lies and other non-truths

            I can’t remember who it was originated the maxim, “if you tell a lie often enough it begins to seem like truth.”  Nor do I know for certain that there is a GOP sacred book from which all its policies and strategies flow.  But if such a thing exists, “if you tell a lie often enough it begins to seem like truth” must be its first sentence.  And it must be printed in ALL CAPS.  And end with several exclamation points!!!!

            I don’t know any other way to explain why Republicans keeps saying so many of the things they are saying.  You may remember, back during the Republican primaries, the Romney campaign ran a TV ad showing President Obama saying something to the effect of “with the economy this bad,  we deserve to lose.”  The ad went on to nearly guffaw over Obama’s admission that he hadn’t done much to improve the economy.

            Only problem was that, in the speech where Obama uttered those words, he was quoting John McCain talking about the economy the Republicans and George Bush had created.  The Romney campaign knew it was guilty of creative editing, and when virtually every news outlet except Fox pointed that out, the campaign’s response was, essentially, “yeah, it was a lie and we knew it, but it worked.  Let’s move on.”

            I’m enough of a student of history that I don’t really believe in seminal moments, single points in time from which everything that follows emanate, but on the matter of GOP callousness about the truth, maybe this was one.

            Let’s look at a few other “biggies,” as my mother used to call them.

            Within hours of the Supreme Court upholding the Affordable Care Act by ruling that the “fine” for not purchasing insurance was not a fine at all but a tax, every Republican talking head and every Republican politician, as if reading from the same teleprompter, called it “the single biggest tax increase in history.”  Rush Limbaugh actually went a little further, calling it the biggest increase “in the history of the world.”

            How dishonest is that?  Well,  let’s see:  if you already have insurance, either on your own or through your employer, no fine/tax; if you accept your personal responsibility for your medical treatments and purchase insurance, no fine/tax; if your income is less than 133% of the poverty line, you can be covered by Medicaid, no fine/tax; if you earn too much for Medicaid but not enough to afford private insurance, you get a subsidy from the federal government, no fine/tax.  So who’s left for this fine/tax to be levied on?  Actually, only those people who can afford insurance but refuse to purchase it.  How many people is that?  No way to tell at this point, which means, on the basis of that fact alone, declaring it the largest tax increase in history is the most audacious of lies.  When you factor in all the people who currently have insurance, or will be covered by Medicaid—and add to them the number of currently uninsured people who will accept personal responsibility for their health care and get insurance—you’re left with a number of non-compliers that is very likely too small generate the kind of humongous tax increase the GOP wants to call it.  More to the point, you’re talking about people who are paying the “tax” only because they chose to do so.  Option One: pay a health insurance premium and be assured of medical care.  Option Two: pay a tax and have nothing to show for it but a cancelled check. 

           

            Can stupidity be called a mitigating factor?

            Here’s the thing.  The people calling this the biggest tax increase in history aren’t stupid.  Well, probably some of them are, but most aren’t.  They know that what they’re saying is factually challenged.  But in their heart of hearts they believe that if they say it often enough, enough people will believe it to get them elected. 

            Actually, the dishonesty—or at least the disingenuousness—goes even further with this one.  The ACA has been in place nearly two years.  During all that time, the GOP never once complained about the penalty for not purchasing insurance being a tax.  Did they just miss that potential talking point?  Did they really need the Supreme Court to discover it for them?  Probably not.  More likely, they didn’t talk about it being a tax because the exact same penalty provision appeared in the very Republican Heritage Foundation plan from several years back—and appears in the Massachusetts plan created by the Mittster.  To complain about a tax in the ACA would have been perhaps too much the pot calling the kettle black even for Republicans. 

            When they jumped all over the tax idea after the Supreme Court ruling, it created a bit of a problem for Romney, which resulted in some interesting sophistry.  Mitt first just disagreed with the Court, saying the penalty was a fine, not a tax.  When it was clear that put him distinctly outside the talking point boundaries, Romney announced that a tax is only a tax when the federal government imposes it.  When a state government imposes the exact same thing, it’s a fine.  Intelligent minds are spinning.

            How about this one?  “Stricter voter ID requirements are necessary to insure that our elections are fair and not stolen via rampant voter fraud.”  Couple of points worth making here.  First, the need for stricter ID requirements apparently exists only in red states, and more specifically, in red states where the GOP controls the governor’s mansion and both houses of the legislature.  Curious. 

            Second, though they vary slightly in specifics, all these stricter ID laws are built around requiring some form of government issued photo ID.  Photo ID’s protect us against one form of voter fraud, and only one: they prevent (or at least make more difficult) John Smith from presenting himself at a polling place as Pocahontas and voting in her place.

            Here’s the thing.  Prompted by GOP firebreathers, George Bush’s Justice Department in 2002 launched a nationwide probe of voter fraud that went on for 5 years.  It convicted a total of 86 people (an average of 17/year), most of whom were either felons or immigrants.  NOT ONE of the convictions involved the kind of voter fraud photo ID’s might prevent. 

            If the voter ID laws the Republicans are pressing so hard for in fact only prevent a problem that doesn’t exist, why are they pressing so hard?  Why are they seizing every available microphone to assure us that only by passing their ID laws can we guarantee that elections are fair?  Perhaps the answer was unwittingly revealed a few weeks ago by the majority leader of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives.  That gentleman, one Mike Turzai, was talking to the Republican State Committee and proudly announced the following: “Voter ID [which had just passed the Republican controlled Pennsylvania legislature and been signed by its Republican governor], which is gonna allow Governor Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania—done.”

            What had him so certain, and so excited?  Well, most of the Pennsylvania voters without photo ID live in urban areas—over 185,000 of them in Philadelphia alone.  Why is that important?  Because Philadelphia is traditionally a Democratic stronghold in Pennsylvania and the heavy Democratic vote it usually produces is a big reason no Republican presidential candidate has won Pennsylvania since 1992.

            The statewide vote is often close, however, and Turzai may very well have been correct in opining that suppressing the vote in Philadelphia could carry the state for Romney.  But that’s the point.  The GOP says it’s pressing for stricter controls in order to prevent fraud.  In fact, there’s no fraud to prevent.  There are, however, a lot of voters in urban areas  who traditionally vote Democratic, and making sure some percentage of them aren’t able to vote makes the fairer outcome of a Republican victory more likely.

            In states like Mississippi, where a dead man with “Republican” printed on his casket, could win in a landslide, voter ID laws are no less specious—just less problematic.  But in battleground states like Ohio, Pennsylvania, Florida and several others—this GOP lie could have enormous consequences.

            There are numerous other “lies they keep repeating” which will be the subject of coming blogs.  In the meantime, if you care about the country, accept the fact that politicians no longer care what is true.  While that is true of Democrats and Republicans, it’s way more true of the latter than the former.  The solution is to start pressuring the media outlets in your area to stop pretending that everything a politician says deserves uncritical reporting.  The truth is the truth and a lie is a lie; it’s time for the media to stop acting as though everything it’s told is true and start revealing lies for what they are.