“The GOP Manufactured Freak-Out”: What The Constitution And The Democratic Platform Have In Common
Paul Ryan, Fox News, the Christian Broadcasting Network, and assorted media figures everywhere seem to be fascinated by the same omission from the Democratic Party’s platform.
The word “God” is notably missing from this year’s 40-page document, as David Brody of the Christian Broadcasting Network first pointed out.
“We need a government that stands up for the hopes, values, and interests of working people, and gives everyone willing to work hard the chance to make the most of their God-given potential,” the party’s 2008 platform said.
This year, a similar paragraph instead states, “We gather to reclaim the basic bargain that built the largest middle class and the most prosperous nation on Earth — the simple principle that in America, hard work should pay off, responsibility should be rewarded, and each one of us should be able to go as far as our talent and drive take us.”
The Democratic platform honors religious freedom, but given the absence of the “g” word, the manufactured freak-out is now well underway.
It’s tempting to delve into an extended explanation of why, for believers, God probably doesn’t need perfunctory references in a political party platform, and why this trumped up story is silly, even by 2012 standards, but let’s instead consider another tidbit of news.
The United States Constitution — the foundation of our government, the basis for our laws, and a model for democracies around the globe for generations — includes no references to God. Literally, not one.
If the Constitution doesn’t mention God, I think the political world can probably keep its apoplexy in check over the Democratic platform. Unless Republicans and news organizations are going to start condemning the Constitution, too, demanding an explanation for its secular nature, let’s relax a bit.
BY: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, September 5, 2012
“Is That A Rhetorical Question?”: The Obvious Answer To The “Better Off” Question
Much of the Sunday shows were dominated by a simple question: asking Democrats whether Americans are better off than they were four years ago. Dems inexplicably seemed to be caught off guard by the question, and struggled with the answer. Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley (D) even felt compelled to clarify his “no” answer from yesterday.
This morning, Democrats tried to get back on message.
With a definitive “absolutely,” Obama campaign spokeswoman Stephanie Cutter said the country was moving in the right direction by pointing to job growth and the auto industry.
“By any measure the country has moved forward over the last four years,” she said on NBC’s Today. “It might not be as fast as people hoped. The president agrees with that. He knows we need to do more. That’s what this week is about, laying out a road map of how we can continue this progress, how we can continue moving the country forward.” […]
This attack was echoed by Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, the Democratic National Convention chairman…. “[T]he answer is yes, we are better off. But we’ve got to keep on working harder.”
While Dems struggled with this yesterday, I think they may be missing the importance of this opportunity. If Republicans and many in the media are going to be focused on the “are you better off” question, it’s a chance for Democrats to remind the public of something much of the country has forgotten — just how cataclysmically terrible things were before.
Indeed, I’m at a loss to explain how this is even a debate. Whether you love the president or hate him is irrelevant — four years ago the economy was shrinking, now it’s growing; four years ago the nation was hemorrhaging jobs, now it’s adding jobs. The auto industry, the stock market, American manufacturing, the deficit — they’re all better now than when Obama took office.
Put it this way: Mitt Romney thinks the American economy has improved under Obama.
Consider this gem.
In his remarks [Friday], Romney also acknowledged the economy was getting better — something he has said before….
“And [President Obama]’s going to say the economy is getting better,” Romney said. “Thank heavens it’s getting better. It’s getting better not because of him, it’s in spite of him and what he’s done.”
Notice, in this quote from earlier in the year, Romney said twice in three sentences that he believes the economy is “getting better.”
Or how about this stunning exchange between Romney and conservative radio host Laura Ingraham:
INGRAHAM: You’ve also noted that there are signs of improvement on the horizon in the economy. How do you answer the president’s argument that the economy is getting better in a general election campaign if you yourself are saying it’s getting better?
ROMNEY: Well, of course, it’s getting better. The economy always gets better after a recession. There is always a recovery.
INGRAHAM: Isn’t that a hard argument to make, if you’re saying, like, OK, he inherited this recession, and he took a bunch of steps and tried to turn the economy around. And now, we’re seeing more jobs, but vote against him anyway? Isn’t that a hard argument to make? Is that a stark enough contrast?
ROMNEY: Have you got a better one, Laura? This happens to be the truth.
If the president’s critics want to argue that conditions haven’t improved enough, fine. If they want to argue that conditions have improved, but Obama shouldn’t get credit, fine. If they want to say conditions would be even better if we’d tried a different course, we can at least have the debate.
