Category Archives: Lying bastards

“And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed — if all records told the same tale — then the lie passed into history and became truth.”

The news from Oceania this week:

“Since President Obama assumed office three years ago, federal spending has accelerated at a pace without precedent in recent history…”

Really?

From the Washington Post:

“Government spending under Obama, including his signature stimulus bill, is rising at a 1.4% annualized pace — slower than at any time in nearly 60 years.”

This is in raw dollars.

This is adjusted for inflation.

Even adjusted for inflation, Obama has the second lowest spending record in modern American politics. (Eisenhower wound down the economy because of the end of the Korean War.)

From Politifact:

“Bottom line: The Facebook post’s claim that government spending under Obama is “slower than at any time in nearly 60 years” is very close to accurate.”

Hey, all you Republicans out there who are convinced that Obama makes the biggest spendthrift moves this side of Willard Romney’s rebuilt California mansion: what’s it like having a candidate that tells blatant lies?

Do you enjoy being lied to?

“Sometimes the ideas we’re certain are true are dead wrong.”

As my brother John commented: “I’ve always known this. Why isn’t it more apparent?”

Here’s the thought from Nick Hanauer that resonated most strongly for me:

“The extraordinary differential between the 15% tax rate that capitalists pay on carried interest, dividends, and capital gains, and the 35% top marginal rates on work that ordinary Americans pay, is kind of hard to justify without a touch of deification.”

Preach, brother, preach.

Uncovered asshattery over at NOM

Anyone who doubts that the National Organization for Marriage (NOM) is an evil, divisive, and disruptive group of homophobic morons (whose bills are being paid by a few rich donors who refuse to publicly admit who they are) should take a gander at these excerpts from a confidential study done by NOM and purposely hidden from public view until the Maine court system forced the document’s release:

  1. “Drive a wedge between gays and blacks” by convincing them to fight over the language of “civil rights”.
  2. Bait Latino voters to oppose marriage equality as “a symbol of resistance to inappropriate assimilation”.
  3. Interrupt the “attempt to equate…sexual orientation with race” so that marriage inequality is not perceived as discrimination.
  4. Draw attention to the “bigotry and intolerance” displayed by equality advocates and “document the victims” through a rapid response media team.
  5. Emphasize the importance of “religious liberties” to limit the impact of marriage equality’s legislative advancements.
  6. “Develop side issues to weaken pro-gay marriage political leaders” like pornography, “protection of children”, and religious liberty at the federal level.
  7. Expose Obama administration programs that “have the effect of sexualizing young children” or threatening “childhood innocence”.
  8. “Find, train, and equip young leaders” to become a “next generation of elites” capable of opposing marriage equality.
  9. Foster closer relationships with Catholic bishops to “equip, energize, and moralize Catholic priests on the marriage issue”.
  10. Focus on “the consequences of gay marriage for parental rights”.

I find #8 particularly chilling; I can imagine training films for such groups of young people, but I keep hearing the narration spoken in German.

If NOM ‘fessed up and admitted that the Catholic Church is their big mover and shaker, and used that as the reason for their proselytizing, I could understand them.

I’d still kick ‘em in the stomach at my first opportunity, but I’d understand them.

 

“How many mistakes must we make before we pay for them?”

One “carelessly-made statement” — okay, anyone can misspeak once in a while.

Two or three “carelessly-made statements”, and doubt creeps in.

Dozens of “carelessly-made statements”, and I would invoke V’s comment:

“…to go on making the same lethal errors century after century seems to me nothing short of deliberate”

Let’s let Mr. Paul speak for himself:

1. “We don’t think a child of 13 should be held responsible as a man of 23. That’s true for most people, but black males age 13 who have been raised on the streets and who have joined criminal gangs are as big, strong, tough, scary and culpable as any adult and should be treated as such.”

2. “What else do we need to know about the political establishment than that it refuses to discuss the crimes that terrify Americans on grounds that doing so is racist? Why isn’t that true of complex embezzling, which is 100 percent white and Asian?”

