Lies and the Lying Liars

I haven't had time to read Hertiage's new report that says that this Immigration Bill compromise would cost tax payers 6.3 trillion dollars, but considering their work their constant lying/being wrong about everything else, I'm going to guess it isn't true. Based on the linked article seems like people who have had time to study it agree that this is the case.

These people really do live another world absent from any attempt at honest discourse.

Your Moment of Zen

Paul Ryan, yesterday:

"It seems pretty clear that their new strategy is basically just call us liars."

I FUCKING WISH!!!!!!!!!!!

The balls on this guy...

Paul Ryan Enters a Brave, New, Fact-Filled World

What is wrong with our discourse system is that the truth has be told for free (ie. at a cost) while lies and liars are heavily subsidized.
— Ian Welsh (@iwelsh) September 3, 2012

When Paul Ryan was chosen as Romney's VP, I had a small hope that all the exposure would mess up his brand if Romney lost, and he would taint the teflon brand he carries in DC circles.

Well, it happened in a different way than I had imagined, but Paul Ryan lied so much and so blatantly during his convention speech that the media basically had to take notice. Jonathan Chait nails this exactly:

A week ago, Paul Ryan’s political assets included — alongside his chiseled torso, plainspoken Midwestern demeanor, and the unshakable loyalty of the entire Republican Party — a firm reputation for honesty among the mainstream media. That reputation has suffered a massive, swift erosion. News stories about his speech at the Republican National Convention focused on its many rhetorical sleights of hand. Over the weekend, the revelation that he dramatically misstated a marathon time added a crucial, accessible piece of evidence to the indictment. Now liberals are calling him “Lyin’ Ryan” — a nickname that, a few weeks ago, would have seemed silly, like “Wimpy Palin.” Now mainstream pundits are defending Ryan with versions of the “well, all politicians fib” defense. Given that this constituency was once portraying Ryan as unusually honest, this represents a huge retreat for his political brand.

What happened?

Here’s what has not happened: Paul Ryan did not begin telling an unprecedented series of lies that suddenly exposed a predilection for shading the truth. His marathon boast is certainly odd and may well be a deliberate lie, but it could also be a simple failure to recall. The New Yorker’s Nicholas Thompson, arguing for the prosecution, contends that “for someone who does run seriously,” missing a marathon time by as a vast a level as Ryan does is nearly impossible. On the other hand, given that the race occurred in 1990 and was Ryan’s only marathon, perhaps the explanation is that Ryan just isn’t a serious runner.
And Ryan’s Tampa speech, while pretty dishonest, was not especially so by Ryan’s standards. Here you can see why Ryan must view the sudden attack of the truth squad so bewilderingly. Ryan has been saying things like this, and worse, all along. The bit where he sadly shakes his head and blames President Obama for the failure of the Bowles-Simpson deficit commission that Ryan killed himself has been a staple of the Ryan shtick for two years. Reporters usually bat their eyes and coo sympathetically. Now it has become evidence of his duplicity .
Ryan seems to have fallen victim to circumstances he didn’t quite foresee. The Romney campaign has spent the last several weeks practically daring the national press corps to call out its lies. Well beyond the usual exaggerations of a national campaign, Romney has built its entire message around two accusations — “you didn’t build that” and “just send them a check” — that are obviously false. A day before Ryan’s speech, a Romney adviser told reporters, “We're not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact-checkers.” The media that had spent the last two and a half years nuzzling gently in Ryan’s lap had been prodded with sharp sticks and reacted in the predictable fashion, though probably not predictable to Ryan himself.

The thing about Ryan is that he has always resided in a counter-factual universe. He is a product of the hermetically sealed right-wing subculture. Many of the facts taken for granted by mainstream economists have never penetrated his brain. Ryan burst onto the national scene with a dense, fact-laden attack on the financing of Obama’s health-care bill that was essentially a series of hallucinations, pseudo-facts cooked up and recirculated by conservative apparatchiks who didn’t know what they were talking about or didn’t care. His big-think speeches reflect the influence of fact-free conservatives and collapse under scrutiny.

The Romney campaign and Ryan were essentially engaged in a game of chicken with anyone covering the election, daring them to call out their bullshit. They may have pushed it to far, in the sense that Ryan's speech was so over the top that some mainstream media people had to point out the truthiness of most claims.