But to say a growing economy that’s adding jobs is worse than a shrinking economy that’s losing jobs is demonstrably ridiculous. Is the country better off than it was in the midst of a global crash four years ago? Is that a rhetorical question?
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, September 3, 2012
“A Parallel Republican Universe”: How Mitt Romney Keeps Lying Through His Big White Teeth
“We’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact-checkers,” says Neil Newhouse, a Romney pollster.
A half dozen fact-checking organizations and websites have refuted Romney’s claims that Obama removed the work requirement from the welfare law and will cut Medicare benefits by $716 billion.
Last Sunday’s New York Times even reported on its front page that Romney has been “falsely charging” President Obama with removing the work requirement. Those are strong words from the venerable Times. Yet Romney is still making the false charge. Ads containing it continue to be aired.
Presumably the Romney campaign continues its false claims because they’re effective. But this raises a more basic question: How can they remain effective when they’ve been so overwhelmingly discredited by the media?
The answer is the Republican Party has developed three means of bypassing the mainstream media and its fact-checkers.
The first is by repeating big lies so often in TV spots – financed by a mountain of campaign money – that the public can no longer recall (if it ever knew) that the mainstream media and its fact-checkers have found them to be lies.
A series of court decisions and regulatory changes, beginning with the Supreme Court’s ruling in Citizen’s United vs. Federal Election Commission, opened the floodgates to big money. Fully a quarter of the $350 million amassed by Super PACs through the end of July came from just ten donors, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, a non-partisan group that tracks such spending.
And through political front groups masquerading as nonprofits charitable, like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, corporations and Wall Street banks are making secret contributions — without even their own shareholders knowing.
The second means the GOP has developed to protect its lies is by discrediting the mainstream media – asserting it’s run by “liberal elites” that can’t be trusted to tell the truth. “I am tired of the elite media protecting Barack Obama by attacking Republicans,” Newt Gingrich charged at a Republican debate last January, in what’s become a standard GOP attack line.
To be sure, the mainstream media hasn’t always called it correctly. Initially it bought the Bush administration’s claim there were “weapons of mass destruction” in Iraq. But the mainstream media is at least committed to professional standards that separate truth from fiction, seek objective facts, correct errors, and disseminate the truth.
The third mechanism is by using its own misinformation outlets – led by Fox News, Rush Limbaugh and his yell-radio imitators, book publisher Regnery, and the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal, along with a right-wing blogosphere – to spread the lies, or at least spread doubt about what’s true.
Together, these three mechanisms are creating a parallel Republican universe of Orwellian dimension – where anything can be asserted, where pollsters and political advisers are free to create whatever concoction of lies will help elect their candidate, and where “fact-checkers” are as irrelevant and intrusive as is the truth.
Democracy cannot thrive in such a place. To the contrary, history teaches that this is where demagogues take root.
The Romney campaign has decided it won’t be dictated by fact-checkers. But a society without trusted arbiters of what is true and what is false is vulnerable to every lie imaginable.
By: Robert Reich, Robert Reich Blog, August 28, 2012
“There Goes Lyin’ Ryan”: Marathon Runner, Marathon Liar
The latest controversy involving Rep. Paul “Lyin’” Ryan concerns whether, in a recent interview, willfully misrepresented the time it took him to run a marathon, some 20-odd years ago. He claims it was under three hours, but apparently it was actually over four. While I do believe he’s probably deliberately lying here, rather than innocently “misremembering” (runners tell me they remember their marathon times like other people remember their SAT scores), normally I think it would be way too petty to make a big deal out of it.
However, given that: 1) for some time now, Ryan has had a reputation for playing fast and loose with the truth, a reputation that notably enhanced by his convention address, a speech that was unusually mendacious even by the standards of the contemporary G.O.P.; and 2) during the 2000 election, the Republicans, and (especially) their enablers in the mainstream media, hung Al Gore for far less (see here, for example), I think going after Paul Ryan for this is totally fair game.
Yes, it’s trivial BS. And no, I don’t by any means believe that this should be the focal point of attacks on Paul Ryan — the fact that he and his party are such ruthless champions of the immiseration of working people should be the main focus of said attacks, always.
That said, ridicule is a powerful weapon, and one which progressives should not shy away from (though sadly, some of the more misguidedly high-minded ones among us do). Besides, if you think I’m going to pass up the opportunity to crack snarky Rosie Ruiz jokes at Ryan’s expense, you are so, so wrong. Clearly!
