Here are two headlines from today’s Think Progress that ought to crack you up: Paul Ryan: I Didn’t Vote For The Defense Cuts I Voted For and Romney Says His Plan To Cut Taxes On The Rich Doesn’t Actually Cut Taxes On The Rich. If you bother investigating, you’ll discover some of the most egregious lying you are ever likely to see from any national candidates in your lifetime. You certainly have never seen anything like it so far in your life, and I don’t care how old you are. Even if you remember the Hoover Administration, you have never seen two candidates for the White House lie like this. It has never happened before. I can’t say it is likely to happen again in the next 225 years, either.
It’s hard to say that one lie is bigger than the other, since both lies are big enough to blot out sunlight for a century or more. Mitt Romney actually said that his tax plan is revenue neutral for rich people but will help the middle class, which is the complete opposite of the truth. Paul Ryan simply lied about what he voted for and talked a bunch of meaningless gibberish.
These men aren’t fit to serve in the White House. They aren’t even fit to run for office. They aren’t even fit to be interviewed on television. They should be thrown off every set they appear on for their audacious lack of respect for the truth, the voter, and the country.
“I can’t say it is likely to happen again in the next 225 years, either.”
I say it’s very likely to happen again 4 years from now, because now candidates know they won’t be called on it.
We’ve entered a post-truth era.(So long as you are Republican.)
No, I’m sorry.
Mittens is a special case. And his zombified sidekick is taking after him.
What makes them special? They’ve been lying for months, and never get called on it. The press is loathe to point it out, which just enables more.
Other candidates will begin to do so after seeing this, because they know there’s absolutely no penalty for doing it.
Actually, there is a penalty for doing it. That is why you see a giant yawning gap open up in the race at precisely the moment that Paul Ryan opened his yap at the RNC and spouted a ton of lies:
Mittens has been lying since the GOP primary began.
And he’s paying a price for it. People don’t trust him and they don’t like him and he now has a reputation as a dishonest, soulless politician who doesn’t stand for anything and takes every side of an issue (eventually). He’s losing badly, if you haven’t noticed. And once he and Ryan hit the spotlight and decided to double down on the lying, the press called them on it and they plummeted in the polls.
I don’t know, I think R&R have shown that the press as it currently operates is either unwilling or incapable (possibly both) of effectively debunking Republican lies, and I think that the current level of dishonesty may establish a new baseline going forward.
You have to keep in mind that Obama has a few factors going in his favor that the next Democratic presidential candidate either will not or may not have – 1) a huge charisma advantage; 2) incumbency (constant media exposure has already defined Obama, which repels the unlimited attack ads to some extent); and 3) direct involvement in the events that R&R are lying about, which allows him to explain the events as they really happened.
Take away those factors, make the Republican nominee a better and more natural liar, and maybe the lies gain enough traction (bolstered by endless repetition through unlimited attack ads) to flip the presidency to the Republicans. Heck, tick unemployment up a few tenths of a point and/or produce a sub-standard DNC and maybe Romney wins this election, warts and all.
I agree with Booman and yet share your frustration that so many folks are so easily bamboozled. Romney will get way more votes than makes sense to me. How anyone not on the lunatic fringe can pull the lever for him makes no sense to me.
Now??
Yet…they’ll be running the country soon!
No! And you’re back, fucking wonderful….
Ranger…is it really that bad?
Offered without comment:
Look, Progressives…your model doesn’t work, and you know it (see Greece, or Spain, or California, or Illinois…)
Games Up…the needy cannot enslave the able.,,
Your ideology is dead…
I’m sorry…your ideology isn’t dead…
It’s Bankrupt!
Unlike, say, most red states which surely don’t take the lion’s share of federal money. Oh, wait, they do.
Booman, am I really reallly,reallllly, realllllllly not allowed to call this guy an asshole?
Really?
Relax. You’ll live.
Enjoy the insight into the teamented mind.
Look, Progressives…your model doesn’t work, and you know it (see Greece, or Spain, or California, or Illinois…)
Sorry to have to keep reminding you that facts have a liberal bias, but it’s true. In the case of both Spain and Greence, it was the Conservative governments in each chase that screwed the pooch. The people in both cases elected Socialist governments(which weren’t really such, but such is life in the neo-liberal era) to clean up the mess, or give them a shot to straighten things out. Since leftish parties these days also subscribe to neo-liberalism, they failed to make things better. In fact, Greece’s Socialist Party went along with the IMF/World Bank bullcrap. And both cases resulted in Cons returning to power since neither Socialist party made things right.
And in the case of California, it’s the 2/3rds rule that has crippled the state’s ability to react to the crisis. This allows the Republican minority to block any tax increases to offset a loss of revenue during an economic crisis, the end result being shuttered schools, police and fire departments, furloughs of state employees and of course a complete inability to enact a stimulus to revive the economy.
California is an example of the Republican solution to the problem, not the liberal solution.