Ryan's case is also awesome because it really is what happens when you get a creation of the fact free right wing echo chamber and place them in the wild. Because of this, he has gotten used to lying with reckless abandon, and having those lies re-enforced rather than challenged at any point. Unlike Palin, he is an articulate white male that many of the beltway media have built up into this super serious budget savant, so they may not tear him down completely and turn him into a punchline in the same way, but acknowledging that he's not telling the truth is a big first step. We have a really really crappy political media, and no matter how basic, pointing out that someone is lying is a pretty big deal for them, and it should be commended.

The Post Truth Era Has Fully Arrived

Dave Roberts of Grist and Chris Hayes have both written about this phenomenon, but I think Paul Ryan's speech last night was a good coming out party for openly lying about easily disprovable things on a national stage. Ryan Grim:

Ryan then noted that Obama, while campaigning for president, promised that a GM plant in Wisconsin would not shut down. "That plant didn’t last another year. It is locked up and empty to this day. And that’s how it is in so many towns today, where the recovery that was promised is nowhere in sight," Ryan said.

Except Obama didn't promise that. And the plant closed in December 2008 -- while George W. Bush was president.

It was just one of several striking and demonstrably misleading elements of Ryan's much-anticipated acceptance speech. And it comes just days after Romney pollster Neil Newhouse warned, defending the campaign's demonstrably false ads claiming Obama removed work requirements from welfare, "We're not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact-checkers."

Ryan, for his part, slammed the president for not supporting a deficit commission report without mentioning that he himself had voted against it, helping to kill it.

He also made a cornerstone of his argument the claim that Obama "funneled" $716 billion out of Medicare to pay for Obamacare. But he didn't mention that his own budget plan relies on those very same savings.

Ryan also put responsibility for Standard & Poor's downgrade of U.S. government debt at Obama's doorstep. But he didn't mention that S&P itself, in explaining its downgrade, referred to the debt ceiling standoff. That process of raising the debt ceiling was only politicized in the last Congress, driven by House Republicans, led in the charge by Paul Ryan.

These things aren't that shocking anymore, but it's kind of incredible that you would say so many obviously false things in a speech this widely seen. But then again, if he won't become a joke for lying constantly about this stuff, what's the downside?

Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them

Jonathan Chait touches on a pet peeve of mine:

And this is why I am forced to be so mean. There are just a lot of people out there exerting significant influence over the political debate who are totally unqualified. The dilemma is especially acute in the political economic field, where wealthy right-wingers have pumped so much money to subsidize the field of pro-rich people polemics that the demand for competent defenders of letting rich people keep as much of their money as possible vastly outstrips the supply. Hence the intellectual marketplace for arguments that we should tax rich people less is glutted with hackery. The very simple fallacy I pointed out by de Rugy has been knocking around for years, without end. (Here it is in a piece by Stephen Moore in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal op-ed page. Here is Senator Jim DeMint making it today in an interview with the approving editors of Reason.) A similar problem exists, perhaps to an even worse extent, with climate change denial.

Most people don’t follow these issues for a living and have a hard time distinguishing legitimate arguments from garbage. I don’t mean this patronizingly: I certainly would have trouble distinguishing valid arguments from nonsense in a technical field I didn’t study professionally. But that's why there’s a value in signaling that some arguments aren’t merely expressing a difference in values or interpretation, but are made by an unqualified hack peddling demonstrable nonsense. Being so mean is a labor of love, I confess, but also one with a purpose.

The only issue I take with his post is that I'm not even sure qualified/unqualified is the distinction we want to be making. I'm sure plenty of these hacks have all the right credentials! The difference is that one side of the policy debate is lying almost all the fucking time. It's important to understand the difference between genuine disagreements on policy, and lying. Mainstream media outlets rarely point out the difference, and this unsurprisingly leads to people thinking most policy debates are genuine disagreements or he said/she said bickering. There is always some of that too, but the right has figured out that there is absolutely no political cost to lying constantly, so they're using it to great effect. Watch an interview with any Republican politician/think tank hack and I guarantee you over half the stuff they say are either highly misleading or outright bullshit. That's not to say that Democrats don't lie (All politicians do), but conservatives have turned it into a science.

