidate: Stop Telling People What I Said!

Nevada GOP Senate candidate Sharron Angle is well-known for some nutty and some ominous statements, such as this one:

“You know, our Founding Fathers, they put that second amendment in there for a good reason and that was for the people to protect themselves against a tyrannical government. And in fact, Thomas Jefferson said it’s good for a country to have a revolution every 20 years.”“I hope that’s not where we’re going, but, you know, if this Congress keeps going the way it is, people are really looking toward those Second Amendment remedies and saying, ‘my goodness what can we do to turn this country around?’ I’ll tell you the first thing we need to do is take Harry Reid out.”

She later retracted the statement--sort of. But she hasn't backed off on her suggestion that her followers might engage in armed insurrection if they don't get their way.

But now, it seems that Angle is threatening to sue the Reid campaign--for reposting what she said on her own Website.

After the former state Rep won Nevada's Republican Senate primary, Angle's campaign took down most of its website, and later replaced it with a relaunched version that in some ways toned down her right-wing rhetoric. But Internet pages are rarely ever forgotten -- the Reid
campaign saved the old version, and put up a website called "The Real Sharron Angle," reproducing the old content.

Then, they say, the Angle campaign sent them a cease-and-desist letter, claiming misuse of copyrighted materials in the reposting of the old website -- which was, of course, being posted for the purposes of ridiculing Angle. The Reid campaign has in fact taken down the site, rerouting visitors to another website that goes after Angle's positions, "Sharron's Underground Bunker."

This is the thing about the TPers: the only way they think they can win is by concealing how nutty most of them really are. And they're willing to go to court to hide what they themselves have said, and to hide their nuttier beliefs until its too late. Fortunately, that's harder and harder to do in the age of the Internet.

The Big Lie

The Washington Monthly:

The accusation that the president and his team decline to use the words "terror" or "terrorism" wasn't just some off-hand line uttered by a Fox News personality -- it was a charge levied repeatedly by Republican House members, senators, and a certain former vice president, all of whom insisted with a straight face that the Commander in Chief refuses to use a word that he's repeatedly over and over again throughout his presidency.

The entire basis for two weeks of GOP accusations is nothing but a pathetic lie. There's simply no other way to put it.

Push back with the facts. The so-called 'liberal" media isn't going to do it.

So Obama's Not Treating Terrorism Seriously Enough, Eh?

U.S. Kills Top Qaeda Militant in Southern Somalia, September 14, 2009

NAIROBI, Kenya — American commandos killed one of the most wanted Islamic militants in Africa in a daylight raid in southern Somalia on Monday, according to American and Somali officials, an indication of the Obama administration’s willingness to use combat troops strategically against Al Qaeda’s growing influence in the region.

TalibanLeader In Pakistan Killed by Predator Strike, August 7, 2009

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — American and Pakistani officials said Friday they were increasingly convinced that an American drone strike two days earlier had killed Baitullah Mehsud, Pakistan’s enemy No.1 and the leader of its feared Taliban movement.

Terror Case Is Called One of the Most Serious in Years (September 24, 2009)

WASHINGTON — Since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, senior government officials have announced dozens of terrorism cases that on closer examination seemed to diminish as legitimate threats. The accumulating evidence against a Denver airport shuttle driver suggests he may be different, with some investigators calling his case the most serious in years.

Documents filed in Brooklyn against the driver, Najibullah Zazi, contend he bought chemicals needed to build a bomb — hydrogen peroxide, acetone and hydrochloric acid — and in doing so, Mr. Zazi took a critical step made by few other terrorism suspects.

If government allegations are to be believed, Mr. Zazi, a legal immigrant from Afghanistan, had carefully prepared for a terrorist attack. He attended a Qaeda training camp in Pakistan, received training in explosives and stored in his laptop computer nine pages of instructions for making bombs from the same kind of chemicals he had bought.

