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Opinions/Editorials Title: The Republican Holy Trinity: Racists, Misogynists, and Liars Despite having strayed from my area of expertise over the past few weeks, (economics-and the damage the Republicans’ brand of economics has done and the pain it would continue to inflict on Americans) I have to address one more theme: the obvious notion that all Republicans deny, but few Republicans and no Democrats doubt: Republicans are a party primarily made up of racists, misogynists, and liars–and how the so-called television “news” media has become complicit. Mitt Romney claims, as the centerpiece of his most recent efforts to make inroads in the all-important swing states, a clear and unequivocal lie – and Romney knows it: ”On July 12th, President Obama quietly announced a plan to gut welfare reform by dropping work requirements. Under Obama’s plan, you wouldn’t have to work and wouldn’t have to train for a job. They just send you your welfare cheque.” That’s a small piece from a Romney ad that top Romney ad strategist, Ashley O’Connor, called “Our most effective ad”, saying “It’s new information”. Horsefeathers. (or maybe “Malarkey”) It’s false information which fact-checkers have roundly criticized in no uncertain terms. PolitiFact rated Romney’s claims as “pants on fire” lies, while the Washington Post’s fact checker gave the ad four Pinocchios – its highest rating for deceit. FactCheck.org at the Annenberg Public Policy Center agreed that Romney’s claims were false, stating brusquely, “A Mitt Romney TV ad claims the Obama administration has adopted ‘a plan to gut welfare reform by dropping work requirements’. The plan does neither of those things.” The Romney campaign has pushed back hard, essentially saying, “take a hike, this is working for us”. The exact words, from O’Connor: ”Fact checkers come to this with their own sets of thoughts and beliefs, and we’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact-checkers.” But it’s not just the fact-checkers and political reporters in general. Former Republican congressman Joe Scarborough weighed in as well: “I’ve been looking for a week-and-a-half to try to figure out the basis of this welfare reform ad, I’ve scoured the Wall Street Journal editorial pages, I’ve scoured… the ad’s completely false. It’s just completely false. “And I’m pretty stunned.” Not only that, but Romney himself is on record requesting exactly the sorts of changes that Obama signed off on – only on a broader scale, applicable to all states, and signed into law, not just an executive order. In 2005, the Republican Governor’s association sent a letter to Congress on the subject of re-authorizing so-called “welfare reform”, continuing the process along the lines that Republicans supported. It touched on several different issues, one of which was “state flexibility”, about which the governors wrote: “The Senate bill provides states with the flexibility to manage their TANF programmes and effectively serve their low-income populations. Increased waiver authority, allowable work activities, availability of partial work credit and the ability to coordinate state programmes are all important aspects of moving recipients from welfare to work.” The letter was signed by four Republican candidates for president this cycle: Tim Pawlenty, Jon Huntsman, Rick Perry and, of course, Mitt Romney, who were all Republican governors at the time. They were making a traditional conservative states’ rights argument. So, when Obama signs an executive order providing just this sort of flexibility, Mr. Romney spins it, portraying Obama’s willingness to go along with Republican ideas on “welfare reform” as the exact opposite. Displaying for all to see, Romney call it a divisive move to “gut” the process, return to the “bad old days”, and play to his base; which frankly probably never even heard of the waivers until Romney started making an issue of them. Certainly not the only lie of the Romney campaign (lies have so often, so fast that the American voting public has become de-sensitized to them), but it is one of the more revealing, because of its clear racial subtext, as well as the Romney campaign’s in-your-face refusal to acknowledge any wrongdoing, and its proud citing of the ads’ effectiveness. Many media critics – and working journalists as well – have taken note of how the Romney campaign seems to have entered new territory in the boldness and pervasiveness of its lying, so much so that an open debate is breaking out about what can be done, and why it’s happening now. I certainly have stated my opinions on this. Media giants own every television “news” organization and Republican mega-contributors like the Koch Bros. and Sheldon Adelson want a return on their investments from Romney if he wins. This predilection for lies has been