I'm genuinely not sure how you counter this when most media outlets don't seem to give the slightest shit about educating their readers/viewers. However, since this is one of the defining dynamics of this era, it's at least worth pointing out from time to time.

Should We Publish Lies? Opinions Differ.

Here is how the New York Times defines the role of the public editor:

Arthur S. Brisbane is the readers' representative. He responds to complaints and comments from the public and monitors the paper's journalistic practices.

All the quotes from the following post are real, and were not taken from the Onion.

The headline of his post:

Should The Times Be a Truth Vigilante?

Yes.

This should have ended there. Instead, who wrote an entire post on the subject.

I’m looking for reader input on whether and when New York Times news reporters should challenge “facts” that are asserted by newsmakers they write about.

Still having trouble believing this is serious. On one hand "challenging facts that are asserted by newsmakers" is the job of a news organization, and on the other hand... the person you called a liar doesn't invite you to their birthday party?

As an Op-Ed columnist, Mr. Krugman clearly has the freedom to call out what he thinks is a lie. My question for readers is: should news reporters do the same?

Uhhh, yes?

That approach is what one reader was getting at in a recent message to the public editor. He wrote:

“My question is what role the paper’s hard-news coverage should play with regard to false statements – by candidates or by others. In general, the Times sets its documentation of falsehoods in articles apart from its primary coverage. If the newspaper’s overarching goal is truth, oughtn’t the truth be embedded in its principal stories? In other words, if a candidate repeatedly utters an outright falsehood (I leave aside ambiguous implications), shouldn’t the Times’s coverage nail it right at the point where the article quotes it?”

This message was typical of mail from some readers who, fed up with the distortions and evasions that are common in public life, look to The Times to set the record straight. They worry less about reporters imposing their judgment on what is false and what is true.

This reader is frustrated that we print falsehoods and don't correct them! It's as if they look to this newspaper as a place to be further informed on the issues. How quaint!

Is that the prevailing view?

For people who care about being more informed and facts, yes, it is.

And if so, how can The Times do this in a way that is objective and fair?

When someone isn't telling the truth, you point out that they aren't telling the truth? That seems fair.

Is it possible to be objective and fair when the reporter is choosing to correct one fact over another?

Yes. This is possible.

Are there other problems that The Times would face that I haven’t mentioned here?

Mainly that you think that refusing to print lies is some sort of confusing and brave new world for reporters?

This post needs to enshrined for future generations to as so they can better understand how everything went so wrong.

The Joe Buck Disgusting Act of the Week: Politifact

The Joe Buck Disgusting Act of the Week is awarded to whatever event/person best deserves Joe Buck's unnecessary and over the top outrage after a 2004 Randy Moss' touchdown celebration.

If you read this blog, you're aware that the conservative game plan for the last __ years involves constantly lying about everything and depending on the media to not call them out, and report the story in a he said she said, you decide fashion. So when CNN and other news organizations started citing this service called Politifact I thought it was hilarious they treated it as this crazy new technology, rather than "doing their jobs".

The inherent problem with Politifact was going to be as follows: Conservatives lie constantly about fucking everything. If a fact checking service was going to do it's job, it was going to call out conservatives a lot more than it would with anyone else... opening themselves up to the charge of liberal bias. And since the charge of liberal bias is apparently so strong that shielding yourself from this label is actually more important than doing your job for most media organizations, this was always going to be an issue.

So while it was nice that people were pretending to care about accuracy... there was always this looming problem when Politifact would have to decide between doing their jobs or getting to sit at the cool kids table with all the other worthless news organizations.

And now, perfectly in line with everything wrong with our media, we get this logic: (TPM)

Here’s a long, sad story about how Democrats’ basically true claim that House Republicans voted to end Medicare ended up with PolitiFact’s Lie of the Year award.

Back in April, House Republicans passed a budget that included a plan to phase out Medicare over several years and build in its place a subsidized, private insurance marketplace for seniors.
Democrats called this a vote to “end Medicare.”