Hosam Maher Husein Smadi was arrested Sept. 24, 2009, after authorities said he parked a vehicle laden with government-supplied fake explosives in the underground parking garage of Fountain Place, a 60-story tower in downtown Dallas.
The arrest was part of an FBI sting operation that began more than six months earlier, when an agent monitoring an online extremist Web site discovered Smadi espousing jihad against the United States.

Steve Benen over at Political Animal Summarizes it nicely:

President Obama hasn't just ordered predator-drone strikes to target terrorists, he's also used ground forces to capture and kill terrorist leaders. What's more, the administration has had great success in taking terrorist suspects into custody before they could launch their planned attacks, as the Najibullah Zazi, Talib Islam, and Hosam Maher Husein Smadi incidents help demonstrate.

Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R-Mich.), the ranking Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, was quoted in the editorial as saying the entire Obama administration considers itself "first responders dealing with the aftermath of an attack," while Republicans "believe in a forward-looking approach to stopping these attacks before they happen."

Even the most rabid partisan should be able to notice that this is idiotic and the exact opposite of reality.

Guess Krauthammer, DeMint, Cheney, Hoekstra, King, et. al. must have just "forgotten" about the successes we've had this year. Or, they're, you know, lying.

Push back with the facts.

The Lazy Way to Successful Punditry

Latest Newspaper Column:

I tell you, folks, I'm weakening. I'm about to do something I thought I'd sworn off forever.

I'm considering joining the Republican Party again.

Some of my long-term readers may recall my joining the GOP back in '05 and '06 and writing about it in this column. Not because of any ideological change of heart, but precisely because the GOP had no actual ideology other than IOKIYAR: It's OK If You're A Republican.

Back in those days, the knee-jerk Republican defense of everything from adultery to sexually propositioning teenagers to shoplifting suggested to me that whatever I did, I'd always find a host of defenders so long as I had the correct political affiliation. Not that I was going to do any of those things, mind you, but it was just nice to know.

Well, I left the party, but I have to say, I'm sorely tempted to join up again. Not just for the complete lack of moral accountability (even though the David Vitter and Mark Sanford cases show that that's still alive and well), but because it would make writing this column so much easier.

See, I'm basically a lazy person. It's a real drag sometimes when I'm writing this column to go back and actually check various sources to make sure that the things I'm saying about people have at least some basis in fact.

But if I were a conservative Republican, I wouldn't have to do any of that stuff. If I saw something that looked outrageous enough, I could write about it without having to check around and see if it actually happened. And if it turned out not to be true -- hey, who cares?

As an example, let's take de facto Republican Party leader Rush Limbaugh. Limbaugh recently went on the air with a real blockbuster of a story: Time magazine reporter Joe Klein had uncovered a thesis written by Barack Obama while Obama was a student at Columbia University.

The thesis was supposedly harshly critical of the U.S. Constitution, stating, "The so-called Founders did not allow for economic freedom. While political freedom is supposedly a cornerstone of the document, the distribution of wealth is not even mentioned. While many believed that the new Constitution gave them liberty, it instead fitted them with the shackles of hypocrisy."

Only problem was, as Limbaugh was informed almost immediately, the story was a complete hoax, a satire posted on an allegedly humorous blog called "Jumping In Pools."

Joe Klein himself denied ever writing such a piece. "It is completely false," Klein posted on Time's online blog "Swampland." "I've never seen Obama's thesis. I have no idea where this report comes from -- but I can assure you that it's complete nonsense."

Rush, as the kids say, had been punk'd.

No matter, Limbaugh smoothly stated in his very next radio hour. He repeated the false quotes, then admitted that they were probably fake, but -- and this is the cool part -- he still stood by them because (a) he himself had been misquoted recently, and (b) he "knows Obama thinks it."

You can see how, to a lazy person such as myself, this would be very attractive. As a liberal, I can't get away with, for example, saying Sarah Palin once actually claimed she had foreign policy experience because she could "see Russia from her house."