3. “Six-hundred-thousand Americans died in the senseless Civil War. No, he should not have gone to war. He did this just to enhance and get rid of the original tenet of the Republic.” (referring to Abraham Lincoln)

4. “Given the inefficiencies of what DC laughingly calls the criminal justice system, I think we can safely assume that 95 percent of the black males in that city are semi-criminal or entirely criminal. These aren’t my figures, that is the assumption you can gather from ‘the report.’ “

5. “Contrary to the claims of the supporters of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the sponsors of H.Res. 676, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 did not improve race relations or enhance freedom. Instead, the forced integration dictated by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 increased racial tensions while diminishing individual liberty.” (quoted by Ron Paul’s colleague and collaborator Lew Rockwell)

6. “The criminals who terrorize our cities – in riots and on every non-riot day – are not exclusively young black males, but they largely are.”

7. “I wouldn’t vote against getting rid of the Jim Crow laws.”

8. “Opinion polls consistently show that only about 5 percent of blacks have sensible political opinions, i.e. support the free market, individual liberty and the end of welfare and affirmative action.”

9. “Immigrants can spread diseases for which we may have no immunity. There is also the question of crime and culture. Many immigrants come from countries with different legal structures and are not willing to behave in the way we expect American citizens to behave.”

10. “There is no such thing as a hate crime.”

There is a plethora of Ron Paul quotes on Twitter. Enjoy them, if you can keep your breakfast down.

“I love it when a plan comes together”

Komen blinked first:

“We have been distressed at the presumption that the changes made to our funding criteria were done for political reasons or to specifically penalize Planned Parenthood. They were not. Our original desire was to fulfill our fiduciary duty to our donors by not funding grant applications made by organizations under investigation. We will amend the criteria to make clear that disqualifying investigations must be criminal and conclusive in nature and not political. That is what is right and fair.”

We’ll just all wink eye and ignore the pegging that our bullshit detectors get when this statement is read. Of course it done for political reasons. There are strong anti-choice forces within the Komen Foundation, and they were given control of the foundation by Karen Handel, Komen’s new VP for Public Policy. Handel has a long anti-choice history, and she turned the Komen Foundation into a tool for wingnuts to further their political agenda.

Handel and her lackeys were playing politics with breast cancer. That’s despicable.

And of course you all know who’s to blame for shaming Komen into doing the morally correct thing.

You are.

You who organized yourselves online.
You who contacted Komen corporate sponsors and voiced your outrage.
You who donated money for breast cancer screenings directly to Planned Parenthood. (I take back half of all the bad things I’ve ever thought about Michael Bloomberg.)
You who called and wrote Komen and raised hell with them about their political blunderings.

You made that plan come together. Take a bow.

A savage look at Newtonian hypocrisy

I really shouldn’t quote Savage Love letters in their entireties, but this one‘s just too delicious to pass up.

Congrats, Dan. It looks like you’ve got your first high-profile “monogamish” public figure: Newt Gingrich. You must be so proud.

Dan Savage

For anyone who spent last week under a rock: Newt Gingrich, brave defender of traditional marriage, was still married to his second wife—and still fucking the consecrated host out of his “devout Catholic” mistress—when he asked his second wife to agree to an open marriage. Newt had been fucking Callista, his devoutly Catholic mistress, for six years when he made the big ask. Newt’s second wife wouldn’t agree to an open marriage, according to Newt’s second wife, which is how she became Newt’s second ex-wife and Newt’s mistress—the devoutly Catholic Callista—became Newt’s third wife.

That’s not monogamish, SCUM. That’s CPOSish. And lumping honest nonmonogamists—people who don’t lie or cheat—in with the likes of the Gingriches and Schwarzeneggers of the world, which whiny and insecure monogamists (who are not to be confused with reasonable and secure monogamists) are always doing, is simply unfair. Newt, like Arnold before him, didn’t succeed at nonmonogamy, he failed at monogamy.

