The death of truth, especially in our political affairs has reached a point of critical mass where no one and nothing can be believed. This may seem normal to some of those involved in the political process but it is appalling to those of us who were raised to believe that there is strength in the truth. The unacceptably false statements credited to members of the Republican Party with regards to Obamacare, The Iran Treaty, the TPP, immigration, climate change and incredibly each other, were topped this weekend when Fox news published a poll that announced exactly the opposite results of what the poll actually recorded.
Yes, we have all made fun of Fox News, but it is the fourth largest network and even if it is generally accepted as a partisan operation that acts as a shill for the Right, it is still expected to have some tiny bit of integrity. Alas, that is not to be.
The poll had to do with how people felt about the rights of unions to organize .The results of the poll showed that people favored those rights by 61% to 33% with some not caring. This shows that the public by an almost 2 to 1 margin favored the unions right to organize and exist. Yeah, well Rupert Murdock didn’t like this result, so Fox just reversed the numbers and published an article where the public magically repudiated the unions right to organize by exactly the same numbers; 61% against and 33% for. Yes, Fox believes in miracles and so will you if you believe anything they say.
But that’s not the end of it. Listen to the Republican candidates as they attack, Obama, Hillary, the government in general and even each other. They will say anything that will help them make their point, whether it has any hint of truth or not. Watch Ted Cruz speak about Obamacare. He states unequivocally that people are paying higher premiums, which means that Obamacare is bad for us. While this is not a flat out lie it is a twisting of the truth because while premiums do go up they are doing so at a much slower rate than they did before Obamacare, which actually means that it is good for us.
Listen to anyone on the Right who speaks about Planned Parenthood and you will hear how they are spending your tax dollars to kill babies. Really? How about the fact that no tax dollars are used to pay for abortions and of course there’s the little discussion about what constitutes a baby. The Right would have us believe that a baby exists the instant that the potential father gets bare tit.
How about the Iran Treaty where Republicans stated fact after fact about what was in it, all of them lies, because none of them had read it. The same is true for the TPP although it would be a miracle if anyone, Left or Right, regardless of background or education level, understood what was in that fantasy creation of Wall Street lawyers.
At any given time all the Republican candidates have denied climate change and in the process have lied, egregiously, about the number of actual American full time jobs that would come out of the building of the Keystone Pipeline. Various numbers from two thousand to ten thousand jobs are a flat out lie that is told not once but over and over despite the fact that both the government oversight agency and Pipeline Company themselves have set the number of actual full time jobs at about 35.
And, not to exempt Hillary, it is pretty obvious that she’s lying about something in that email mess. The question, there, becomes just what is it? And of course the bigger question hanging over it all is: was there any kind of negative result or was it just, as are most of the Right’s assaults against the Clintons, much ado about nothing. But let’s be as even handed as possible and say that she is lying about something in the email process. That, of course would make her just like all the GOP candidates so we would be left with nothing to help us in our choice except; intelligence, ability and their plans about what they would do if they got elected. Does anyone from the Right really want to get into that? One would think not, since not one single Republican candidate has come up with even a single aspect of a plan of governance, should they, by some fluke, get elected.
The Right lies as a matter of course because there is no sustainable truth in their political positions. Universal healthcare, more money spent on education and less cost to those seeking it, better wage scales and more opportunity, a stronger, more functional infrastructure, cleaner air, better veterans benefits and government involvement in creating jobs are all unassailable positions of an even minded constituency. They are fully supported by the Left and occasionally given empty vocal support by the Right. There was a time when the Right supported many of those positions but had certain qualms about how to achieve them. Now the Right, because of their subservience to the corporate billionaires, is dead set against all these positions, but in order to get elected, they must lie to protect their allegiances.
You can only lie so long before even the slowest of your listeners knows you for what you are. That is what has happened to the Right. That is why a bullying buffoon with no answers like Donald Trump is beating the crap out of every Republican candidate. The problem for the Party is that they have been lying for so long that they don’t even recognize their lies for what they are. They certainly don’t see them as a problem. So they flounder around, letting a demagogue like Trump steal their air, their press and eventually their seats at the table while he does his Hitler/Castro impressions for an angry, clueless constituency that finds him so refreshing in his outlandishness that they fail to see that he, himself, has no answers to the questions he asks, and that he is lying even more than the rest of them.
every time i read a piece like this or see some political moron spouting some thing like Cruz did, i wonder why they bother since every thing said or done in this world is captured on video or audio and can be replayed showing what an ass the speaker is. if they’ve changed sides/flip flopped or are merely twisting the data to suit themselves its all there
the only thing sadder, more frustrating is that the people who voted these yahoos into office dont seem to care about the lies or the flip flopping or that these elected officials could care less what the people who elected want – all they, the politicians, care about are the lobbyists and the money they contribute to campaigns ..so they just re-elect them