You can quibble. It wasn’t a vote to end Medicare — BLAM! — all at once. But under the GOP plan, within a couple decades, the current health retirement program for old people would be gone and in its place would be an entirely different one. It would just, by political design, have the same name: Medicare.
Ignoring policy in favor of process, and with an eye toward political balance, PolitiFact rated this basically true Democratic claim “Pants on Fire.”

Liberals, economists, health policy experts, and yours truly objected strongly to PolitiFact’s conclusion. But instead of rethinking their conclusion, the PolitiFact turned the opprobrium into a badge of honor: The claim itself became a candidate for PolitiFact’s “Lie of the Year” contest; Paul Ryan — the House GOP budget chairman who authored the plan — engaged in a modest ballot stuffing campaign; and the Democrats’ true “lie” came in third place, just behind the GOP claim that the stimulus created zero jobs, and Sen. Jon Kyl’s claim that abortion services are “well over 90 percent of what Planned Parenthood does.”

In a way I'm actually glad this happened, because sometimes it takes an example this stupid to bring the amount of lying to the forefront. Of course that won't be what happens, the conclusion will be that Paul Ryan is a reasonable man who simply wants to fix medicare, and shame on those crazy hippies for saying otherwise.

The fact free discourse lives on, now with it's very own "fact checking institutions" to help ensure that no one has the slightest clue about what's going on.

How to Lie To the 99%

Frank Luntz is a GOP language guru who makes his living lying about Republican policies and phrasing them in a way that sane people won't find them revolting. He now has a memo on how to discuss issues that have come up due to the emergence of the Occupy movement. Let's take a look at what concepts Luntz felt rich assholes might not be able to figure out on their own. Credit to Yahoo news for transcribing Luntz' thoughts on each one:

1. Don't say 'capitalism.'

"I'm trying to get that word removed and we're replacing it with either 'economic freedom' or 'free market,' " Luntz said. "The public . . . still prefers capitalism to socialism, but they think capitalism is immoral. And if we're seen as defenders of quote, Wall Street, end quote, we've got a problem."

The honesty of this one is telling, and also a sign that in the long run, the occupy movement is winning.

2. Don't say that the government 'taxes the rich.' Instead, tell them that the government 'takes from the rich.'
"If you talk about raising taxes on the rich," the public responds favorably, Luntz cautioned. But  "if you talk about government taking the money from hardworking Americans, the public says no. Taxing, the public will say yes."

This is the first of what you will begin to see is a pattern with Luntz. When something is stated factually, and extremely popular, don't just change the wording, but change the entire meaning of the sentence, then it becomes unpopular!

3. Republicans should forget about winning the battle over the 'middle class.' Call them 'hardworking taxpayers.'

"They cannot win if the fight is on hardworking taxpayers. We can say we defend the 'middle class' and the public will say, I'm not sure about that. But defending 'hardworking taxpayers' and Republicans have the advantage."

It's always funny when he admits something is just completely lost for republicans. In this case, it's the third rail issue of "talking about the middle class".

4. Don't talk about 'jobs.' Talk about 'careers.'
"Everyone in this room talks about 'jobs,'" Luntz said. "Watch this."
He then asked everyone to raise their hand if they want a "job." Few hands went up. Then he asked who wants a "career." Almost every hand was raised.
"So why are we talking about jobs?"

Answer: Because when lots of people don't have jobs, whether or not they're going to have a career at said imaginary job isn't exactly their biggest concern at the moment.

5. Don't say 'government spending.' Call it 'waste.'
"It's not about 'government spending.' It's about 'waste.' That's what makes people angry."

He's right, it's not about government spending, because people actually like a decent number of things the government does. But if we lie and say that all government spending is waste, then they don't like it! See what he did there? The key was lying.

6. Don't ever say you're willing to 'compromise.'
"If you talk about 'compromise,' they'll say you're selling out. Your side doesn't want you to 'compromise.' What you use in that to replace it with is 'cooperation.' It means the same thing. But cooperation means you stick to your principles but still get the job done. Compromise says that you're selling out those principles."

Given the last 2 years of the Republican party I'm not really sure why he bothered to include this one.

7. The three most important words you can say to an Occupier: 'I get it.' 
"First off, here are three words for you all: 'I get it.' . . . 'I get that you're angry. I get that you've seen inequality. I get that you want to fix the system."
Then, he instructed, offer Republican solutions to the problem.

