Republican Lies -- Late Winter/Early Spring 2009


Have you seen the billboards advertising the new show on Fox? It's called Lie to Me. Fox knows their audience well -- after all, as far as I know they're the only network that has claimed the right to lie, and had that right awarded by a court ruling.

With Republican lies flying so thick and fast lately, I thought I'd catalog just a few, as a public service, to help people keep track. First up: Piyush (Bobby) Jindal, Republican governor of Louisianna. Jindal drew the hot spot to give the Republican response to President Obama's first address to a joint session of Congress. Clearly out of his league going up against a man who is at the moment probably America's best speaker, Piyush went down swinging, and his lackluster performance and condescending tone drew criticism not only from liberals but also from notable conservative writers such as David Brooks. Rush Limbaugh questioned Brooks' conservative credentials after that move, but Rush seems to have a different definition of conservative -- for Brooks, being conservative seems to refer to a principled ideology, whereas for Rush it seems to simply mean supporting any and all right-wing lies and liars, no matter how far removed they might be from the truth and/or common sense.

When I heard Piyush's speech, a couple of lies seemed to stand out very clearly. He criticized Obama's stimulus plan for being "larded with wasteful spending," and for exampes he mentioned a magnetic levitation high-speed rail line from Las Vegas to Disneyland, and "$140 million for something called 'volcano monitoring.'" Well, for Gulf Coast states such as Jindal's Louisianna, the U.S. weather service does something called "hurricane monitoring," but Jindal didn't suggest this is "wasteful spending," and I doubt that anyone living in a state that has volcanos, such as Alaska and Washington, would consider volcano monitoring wasteful if it happened to save his or her life. And that magnetic levitation train? China already has one of these (they're way ahead of the U.S. on this one), such a project has been studied, and might even make sense, given the level of car traffic between L.A. and Las Vegas. But is it in the bill? When Republican Representative Mary Bono Mack repeated this lie a couple of weeks after Jindal, a Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee member called her staff to verify the claim, and Mack's staffer called back to admit that "It's not in the bill."

As Jindal's back luck would have it, he actually had to admit to telling at least one lie in his speech. No, it wasn't either of the two I already mentioned. It turns out that the hokey little Katrina tale he told didn't really happen -- a number of people had mentioned that the story didn't quite pass the smell test, and a little checking revealed that, sure enough, Piyush wasn't actually in New Orleans during the Katrina floods.

Meanwhile, Representative Zach Wamp of Tennessee recently told a reporter in an on-camera spot that "Half the people that are uninsured today choose to remain uninsured." These people choose to "go naked," as Mr. Wamp put it, because they want to save the money that they would have to spend on insurance. If this were true, it might actually make sense today, given what a gamble having so-called health insurance coverage is turning out to be for so many people, but does Zach really believe half of the 45 million uninsured choose to be? And does anyone else believe that, other than the right-wing fools who want to believe what Fox News tells them?

And speaking of Fox News, Republican members of Congress continue to make appearances on that channel to keep telling the story of the phantom train. In the Trent Franks version, he had it going from Disneyland to the Bunny Ranch. To believe this kind of stuff, I guess you'd have to be dumb enough to think Sarah Palin would make a good President. In that recent Trent Franks segment, he also brought up the Pelosi marsh mouse story. While the right wing stitched the train story together by connecting a few pieces of half truth, the Pelosi mouse story is a lie that Republicans have fabricated out of whole cloth, having, as far as I can tell, not one starting point in anything real. Perhaps Speaker Pelosi once saw a mouse, though I couldn't say that with any certainty, but Republicans continue to repeat the Pelosi marsh mouse lie, over and over and over again.

Then there's the top right-wing Republican liar Rush Limbaugh... When a Pakistani immigrant beheaded his wife in upstate New York recently, Rush said that NOW (the National Organization for Women) publicly excused the murder, calling it a "cultural honor killing." To believe such nonsense, I guess you'd have to be the kind of person who likes to be called a Ditto Head.

But the biggest lie of all is also one of the oldest lies in the Republican playbook. In light of our recent economic rumblings, they recently dusted this one off and brought it back: the New Deal didn't work. Or so Republicans want everyone to believe. Roosevelt's Depression-era government spending put a lot of people back to work, and cut unemployment from 24% in 1933 to 15% in 1941, but for Republicans that means nothing. What's their suggestion for the current economic climate? A spending freeze. They think it's the perfect time to give the do-nothing-for-the-little-guy policies of Herbert Hoover another try. And maybe this makes sense if you work for the rich, as most Washington Republicans do, and you don't care how many of the other 98% of Americans have to move into modern-day Hoovervilles.

4/17/09