Booman, may I say how sweet it is that you let this puppy keep posting? It really is adorable.
And while I’d love to watch him grow up to be an enlightened liberal, I keep reminding myself that, come November 6th, he’s likely to run into the street and be hit by the car of life. So I won’t get too attached, but I’ll miss him.
Wow!
Within Hours, Mitt Romney Takes Back Everything He Said About Preexisting Conditions
http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2012/09/within-hours-mitt-romney-takes-back-everything-he-said
-about-preexisting-conditio via @motherjones
And as Drum notes in the link:
“It would also be nice if the mainstream press reported the fact that Romney doesn’t plan to make sure those with preexisting conditions can get health coverage just as loudly as they reported his original misstatement. I’m not holding my breath.”
Mitt lies again, won’t get called on it. It’s quite astounding.
Ohhhhhhhh NO!!! His base won’t let him get away with that.
Remember, the only people more likely to scrutinize the meanderings of Mittens Romney than left/progressives are the teatards. They’ll roast him alive.
It’s okay. Mitt’s campaign has already walked it back. Shortly after this very public statement by Mitt, his campaign released a statement saying he won’t be doing anything about pre-existing conditions on a federal level.
Without fanfare, of course, so people who watched Mitt say that on TV may never hear about the walkback.
One interesting thing about Ryan’s lie is that he got some pretty vigorous pushback from Nora O’Donnell. Political discourse has been trapped in a surreal otherworld between truth and post-truth for a few years now, with the wingnuts and their captured politicians sealed into a Fox-generated virtual reality and the rest of us trying to talk to them. It’s a conversation made up entirely of non sequiturs. I think this absurdity has finally gotten to the political press — the faux balance mechanism can only stretch so far.
You’d think that constructing an entire world out of “facts” that are easily refuted by everyday experience would be a very maladaptive strategy. Eventually something you consider to be beyond the bounds of possibility will come out of the blue and bite you in the ass. I have every hope that the reality of Obamacare’s advantages will one day — say around 2015 or 2016 — be found to have that kind of teeth.
Yeah, I thought O’Donnell’s willingness to pursue Paul’s lies was worthwhile, and her exasperation with Lyin’ Ryan’s unwillingness to come clean was interesting.
OTOH, Gregory wasn’t even quick enough in the interview to do the direct followups with Romney on health care reform and sequestrated defense cuts. Instead, Dancin’ Dave sandbagged him after the interview and asked the panel to help him do so. He either didn’t know his stuff during the interview, or he’s a completely gutless journalist. I believe the second option is most true.
A long time ago, people responded to lying, crooked, and unqualified candidates by saying they wouldn’t vote for them for dogcatcher. Applied to Rmoney, it has more resonance.
the ones who believe a lie if it’s repeated often
“War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.” ― George Orwell, 1984
To give credit where it’s due, it was really Bush junior (and the Rove team) who first really exploited the dual developments of the alternate right wing echo chamber universe (which willingly embraces a different set of facts) and a mainstream national media unwilling to label a lie a lie. (Remember the enormous controversy and outrage when progressive activists and occasional pols first started using the L-word to characterize Bush’s rationales for invading Iraq?)
Romney, Ryan, and the other exploiters of the Teahadists are simply taking the Bush strategy to another level. It will be very interesting, once the exit polls and all are done this year, to see whether strategists conclude the willingness of some national media now to call Romney and Ryan on their bullshit is outweighed by the number of people who get their “news” from the echo chamber or paid ads and therefore are unreached or unaffected by actual fact-checking. That may influence the degree to which this becomes a future norm.
Well maybe we now understand why Romney picked Ryan.
Kindred spirits.
I share those two stories with you over nachos, you write a post about them, and I don’t even get a tip of the hat?
Sigh.
Well…who made those nachos? I don’t get any credit for that?
For the record, I steal CG’s ideas all the time.
photo or it didn’t happen. and if you used my salsa recipe, where’s my credit? ;-P
the convention narrative was an amazing thing to watch in totality last week. it shifted the conversation enough where I’m even seeing Jeff Flake get hammered here in AZ for wanting to cut Medicare. The more they lies, the more helpful it becomes to break the fever
Can someone explain to me the point of a “revenue-neutral” tax cut. I don’t think anyone ultimately care’s what their tax-rate is, they care how much money they have to send to the government at the end of the day.
If you save me $2000 by cutting my tax-rate, then increase my taxes $2000 by eliminating deductions, you’re just shuffling money around.
The point is to make the code less complex, which it’s then argued you’ll have an economy that can grow faster, thereby increasing revenue.
In reality, it’s so they can push rates lower, and then reinsert other deductions.
I agree this republican team can’t talk without lieing—but America was founded on a lie “All men are created equal” and we haven’t overcome the irony of that yet either. The Romney/Ryan candidatesare are just trying to walk the phrase back farther and faster than anyone since the henchman George Wallace.