Shorter Luntz: Say "I get it". Then explain to them why you don't get it.

8. Out: 'Entrepreneur.' In: 'Job creator.'

Use the phrases "small business owners" and "job creators" instead of "entrepreneurs" and "innovators."

I don't even understand the difference here, other than the need to add job to every republican initiative for the sake of doing it.

9. Don't ever ask anyone to 'sacrifice.'
"There isn't an American today in November of 2011 who doesn't think they've already sacrificed. If you tell them you want them to 'sacrifice,' they're going to be be pretty angry at you. You talk about how 'we're all in this together.' We either succeed together or we fail together."

So Frank Luntz has better awareness on this issue than Barack Obama. Awesome.

10. Always blame Washington.
Tell them, "You shouldn't be occupying Wall Street, you should be occupying Washington. You should occupy the White House because it's the policies over the past few years that have created this problem."

Back to the "lying" theme we've seen repeated several times.

BONUS:
Don't say 'bonus!'
Luntz advised that if they give their employees an income boost during the holiday season, they should never refer to it as a "bonus."

"If you give out a bonus at a time of financial hardship, you're going to make people angry. It's 'pay for performance.'"

The best part of this list, is you can see a room full of the 1% in suits furiously taking notes at Luntz' shocking suggestions.
Guy #1:"So if you give out a bonus at a time of financial hardship, you're going to make people angry."
Guy #2: "Wow, I'm so glad we came to this, how else would we have figured that out???"

The idea that Luntz gets paid ungodly sums of money to tell rich people how to lie to non-rich people pretty much says all you need to know about the state of the world in 2011.

How To Fix America's Schools

Cheating, apparently: (credit to Jake Mcintyre for the photoshop inspiration)

WASHINGTON — In just two years, Crosby S. Noyes Education Campus went from a school deemed in need of improvement to a place that the District of Columbia Public Schools called one of its "shining stars."

Standardized test scores improved dramatically. In 2006, only 10% of Noyes' students scored "proficient" or "advanced" in math on the standardized tests required by the federal No Child Left Behind law. Two years later, 58% achieved that level. The school showed similar gains in reading.

Because of the remarkable turnaround, the U.S. Department of Education named the school in northeast Washington a National Blue Ribbon School. Noyes was one of 264 public schools nationwide given that award in 2009.

Michelle Rhee, then chancellor of D.C. schools, took a special interest in Noyes. She touted the school, which now serves preschoolers through eighth-graders, as an example of how the sweeping changes she championed could transform even the lowest-performing Washington schools. Twice in three years, she rewarded Noyes' staff for boosting scores: In 2008 and again in 2010, each teacher won an $8,000 bonus, and the principal won $10,000.

A closer look at Noyes, however, raises questions about its test scores from 2006 to 2010. Its proficiency rates rose at a much faster rate than the average for D.C. schools. Then, in 2010, when scores dipped for most of the district's elementary schools, Noyes' proficiency rates fell further than average.

A USA TODAY investigation, based on documents and data secured under D.C.'s Freedom of Information Act, found that for the past three school years most of Noyes' classrooms had extraordinarily high numbers of erasures on standardized tests. The consistent pattern was that wrong answers were erased and changed to right ones.

Rhee's response is typically classy:

"It isn't surprising," Rhee said in a statement Monday, "that the enemies of school reform once again are trying to argue that the Earth is flat and that there is no way test scores could have improved ... unless someone cheated."

Any time someone starts throwing around the Nixionian "enemies" line you know you're dealing with a real piece of work. Laura Clawson:

No, Michelle. Flat-earthers follow faith, not evidence. Just as you are doing by trying to cast this as your reform or no reform, good guys and bad guys, evidence be damned. Let's review: Noted enemy of school reform McGraw-Hill, which scores the test sheets, flagged the pattern. Fringe left publication USA Today investigated it—unlike your administration, which conducted only the most cursory investigation and that belatedly. And academics at Arizona State University, Georgetown University, and Western Michigan University agreed that the pattern called for thorough examination.

So it could be that the testing companies, statistics professors and other enemies have finally exposed their elaborate plan to get Michelle Rhee higher and higher paying jobs with endless positive media exposure...