Newton Gingrich

Zooming out for a moment: The Gingrich campaign has presented the holesome story of Newt and Callista’s courtship as a redemption narrative: Newt is a better man today thanks to Callista, he’s better suited to be president thanks to Callista, and he’s better prepared to defend traditional marriage thanks to Callista. She’s been described as a “devout Catholic” in every profile written about her—so devout that her love brought Newt to the one, holy, Catholic, apostolic, and ever-more-rabidly anti-gay church. So it seems to me that it’s fair to ask if Callista knew in advance that Newt was proposing an open marriage to his then-wife and approved of the arrangement. (It might be more accurate to say that Newt informed his second wife that she was already in an open marriage and asked if she wanted to remain in it.) Did Callista know about Newt’s open marriage proposal? Did Newt bounce the idea off his devoutly Catholic mistress first? Maybe right after he finished bouncing himself off his devoutly Catholic mistress?

Would the devout Catholic still be Newt’s mistress today if the second Mrs. Gingrich had agreed to remain in the marriage that Newt had already opened?

Callista Gingrich

This news alters the redemption narrative that the Gingrich camp set before the voters. So questioning Callista about the open marriage proposal—what did the mistress know and when did she know it?—seems like an entirely legit line of inquiry to me.

Callista Gingrich, like her vile husband, doesn’t believe that gays and lesbians should be equal under the law because, as a good Catholic, she believes that homosexuality is a sin and that homosexuals should remain celibate. Well, the Catholic Church considers adultery, divorce, and birth control sinful, too. Someone in the liberal media really ought to ask Callista to explain why her faith should place limits on my sexual expression but not her own. (emphasis mine)

And let’s not forget that Newton did the same damned thing to wife #1, except that he kinda left out the “can I cheat on you with your blessing?” part.

“Yes, I wrote that.” “Well, I didn’t write it, but it’s okay.” “I didn’t write that, and I’ve never heard of it.” “No, I didn’t write that one, either.”

What is it with Ron Paul?

First he published a series of newsletters in the ’80s and ’90s that contained racist, homophobic, and wild-eyed conspiracy spew.

Then he sorta denied that he’d written the inflammatory material but tried to defend it.

Now he denies that he even knew the hate material even existed, and has walked out of media interviews for what he terms “badgering” about the issue. This, despite his inability or lack of interest in who would say such things under his signature.

And then he claimed that there were “only” a few bad sentences in the material.

These are big red flags, folks.

(If you want to see excerpts from those newsletters in hourly snippets, look here.)

In the latest segment of this Who-the-Hell-Is-Steering-the-Paul-Boat saga, his Twitter account tweeted Jon Huntsman last night and mocked Huntsman’s campaign in Iowa:

“@jonhuntsman we found your one Iowa voter, he’s in Linn precint (sic) 5 you might want to call him and say thanks…”

Now Paul claims he didn’t write the jibe.

Just who the hell is managing your campaign and social outlets, Mr. Paul? It’s obvious that you do not have your hands on the wheel, and who wants a chief executive who doesn’t manage well?

Ron Paul — homophobic, racist liar

And he’s not even clever enough to hide it:

Ron Paul -- BUS-ted

  1. Paul’s Iowa state campaign director serves as chairman of the board of an SPLC-designated hate group.
  2. Paul wrote and sponsored newsletters filled with racism, homophobia, and xenophobia in the 1990s. Then he defended those statements. Now he denies he ever knew anything about anything. (If you’d like to read some of his fear-choked ravings, look here.) Lew Rockwell, the person who likely co-wrote the worst of those statements, is the founder and chairman of the Mises Foundation, a group that supposedly supports free markets and capitalism.
  3. Paul opposes the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
  4. And Social Security. And Medicare.
  5. And paper money.

“It’s all about the money”

The Family Leader, known for its infamous Marriage Vow (signed by several Republican presidential candidates), has been caught red-handed. Again.

Bob Vander Plaats -- not exactly your political mastermind

Bob Vander Plaats, the FL’s leader, apparently asked Frothy Mix’s campaign for upwards of $1 million in return for an official endorsement for Rick Santorum. Campaign staffers claim that Vander Plaats wants the money for additional advertising.

