Tag: GOP Hypocrisy

Republicans Warn That Immigration Order Will Foment Anarchy and Violence among Their Base – Obama Tells Them, ‘Pass a Bill’

Jon Ponder
S. 744, a bill to reform immigration, passed with bipartisan votes in the Senate in June 2013, but House Republicans refused to put it up for a vote

Last night Pres. Obama unveiled his executive order to defer the deportations of 4.4 million undocumented residents, allow spouses of green-card holders to apply for legal status, make it easier for foreign entrepreneurs to get visas and more.

Today, predictably, Republicans are in full lather trying to shift public attention away from the fact that they have no alternative plan for immigration reform — and, worse, that for a year and a half House Republicans have been sitting on the immigration bill — Senate bill S. 744, the Comprehensive Immigration Reform Bill — that passed the Senate with bipartisan votes in June 2013.

Instead of proposing an alternative to the president’s order, the GOP strategy is to focus public attention on the process — Obama’s executive action — by claiming, falsely, that the order is illegal. In fact, presidents Reagan and George H. W. Bush also signed executive orders deferring deportations, and Republican presidents Eisenhower, Ford and George W. Bush also made unilateral changes to immigration procedures through executive orders.

The Republican leadership is making a calculation that by ginning up rage at the president over the order, they can avoid having to take a substantive position on immigration, even if the derangement they foment drives their racist base to violence and anarchy, as Oklahoma Sen. Tom Coburn and others have predicted.

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Impeachable? Here Are 18 Immigration Executive Orders Issued by Recent Republican Presidents

Jon Ponder

pensito-infograph--gop-executive-amnesties

Republicans claim that that Pres. Obama’s plan to establish temporary legal status for undocumented immigrants by executive order is illegal.

logo-am-immigration-council
Read the full report from the American Immigration Council: Executive Grants of Temporary Immigration Relief, 1956-Present

They have issued a series of threats against the president if he signs the order to stand up the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, including blocking the nomination of attorney general nominee Loretta Lynch, shutting down the government again and/or impeaching him.

According to a detailed report from the American Immigration Council, however, presidents have routinely altered immigration policies by executive order, including 18 such changes by five recent Republican presidents — Eisenhower, Ford, Reagan, Bush I and Bush II. None of these presidents was threatened with political reprisal for signing the orders, of course.

Here is an overview based on the AIC report:

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Party of ‘Death Panels’ Feigns Outrage Over Insider Claim That Obamacare Passage Relied on ‘Stupidity of the American Voter’

Jon Ponder
T4 refers to the Nazi's euthanisia program
T4 refers to the Nazi’s euthanasia program

Four years ago, the Republican Party launched a relentless propaganda campaign to convince their low-info, Fox-befuddled followers that the coming of Obamacare was a harbinger of the Apocalypse. The motive behind the propaganda campaign had nothing to do with the substance of the reform — Pres. Obama had based the Affordable Care Act on the Republicans’ own individual mandate system that Mitt Romney had successfully rolled out when he was governor of Massachusetts — and GOPers knew that, if passed, the ACA would provide health and financial security to their own working-class and self-employed constituents, many of whom would be insured for the first time in their lives.

To Republican pols, the bankruptcies, foreclosures and untreated illnesses of their constituents were just collateral damage in their campaign to destroy Pres. Obama by killing his signature law. And so was the truth. Remember these patently ridiculous lies they floated on Fox and right-wing radio and inserted into the Congressional Record?

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Gov. Ultrasound’s Guilty Verdict and the End of the Era of Republican ‘Family Values’

Jon Ponder

With the guilty verdicts in the corruption trial of former Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell and his wife, the GOP’s claim to be the party of “family values” — a political messaging tool that served it well in the 1980s and ’90s — may have finally met its end. McDonnell’s status as an icon of the theocratic virtue drove his ascendancy from the Virginia Legislature to the governor’s office and fueled speculation he might be picked as Mitt Romney’s running mate in 2012.

He earned the nickname “Gov. Ultrasound” after he signed a law that forced women seeking abortions to undergo involuntary transvaginal ultrasounds with probes that opponents dubbed “shaming wands”

In his first months as governor, he restored the state’s ability to fire gay employees while earning the nickname “Gov. Ultrasound” after he signed a law that forced women seeking abortions to undergo involuntary transvaginal ultrasounds with probes that opponents dubbed “shaming wands.”

During McDonnell’s campaign for governor, a thesis came to light that he’d written at Regent University, a theocratic institution operated by televangelist Pat Robertson. In the thesis, written when McDonnell was 35, he opined that civil law should not apply to families because families are “God-ordained governments” that started with Adam and Eve and therefore predating the existence of society. Relying on this biblical premise, McDonnell suggested civil government “must restrain, punish, and deter” homosexuality, pornography and drug abuse and restrict the rights of gays and unwed mothers. He also criticized working women and no-fault divorce.

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GOP Voted to Delay Employer Mandate One Year Ago

Jon Ponder

The infographic above shows how House Republicans voted last July on H.R. 2667, a bill to require Pres. Obama to delay implementation of the Affordable Care Act’s employer mandate.

Now, just one year later, these same House Republicans are suing Pres. Obama in order to lay the groundwork to impeach him on grounds that he delayed individual mandate.

This is, of course, hypocrisy piled on top of hypocrisy. The individual mandate, which forms the basis of the Affordable Care Act — and which Republicans now despise — was a Republican invention. It was developed at the Heritage Foundation, a right-wing think tank that has sponsored Rush Limbaugh’s show, and first implemented by the 2012 Republican presidential nominee, Mitt Romney, in 2006 when he was governor of Massachusetts.

Here is a repost of Romney himself describing how he worked with Heritage to come up with the plan that is the basis for Obamacare:

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New Republican Party Anthem – ‘Jailbait’ by Ted Nugent: ‘I Don’t Care If You’re Just 13!’

Jon Ponder

Ted Nugent, 65, a has-been rock star whose endorsement has inexplicably been sought by family-values spouting Republican politicians from Mitt Romney in his presidential bid in 2012 to Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott who is running for governor this year, has admitted to having had sex with girls under the age of consent multiple times. Nugent has even written a rock anthem to his compulsion titled “Jailbait” (lyrics follow) which all GOP candidates should play before every campaign event:

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Flashback: Rand Paul Accused of Tying up, Blindfolding and Abducting a Female College Student in Aqua Buddha Bong ‘Prank’

Jon Ponder

Paul on ‘Meet the Press’ in January 2014
Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky went on NBC’s “Meet the Press” Sunday to slander former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton by suggesting she was somehow complicit in the affair her husband had with Monica Lewinsky nearly 20 years ago. When “Meet the Press” host David Gregory asked Paul if he was in fact blaming Hillary Clinton for Bill’s affair, Paul said he wasn’t — but then immediately contradicted himself, adding, “Sometimes it’s hard to separate one from the other.”

It is beneath contempt — and yet typical of the low esteem with which Republicans view women — to blame a wife for her husband’s infidelity. Compounding his contemptible behavior, of course, is the fact that Paul’s slander is based on half-truths and outright lies, nearly all of which went unchallenged on “Meet the Press,” as usual.

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