Or it could be that Rhee simply has terrible ideas about education reform, but will always get new school systems to destroy because her driving principle is one that everyone that from Bill Gates to Arne Duncan can agree on: union busting.

When In Doubt, Just Make Shit Up

The right gets away with stuff like this on such a regular basis it's mindblowing:

In late December, the New York Post reported, Halloran "met with three plow workers from the Sanitation Department -- and two Department of Transportation supervisors who were on loan." They allegedly told him that snow clearance was poor as a payback for union umbrage suffered at the hands of the mayor. But the brave whistleblowers, Halloran says, "didn't want to be identified because they were afraid of
retaliation."

Problem is, according to the Times, no one else is backing them up:

"But the more that investigators look into Mr. Halloran's story, the more mystifying it becomes," writes the Times. "[I]nvestigators had hoped that extensive publicity would bring out others with knowledge of the purported plot. That has not happened, according to the people briefed on the investigations, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the investigations are continuing. This leaves prosecutors with no proof that anything occurred."

No evidence whatsoever.

This story spent weeks being blasted around talk radio, fox news and other outlets, and I have no doubt they'll rush to make a correction.

While these last couple years have made me feel less confident in the Left's unwillingness to engage in some of the right's worst habits (cult of personality worship), this is one thing that will always remain the same. The major voices on the right simply have no concern whatsoever about the truth, ever.

This is also what bothers me about the bipartisan lovefest that Obama outlined in his speech. I'm all for an exchange of ideas, but you can't have that with people who are worried about Shariah law in the united states, making up lies about "agents" enforcing health care reform and think that Global warming is a hoax.

A debate of differing ideologies is one thing, but you have to coexist within the same reality. That may have been different in another time, but that just isn't the case with today's right wing. And as long as the GOP remains captured by these nuts, good luck trying to get anything accomplished with their help.

Brian Williams Courageously Calls Out President McGwire

Last night on NBC Nightly News, Brian Williams was outraged:

Good evening. Because this is a family broadcast, we probably can't say what we'd like to about the news today that Mark McGwire—the home run hitter, the family favorite from the St. Louis Cardinals—stopped lying today and admitted that he did it while on steroids. For those of us who were raising young baseball fans and baseball players who looked up to Mark McGwire, that summer of ‘98 was magical stuff, as he and Sammy Sosa vied back and forth for the title of Single Season Home Run King. He didn't tell the truth to Congress or to his fans until finally, formally coming clean today. He's been unable to get into the Hall of Fame and, apparently—even for him—the shame here was too much.

See what he did there? He called someone who knowingly concealed/distorted the truth a liar.

It would have been nice if he'd showed similar outrage during the Bush Administration, the run up to the Iraq war, the health care debate, either presidential election... really anything meaningful that's happened over the last 10 years.

I'm glad to see that NBC News is comfortable holding Mark McGuire to a higher standard than any elected official they've ever covered. But I guess their lies are different, because as their slogan says: IT'S JUST POLITICS BRAH!

Get Caught Lying!

Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN):

ACORN is under federal indictment for voter fraud, but the stimulus bill nevertheless gives ACORN $5 billion.

Wanna guess how many parts of that sentance are true?

Something tells me she's not actually reading.

Pelosi Power!

As I was walking back to work, I passed a bookstore no more than a block from the U.S. Capitol and saw this:
Yes, that is a real book. I stood outside in the cold for close to a minute, reading and re-reading the cover: "Know your Power: A message to America's Daughters" by Nancy Pelosi.

It looks like we have another cantidate for The Alanis Morissette School of Irony.

As if to drive home the point, when I got back to work, I was greeted by this front page article with vintage Pelosi-speak on the bailout:

WASHINGTON — Lawmakers want the Treasury to insist that banking institutions sharing in the $700 billion bailout comply with limits Congress imposed on executive salaries and use the money for its intended purposes.

In the first comprehensive review of the rescue package, the Government Accountability Office said Tuesday that the Treasury Department has no mechanisms to ensure that banking institutions limit their top executives' pay and comply with other restrictions.

"The GAO's discouraging report makes clear that the Treasury Department's implementation of the (rescue plan) is insufficiently transparent and is not accountable to American taxpayers," said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif.