Right. I bet he’d love a cabinet post while they’re at it.

It no longer seems a coincidence that Vander Plaats suggested earlier this month to Crazy Eyes Bachmann that she drop out of the race. It sounds now as if Bachmann’s campaign wouldn’t (or couldn’t) afford the FL’s price tag.

And now it’s been revealed that Vander Plaats pulled the same trick with the Romney campaign in 2008. Romney refused, and the FL’s endorsement went to Mike Huckabee.

If you can’t win the race, buy it, I always say.

Plus les choses changent, plus elles restent les mêmes.

During the war of words between the Franklin Roosevelt administration and newspaper publisher William Randolph Herst, there was a particularly telling exchange. From the Roosevelt camp:

“The American people will not permit their attention to be diverted from real issues to fake issues which no patriotic, honorable, decent citizen would purposefully inject into American affairs.”

Herst’s response, in a signed newspaper editorial:

“Let me say that I have not stated at any time whether the President willingly or unwillingly received the support of the Karl Marx Socialists, the Frankfurter radicals, communists and anarchists, the Tugwell bolsheviks, and the Richberg revolutionists which constitute the bulk of his following…I have simply said and shown that he does receive the support of these enemies of the American system of government, and that he has done his best to deserve the support of all such disturbing and destructive elements.”

Fast-forward 75 years. From David Frum’s recent article in New York Magazine:

“Some liberals suspect that the conservative changes of mind since 2008 are opportunistic and cynical. It’s true that cynicism is never entirely absent from politics: I won’t soon forget the lupine smile that played about the lips of the leader of one prominent conservative institution as he told me, ‘Our donors truly think the apocalypse has arrived.’ Yet conscious cynicism is much rarer than you might suppose. Few of us have the self-knowledge and emotional discipline to say one thing while meaning another. If we say something often enough, we come to believe it. We don’t usually delude others until after we have first deluded ourselves. Some of the smartest and most sophisticated people I know—canny investors, erudite authors—sincerely and passionately believe that President Barack Obama has gone far beyond conventional American liberalism and is willfully and relentlessly driving the United States down the road to socialism.” (emphasis mine)

Frum’s article is the most concise, hit-the-nail-on-the-head article about conservatism I’ve read in a long time. Do yourself a favor and read it.

Perhaps there are sane conservatives out there.

“She isn’t young enough or pretty enough to be the President’s wife.”

Immortal words, Newton Gingrich. Immortal words.

People used to call Ronald Reagan the Teflon president. No matter what bad political steps he made (Iran/Contra, his terrible verbal gaffes, and his oncoming dementia), he managed to politically survive it all.

Newton’s been channeling Reagan, it would seem:

Click to embiggen.

One wonders how many more moral gaffes he can survive and still be a viable candidate.

Time and the internet will tell, because the media and the Republican Party sure as hell aren’t.

Towering towers of pure, unadulterated, grade-A, all-American bullshit

Every so often you hear something from a politician’s mouth that makes you think that politics wants to square-off mano a mano with organized religion in some sort of “I can stack bullshit higher than YOU can” competition.

This from Michele Bachmann, when she was asked about her viewpoints on economics:

“… the late Milton Friedman as well as Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams. “I’m also an Art Laffer fiend—we’re very close,” she adds. “And [Ludwig] von Mises. I love von Mises…when I go on vacation and I lay on the beach, I bring von Mises.”

Anyone ever read von Mises? Anybody who

  • thinks that one fretful mother’s opinion on the side-effects of Gardasil, despite mountains of objective material to the contrary, should control U.S. medical policy,
  • lies about not receiving farm subsidies when her tax returns say she does, and
  • compares Herman Cain’s 9-9-9 economic policy with the Christianist Number of the Beast

could not begin to grasp von Mises’ work.

She needs to quit getting ideas from the backs of milk cartoon, Saturday morning cartoons, and video games.