the subject of several posts at the Press Think blog of NYU professor/leading media critic Jay Rosen, most recently, ”You’re not entitled to your own facts’ vs. That’s your opinion. Kiss my ad“. The two most disconcerting aspects to this debate are: First, the assumption that nothing can be done about systematic lying is historically false. Second, the abstract nature of the argument distracts from the concrete, racist nature of Romney’s most effective lies. The Lie Expressway Rosen emphasizes the extensive media bewilderment about how to deal with massive campaign lying, but this mystification is itself confusing, since the media has already proven that it knows very well how to deal with campaign lying. – Jamison Foser, of Media Matters’ convincingly state as much in a column titled “Privileging the Lie” from September 2008. Foser, responding to the Atlantic’s Marc Ambinder, talked about the McCain campaign’s frequently repeated bogus claim that Sarah Palin stopped the infamous “Bridge to Nowhere” boondoggle, and explained that McCain’s success was facilitated by steamrolling the truth with yet another falsehood. The McCain campaign claimed that “the electorate doesn’t seem to penalize campaigns for deliberately distorting the record of their candidate and their opponent”. The impact this had in November was huge: in exit polling, voters citing personal honesty as a top concern. But regardless of the terrible reporting in this case, the record clearly shows that presenting a candidate as a habitual liar definitely does have an effect, although the current Romney campaign has taken lying to a modus operandi. Hence, all the handwringing that Rosen refers to is itself based on a pants-on-fire lie – the lie of media powerlessness. The real press weakness is that, thanks primarily to decades of right-wing intimidation, it will never go after a Republican for systematic lying the way for which it was once famous. If the press were to go after a Republican, it would certainly face intense right-wing push-back, but the impact of such reporting would be real and substantial. The Explosion of Deceptiveness Moreover, if the American press has any interest at all in defending the reality-based enlightenment tradition, as was the case in the past with Walter Cronkite, Chet Huntley, David Brinkley, Edward R. Murrow, on which America was supposedly founded, this is a fight it should welcome. This brings us to the problem with the insider debate about reporting on Romney’s lies: While many seem to be struggling with the problem of Romney’s lies in the abstract, there’s something terribly concrete going on here that cries out for a much higher level of urgent attention, if not outrage. Romney’s lying clearly seeks to divide America, primarily along the lines of race. His welfare lie works in concert with other racial lies as well, such as the voter fraud myth used to justify voter-suppression laws in numerous GOP-dominated states. Of course, Romney tries to cover his tracks with a classic example of projection – throwing out the accusation that Obama is the one trying to divide America. Most striking is that the racism involved is not subtle, for those with any sense of history… or politics. This is neatly laid out in a story by Ron Fournier (distinctively not a member of the “liberal media”) at the National Journal “Why (and How) Romney is Playing the Race Card“: “Why ignore fact-checkers? First, internal GOP polling and focus groups offer convincing evidence that the welfare ad is hurting Obama. Second, the welfare issue, generally speaking, triggers anger in white blue-collar voters that is easily directed toward Democrats. This information comes from senior GOP strategists who have worked both for President Bush and Romney. They spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid retribution. “Furthermore, a senior GOP pollster said he has shared with the Romney camp surveys showing that white working-class voters who backed Obama in 2008 have moved to Romney in recent weeks ‘almost certainly because of the welfare ad. We’re talking a (percentage) point or two, but that could be significant’.” The Race FOR Voters and Race OF Voters Republicans have been doing this deliberately and methodically ever since Richard Nixon’s Southern Strategy in 1968. The facts show that they stumbled into it accidentally four years earlier, when Barry Goldwater, who voted against the 1964 Civil Rights Act, won only his own home state, and five Deep South states, four of which Democrat Adlai Stevenson carried just eight years earlier. The almost total reversal of the electoral maps between 1956 and 1964 proved predictive of what was sooner or later to come. Republican strategist Lee Atwater explained in an anonymous interview in the early 1980s: “You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘nigger, nigger, nigger’. By 