I agree Nancy, the handling of the bailout hasn't been transparent, or accountable to tax payers. What's strange is to hear you talking as if this wasn't the same piece of legislation that you helped craft! Upset that it doesn't have any teeth? That didn't seem to bother you when you were rushing it through the house and whipping your own members to vote for it!

If these type of rants sound familiar, it's because Nancy Pelosi seems to have a recurring problem with that whole "knowing your power" thing.

In fact, since this will no doubt occur again in the future, let's use one of my old posts to create a Nancy Pelosi rant madlib:

Few things enrage me more than when Nancy Pelosi talks about an issue in the same way that you or I would discuss current events.

When I say I'm disappointed we aren't doing much to (problem that requires congressional attention) , that's a reasonable thing me to say, since I'm a citizen and my powers to change that are limited.

When Nancy Pelosi says she's disappointed she wasn't able to (problem that requires congressional attention) , that makes me want to throw her a copy of the U.S. Constitution, since she is the fucking Speaker of the House, and has more power to (problem that requires congressional attention) more than anybody other than the president.

I'd like to think I had the same power as the Speaker of the House. But since I don't it's pretty frustrating to hear her talk as if she's not, you know, Speaker of the Fucking House.

So after seeing today's headline...

Few things enrage me more than when Nancy Pelosi talks about an issue in the same way that you or I would discuss current events.

When I say I'm disappointed we aren't doing much to enforce transparency for the bailout , that's a reasonable thing me to say, since I'm a citizen and my powers to change that are limited.

When Nancy Pelosi says she's disappointed she wasn't able to enforce transparency for the bailout , that makes me want to throw her a copy of the U.S. Constitution, since she is the fucking Speaker of the House, and has more power to enforce transparency for the bailout more than anybody other than the president.

I'd like to think I had the same power as the Speaker of the House. But since I don't it's pretty frustrating to hear her talk as if she's not, you know, Speaker of the Fucking House.

Think of all the time we've saved for the next time she's talking about the war!

Lying as Political Technology: A Very Depressing Post

To give this post a little personal context, I used to run a blog called "Fuck Truth:", and I tend to cringe when people talk about science as though it's "black and white [with] right answers and wrong answers". Regardless of the arena, I've almost never found truth or its younger sibling objectivity to be all that useful in building a healthy picture of a situation. It's not that a reliance on truth is wrong, exactly, just a little silly. Our use of the concept usually has more to do with intention and effect than fact, and is more closely related to faith or expectation than reality.

Especially in politics. It's not news that people who push a right-wing agenda "lie" regularly and successfully about pretty much anything that will serve their interests. Lying works. It's just politics: Democrats lie too, and often (though it can be a little harder to get away with lying to liberals). It's so effective that you've gotta wonder whether human beings actually like being lied to. Whatever the reason, though, that's just the way things are.


And yet, I was still shocked by Palin's speech at the convention, as well as by the conduct of the McCain campaign and Republican operatives since. McCain and Palin are running on quite precisely what they are not, and overtly and repeatedly lying about verifiable aspects of their records and Obama's positions.

Not that the convention bullshitting was limited to Palin, of course. Mitt Romney mocked Al Gore for flying around in a private jet while pretending to save the environment – a private jet that does not actually exist. The video played during Victoria Blackstone's speech about honoring the flag used actors, not real soldiers, to recreate a state funeral (as with most of the rest of the convention images, the footage was purchased from Getty). And Guiliani remarked that Obama is "the least experienced candidate for president of the United States in at least the last 100 years", which is false no matter how you measure experience.

But McCain and Palin are way beyond little funny lies like those. Normally, as Phil Gentry notes, politics isn't about anything that can be verified or labeled as true or false. Neither "reformer" nor "maverick" nor "change," for example, are ideas that need much of a basis in actions or facts – you say them, and they sound good, and that's basically the end of it.

Except that Palin's candidacy seems increasingly based on her supposed rejection of the funds for the "Bridge to Nowhere." They keep repeating it, touting her campaign against earmarks as though she's the first person to want government funds to be fairly distributed. Really, though, it's a lie deserving of the name. It's not even close to true: she pushed for the bridge initially, backed off when it became too infamous to attach her name to, and then kept the money for similar projects when it was finally rejected.