As a liberal columnist, I'd have to point out that Palin never actually said that, but that that quote was instead from "Saturday Night Live" performer Tina Fey's hilarious impression of Palin. If I didn't, you can bet there'd be a deluge of letters lambasting me for making something up. And the defense "Well, it's a lie, sure, but I know Sarah Palin thinks that way" just wouldn't cut it.

But if I were a wingnut -- boy howdy, anything goes. I could make a crazy accusation, find out it's false within the hour, and stand by it anyway. Even after it's shown to be a lie, I could circulate the story on the Internet via chain e-mails that circle around in the Internet forever.

It's really tempting. Someone talk me out of it.

This Is a Great Idea!

I know I get sick to death of conservative family members, and some annoying strangers, spamming me with those e-mails some lying sack of shit has written and spread worldwide, full of outright lies and phony stories designed to stir up rage over things that never happened and fear over proposals no one ever made. I like to go to Factcheck.org or snopes.com, find the articlle on there that refutes it (and they are, invariably, completely untrue) and send it to everyone on the recipient list. Well now MediaMatters.org has compiled a handy resource for countering that bullshit. Their EMail Checker:

....will provide ready-made responses to counter conservative misinformation contained in the most common and most egregious chain and viral emails. This tool will allow you to swiftly respond to emails with fact-based replies.

Cut, paste, send. Pretty soon, I've found they stop sending the e-mails.

Sarah Palin Is Lying

Former Governor Palin:

The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama's "death panel" so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their "level of productivity in society," whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil.

FACT CHECK No death panel in health care bill:

Nothing in the legislation would carry out such a bleak vision. The provision that has caused the uproar would instead authorize Medicare to pay doctors for counseling patients about end-of-life care, if the patient wishes. Here are some questions and answers on the controversy:

Q: Does the health care legislation bill promote "mercy killing," or euthanasia?

A: No.

More at the link.

Let us repeat: there is nothing whatsoever in this bill or in any health care bill currently being considered that can even be interpreted to create any sort of "death panel" or any mechanism that assesses a person's "level of productivity in society" to determine if they get medical care.

When people talk about the current political climate, they often bemoan the lack of "civility" in discourse,. In fact, Governor Palin herself, after her outrageous falsehood, has called for more "civility" in the health care debate.

But con artists like Caribou Barbie exploit good people's natural reluctance to call a lie a lie in order to run their con game. They know that nice people hate to go up to someone, even someone telling the most egregious lie, and go "you know what? You're lying." They depend on it.

Well, I'm not a nice person. And I'll come right out and say it:

Sarah Palin is lying. She is lying to try to scare people away from health care reform. She is lying becuase, if she told the actual truth about health care reform, she knows people would probably support it. She cannot win the debate with the truth, so she lies. She lies shamelessly and in such a way as to insult the intelligence of Americans. And, after moaning and whining about people talking about her family, she holds up her Down's syndrome baby like a bloody shirt because she thinks it'll make people all teary eyed and more reluctant to call her on her bullshit.

This is such a transparent lie that it shows her utter contempt for her supporters. She's treating you like rubes. Like marks. Like sheep who can be herded into the shearing pen and fleeced at leisure. She thinks you're all too stupid to question her.

And this is the person being touted as the GOP's next Presidential candidate? She is despicable.

The New Theme Of Right WIng Racism

Tancredo Claims Sotomayor In "Latino KKK"

Former GOP Congressman Tom Tancredo: If you belong to an organization called La Raza, in this case, which is, from my point of view anyway, nothing more than a Latino -- it's a counterpart -- a Latino KKK without the hoods or the nooses. If you belong to something like that in a way that's going to convince me and a lot of other people that it's got nothing to do with race. Even though the logo of La Raza is "All for the race. Nothing for the rest." What does that tell you?

Well it tells me that Tancredo's a lying sack of shit for one thing. That's not the "logo" for La Raza. The motto of the group is actually ""Strengthening America by promoting the advancement of Latino families."