1968 you can’t say ‘nigger’ – that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites.” This is the historical context behind Romney’s (and more acutely Newt Gingrich’s) welfare lie, and much more of modern Republicanism as well. The Tea Party movement is a direct descendent of this racist political strategy, despite numerous (arguably honest, if naïve) protestations that its members are “not racists”, sometimes even using language muted by the insincere 1960s claim that “some of my best friends are black”. Roots in the Deep South In fact, as Robin Einhorn makes clear in her book American Taxation, American Slavery, the anti-tax “small government” tradition in American politics comes directly out of the Southern slaveholding system, which always opposed an energetic public inclusion and any sort of public control over matters of government taxation and spending. Both of these were latent threats to the power of wealthy slave owners, and were commonplace in Northern colonies like Massachusetts, where the Boston Tea Party took place with a very different agenda: the agenda of representation and democratic self-determination rather than taxation per se. While the slave-holding South practiced a variation of feudal politics, the more affluent and avant-garde North invented something new, distinctively American and authentically exceptional: the high-tax, increasingly industrialized north developed the American System of public infrastructure investment, tariff protections and a centralized banking system. It was conceived as a way to strengthen national bonds, across regional and occupational divisions, as well as strengthening the national economy as a whole. It’s this American System, first fully articulated by Henry Clay, which forms the political foundation for Obama’s policy proposals, and trying to label them as Marxist radicalism instead merely repeats the long history of Southern slave-owning elite misrepresenting Northern politics to advance their own narrow interests and make them seem broadly popular. The Republican demonization of Obama today is simply a historical repeat of the same Southern demonization of Martin Luther King, Jr as a “Communist dupe”. A press that truly sought to inform the public would make all this plain. It would thus give us the “great debate” about the future of America that many had expected, particularly when Romney picked Paul Ryan as his running mate. It would also lead to a landslide Republican defeat, because what the GOP actually stands for is incredibly unpopular, particularly if its intentions and history are made plain. News? Pfffft. Entertainment divisions whose sole motivation is profit run television “news” today. ABC “News” is owned by Disney, synonymous with movies, studios, theme-parks NBCUniversal (NBC, CNBC, MSNBC) owns movie studios, theme parks, etc. CBS “News” is owned along with Showtime, Simon and Schuster, Touchstone Studios and over 100 radio and over 100 local television stations FOX “News” is Rupert Murdoch’s gift to Republicans as their cable network to with as they please and is by far the most biased “news” network ever allowed a license in America. Even the once-respected, CNN is now part of the Time/Warner Brothers empire which boasts such “news” gems as HBO, CineSex, I mean Cinemax, The Cartoon Network, Time magazine, AOL, Fashion TV, The Smoking Gun, DC Comics, People Magazine…I think you get the idea. They would rather have professional wrestling than serious debate. Case-in-point: the now infamous first Romney-Obama debate, during which Romney lied time-after-time while Jim Lehrer and President Obama allowed him to do so unchallenged. Even though President Obama spoke the truth, displaying his usual cool, calm, demeanor, the media fueled message was that Obama lost handily. It was a clear case of the media driving a message to bring more viewers and more ad revenue to the next debate…nothing more. And that, in part, is why the press America actually has will never come close to doing its job. It didn’t do it during the lead-up to the Iraq War, and it became more docile as the Bush administration wore on. Vice President Cheney and his gang of thugs in the administration made sure of that. Of course even a few baby steps in the right direction could have proven crucial in determining the election in November. If racist lies begin to carry a consequence, that will help to eliminate them. Why would any self-respecting journalist not want to see that happen? In this economy, a paycheck is a paycheck. Ask Mika Brzezinski.
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#1. To: Brian S, *The Two Parties ARE the Same* (#0)
Yep, the same as Obama, Holder, Hitlery and the Dems. It's a one party nation, and most vote for the D&R cracka.
Exactly.
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