She's being called on it too, all across the media spectrum. From TPM:

The McCain camp has made her signature issue shutting down the Bridge to Nowhere. But as The New Republic put it today that's just "a naked lie." And pretty much the same thing has been written today in Newsweek, the Washington Post, the AP, the Wall Street Journal. Yesterday even Fox's Chris Wallace called out Rick Davis on it.

The evidence, if you're the sort to go for evidence, is pretty damning. There's video of Palin encouraging the pursuit of federal aid, a note congratulating her staff on a successful haul, even a photo of her holding up a "Ketchikan is not nowhere" t-shirt:




The thing is, it probably doesn't matter. One of the Obama campaign's newest ads features some of that "evidence" and their latest email was about Palin's "Lies to Nowhere," but non-indoctrinated people tend to believe the thing they hear first, particularly when it's less complicated. We can try to brand McCain and Palin as liars, and it could well hurt their credibility with some voters. But probably not. To quote the the ever astute Atrios, "At this point even Republicans all know it's full of shit, but they don't care. It pisses off liberals! And that's really all they care about."

Or as Hunter puts in a Daily Kos diary,

There is absolutely no penalty for lying, in politics. None. Zip. Nada. Sarah Palin could stand atop a stage and declare herself moon-goddess of Endor, and it wouldn't make a bit of difference. Yes, the papers would correct her. There would be a few cable stories on how there was no prior record of her being declared a moon-goddess. In the end, however, it would not matter, and it would not matter because Republicans have decided that it does not. For Republicans, there is no longer any moral taboo whatsoever against lying outright. The only relevant question is whether the lie is effective -- not whether it should have been done in the first place.

So what of it, if Sarah Palin says crooked things with a straight face? Name me one Republican who will object. Name me one -- just ONE -- diehard conservative who will be angry at the lie, instead of praising her for it. To hell with facts, there is another election to be won....

[Y]ou would be hard pressed to find even a single, lone Republican in Washington willing to buck the moral collapse of their own party. Such people once existed: they were voted out of office. All that remain are "mavericks" like McCain, figures who will countermand every previous belief in order to regain the support of his own party.

So be it, then. In a way, it's more honest – politics really is about manipulation, after all, and that wouldn't change even if everyone had complete information about the candidates. But really, though, this isn't about honesty or truth or lies or reality. It's about basic respect. Forcing the nation to have these basic disputes about its candidates demonstrates a contempt that borders on hatred.

And facing that level of disrespect is so tiring that making the argument that people should pay enough attention to vote gets harder and harder every election. There's no way out but out: the only real solution is to stay as far away from politics as possible. At some point, the apathetic become correct – and I can't help but worry that that time is now.

But please. Please, prove me wrong.


PS: Anyone else think it's creepy as all hell that the new face of McCain donations is the "McCain/Palin Compliance Fund"? What the hell is with that party?

Lies Lies LIES!

Nancy Pelosi: (Via Stoller)

''I almost wonder how anybody associated with this war, unless they were of completely different philosophy, would not come to the conclusion that this war is a grotesque mistake, that it was misrepresented from the start, not prepared for correctly,'' said Pelosi.

''This war is a big lie. It was a lie to begin with..and it continues to be a lie..at some point, maybe the lies just got to be too heavy for him to carry,'' she said of the former White House spokesman.

Great point Nancy, only if it wasn't coming from you. I wonder when the burden you're describing is gonna catch up with you for your own lies over the Iraq war. I mean, you didn't start this war, but you've had the power to end it since 2006, and have done nothing but lie to those who brought you into office on the promise of bringing that horrific war to a close. We all know why you don't want to use your power to end the war: you've decided it's better strategy to let more people die before 2009, because you think if you use your power to end it now, the republicans will call the democrats pussies during the next election cycle. And while that plan may win the election, it doesn't mean it isn't morally bankrupt. (And also, I have a funny feeling the republicans will call us pussies and commies no matter what we do, it's kind of their only card to play)

So as fun as say take a pot shot at Scott McClellan for being a liar with blood on his hands, just don't forget that what you're doing is that far off.