By: Kathleen Geier, Washington Monthly Political Animal, September 1, 2012
“Look Into My Lies”: Paul Ryan Uses Fact Checkers As Campaign Surrogates
The old saying goes “There are no referees in politics.” But there are fact checkers — Politifact, FactCheck.org, The Fact Checker. These “independent” seers like to think they’re defending the truth. But Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan have figured out how to use them to spread lies.
Many of these fact checkers peer into the words of both major parties and do their best to suggest that both sides are the same – despite the fact, for instance, that the GOP’s nominee Mitt Romney has more “Pants on Fire” rulings than any national politician.
Rarely are fact checkers as unanimous and righteous in their condemnation of a falsehood as they have been of the Romney campaign’s claim that the president took the work requirement out of Welfare. It’s a flat out lie. But it’s also the first ad that has moved the dial for Romney. You may have listened as a Romney pollster, when confronted with that fact that the attack is false, said, “We aren’t going to let our campaign be dictated by fact checkers.”
Instead of letting fact checkers edit their campaign, Romney’s team has a better use for fact checkers: campaign surrogates.
The “birther” scandal shows that debunking lies does little to quell the lie and much more to spread it. It’s a tactic Mitt Romney has used effectively for a year now as he’s accused the president of “apologizing for America.” That never happened. But to debunk the lie, you have to repeat it. It’s classic “He’ll look like hell denying it” politics.
Although modern politicians are generally too smart to repeat lies about themselves, the Romney camp knows the fact checkers will. So how do you dictate what the media will be talking about tomorrow? Make purposely deceptive statements about the issues you want to highlight.
What are Paul Ryan and Mitt Romney’s biggest weaknesses? Medicare; the auto bailout; a hugely unpopular Congress and Ryan’s record of voting for Bush-era surplus-blowing policies.
So Ryan systematically made an “attack by assertion rather than accusation” about each of these issues. By making these attacks in deceptive ways that either ignored or left out crucial facts, he forced the media to repeat his assertions.
From the morning Romney announced Ryan as his running mate, the candidates have been making the assertion that the president funneled – or sometimes “robbed” — $716 billion from Medicare to pay for Obamacare. This assertion is a classic half-truth in several ways. The money comes from savings that extend the life of the program. Ryan voted to keep the cuts but not to fund ObamaCare.
But you see? We’ve fallen into the precise trap that Ryan set.
While you and I and the fact checkers debunk his half-truth, we’re ignoring the larger issue. Ryan makes huge cuts to current seniors by gutting Medicaid now and then turning Medicare into a voucher program that passes the costs on to seniors. Point: Romney/Ryan.
The best part of this super-sneaky strategy is that it’s fool-proof. Republicans can admit what they’re doing, yet fact checkers and incredulous Democrats still fall into the trap. “Not only was everything Congressman Ryan said factually accurate, but by the Chicago folks highlighting this, they’re advancing our argument,” Sean Spicer, the chief spokesperson for the RNC, said today.
And I have to admit they’re right. Look at the one GM factory in Jannesville that Ryan brought up, deceptively blaming the president for its closure today even though it was scheduled to close during the Bush Administration. We’re doing it again!
Instead of talking about the dozens of GM factories the president helped save or the hundreds of thousands of industrial jobs that the auto rescue protected, we’re talking about one that’s closed. Point: Romney/Ryan.
Instead of talking about how Paul Ryan’s budget increases the deficit, we’re talking about how he voted against Simpson-Bowles. Instead of talking about Paul Ryan’s role in this incredibly unpopular Congress that held the debt limit hostage for a debt deal they won’t even honor, we’re talking about the U.S. credit rating.
These lies are clearly strategically placed, which becomes obvious when you think about what Ryan was really arguing. He wants fewer cuts to government? He wants the government to decide which factories stay open? He wants to protect the poor but cut tens of millions of them from Medicaid?
These aren’t his beliefs, they’re his smokescreen. As long as we’re parsing his words, we’re not talking about how harmful his vision for America actually would be. And that’s obviously what Paul Ryan and the GOP want. The entire convention theme “We Built It!” is based on a deceptive misquote from the president.
It’s nearly impossible to imagine the president lying the way Ryan or Romney do. But if he doesn’t find some way to break through to the truth, the real referees in politics — the voters — may end up being swept up in the tide of lies.
BY: Jason Sattler, The National Memo, August 31, 2012
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