It also tells me Tancredo's a hypocrite, since he was notably silent when La Raza (actually, the nation's largest civil rights organization for Latinos) endorsed George Dubbya Bush's pick for Attorney General, namely Alberto Gonzales.

But Tancredo's attitude is a shining example of the new and improved right wing racism, which holds that it's okay, sort of, to be black or Latino, so long as you don't ever act black or Latino, or ever mention being black or Latino, or ever admit that being black or Latino has an effect on your life and your world view. And for God's sake don't ever belong to any Black or Latino church or organization. Oh, and I almost forgot: don't ever have the effrontery to ask that your name be pronounced correctly. Then it's YOU who's the "real racist."

As it turns out, however, someone's actually run some numbers on Judge Sonia Sotomayor's opinions, and, as usual, the facts have a well-known liberal bias:

Other than Ricci, Judge Sotomayor has decided 96 race-related cases while on the court of appeals.

Of the 96 cases, Judge Sotomayor and the panel rejected the claim of discrimination roughly 78 times and agreed with the claim of discrimination 10 times; the remaining 8 involved other kinds of claims or dispositions. Of the 10 cases favoring claims of discrimination, 9 were unanimous. (Many, by the way, were procedural victories rather than judgments that discrimination had ccurred.) Of those 9, in 7, the unanimous panel included at least one Republican-appointed judge. In the one divided panel opinion, the dissent’s point dealt only with the technical question of whether the criminal defendant in that case had forfeited his challenge to the jury selection in his case. So Judge Sotomayor rejected discrimination-related claims by a margin of roughly 8 to 1.

I'll put those numbers up against one offhand, out of context quote any day.

But, you know, don't let the facts get in the way. You've got a base to placate here, even if it drives a bigger wedge between the Republican party and Latinos, not to mention women. I mean, when you automatically assume a Latino woman is an "affirmative action" pick on the day she's nominated, I don't see how you're going to gain much ground calling anyone else racist.

Enjoy that minority status, boys. Looks like you're fixin' to hang onto it a while.

RNC shells out $150K for Palin fashions During Financial Crisis

Jeanne Cummings - Politico.com

The Republican National Committee has spent more than $150,000 to clothe and accessorize vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin and her family since her surprise pick by John McCain in late August.

According to financial disclosure records, the accessorizing began in early September and included bills from Saks Fifth Avenue in St. Louis and New York for a combined $49,425.74.

The records also document a couple of big-time shopping trips to Neiman Marcus in Minneapolis, including one $75,062.63 spree in early September.

The RNC also spent $4,716.49 on hair and makeup through September after reporting no such costs in August.


Makes John Edwards' 400 dollar haircut seem like pretty small potatoes, dunnit?

And it gets better. They actually spent more money on makeup for McCain's old mug than they did for makeup for Caribou Barbie:

The make-up artist to the wannabe-stars is getting paid beaucoup bucks to make McCain, 72, more telegenic.

Tifanie White, who reportedly has done makeup for the shows "So You Think You Can Dance" and "American Idol," was paid a total of $8,672.55 in September by the McCain-Palin campaign, according to the campaign's latest monthly financial report filed this week with the Federal Election Commission. She was paid $5,583.43 the previous month, records show.

We asked McCain campaign spokesman Brian Rogers whether McCain was happy with the American Idol make-up artist's work, and whether Ms. White also does makeup for McCain's naturally telegenic vice presidential running mate, Sarah Palin. Rogers replied via email, "No comment."

Oh, and as it turns out, the reports of Mrs. Obama's lobster dinner at the Waldorf? Hoax.

The source who told us last week about Michelle Obama getting lobster and caviar delivered to her room at the Waldorf-Astoria must have been under the influence of a mind-altering drug. She was not even staying at the Waldorf. We regret the mistake, and our former source is going to regret it, too. Bread and water would be too good for such disinformation.

See, guys, there's this thing called "Fact-checking" that you might want to look into before you print something some campaign shill whispers in your ear. I know it's a lot like work, but it's kind of important.

Liberal media my ass. Our biggest problem is lazy media.