Tag: GOP Hypocrisy

Romney, Who Hunkered Down in France During Vietnam, on Former SEAL Who Died in Benghazi: ‘They Rushed to Go Help, That’s the American Way, We Go Where We’re Needed’

Jon Ponder

pensito-graphic-550-romney-on-doherty-we-go-where-we-are-needed

During the Vietnam War, Mitt Romney protested the protesters one year and then headed to France the next. While students who involuntary enlistment he actively supported died in the mud in Vietnam, he lived in a chateau in Paris and tooled around France on a bike trying to convince the French to give up coffee and wine.

Now he cites the courage of a former Navy SEAL who died in a terror attack claiming that “They didn’t hunker down where they were in safety. They
rushed there to go help.This is the American way. This is the American way. We go where there’s trouble. We go where we’re needed.”

But you didn’t go there, Mitt. You hunkered down in France.

GOP ‘Journalist’ Who Heckled President about Favoring ‘Foreigners over American Workers’ Is a Foreigner

Jon Ponder

Oh, the hypocrisy:

Neil Munro, the Daily Caller reporter who interrupted Obama’s DREAM Act Lite speech yesterday by yelling, “Why do you favor foreigners over American workers?” is himself a so-called foreigner working a job, here in America. This isn’t breaking news: He identifies as Irish-born on his Twitter bio, and he is currently living in D.C. on a green card. It is, however, somewhat notable and ironic when you consider the agenda behind what he maintains was “a conventional, obvious question.”

Thanks: SmittyPA.

Tucker Carlson Operative Heckles President at White House News Conference

Jon Ponder

An employee of Tucker Carlson, the Swanson frozen foods heir and failed TV pundit who now runs The Daily Caller, a Republican propaganda “news” site, put the GOP’s disrespect for the office of the presidency on display once again when he heckled Pres. Obama during a news conference at the White House yesterday.

The operative, Neil Munro, was at the news conference because the White House Correspondents Association, the gatekeeper organization that decides which media outlets are allowed to attend White House news events, plays along with the ruse that the Daily Caller, Fox News and the rest are news organizations not propaganda mills.

The purpose of the news conference was to announce Pres. Obama’s plan to end the deportation of children of undocumented immigrants who have been raised in the United States.

“Excuse me, sir. It’s not time for questions, sir,” the president said in response to Munro’s first interruption. But Munro continued, demanding to know if the president would take questions. “Not while I’m speaking.” When the heckler continued shouting at the president, Obama responded, “I didn’t ask for an argument. I’m answering your question.”

More on this story at these links:

[…]

Congressional Republicans Go Squishy on Liberal Elements of Obamacare

Jon Ponder

The purpose of the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate is to expand the number of the insured in order to increase the revenue to the giant insurance corporations in order to offset the loss of revenue caused by the more progressive elements of the law, particularly the end of denials coverage due to preexisting conditions and allowing parents to cover children up to the age of 26.

All of this chicanery could be avoided if the insurance corporations would do what Republicans claim that only businesses can do: Solve the insurance crisis themselves by creating plans that are affordable to everyone.

The individual mandate was a right-wing invention. It was created by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank. But now Republicans in Congress are looking at polls showing that while voters still don’t like the right-wing individual mandate — which has been vilified in the conservative media for three years now — but do like the liberal provisions in the law, like ending denial of coverage and extending coverage to young-adult children.

Therefore, the GOP leadership in the House and Senate is signalling that, if the Republicans on the Supreme Court overturn the Affordable Care Act, as they are expected to do next month, congressional Republicans will propose new laws to reinstate the popular but revenue-draining aspects of the law but without any provision to replace the mandate as a vehicle to recoup the insurance corporations’ lost revenue:

[…]

Traitors to Their Country: After Crashing the Economy in 2008, GOP Leaders Conspired to Obstruct Recovery in January 2009

Jon Ponder

Newt Gingrich
Newt Gingrich
In journalist Robert Draper’s new book on the 112th Congress, “Do Not Ask What Good We Do,” he describes a dinner meeting among top Republicans on the day of Pres. Obama’s Inauguration, Jan. 21, 2009. The purpose of the meeting that day — the same day George Bush, whose policy failures they had been supported in lockstep, flew out of Washington as the most unpopular president in the history presidential polling — was to lick their wounds and to plot their comeback.

On hand were disgraced former GOP Speaker, Newt Gingrich, Republican pollster/propagandist Frank Lutz, GOP propagandist Fred Barnes as well as senior Republican elected officials, including Sens. Jim DeMint of South Carolina, Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, John Ensign of Nevada and Bob Corker of Tennessee, as well as Reps. Eric Cantor of Virginia, Kevin McCarthy of California, Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, Dan Lungren of California and others. (Then-Minority Leader John Boehner was not there — he and Luntz are not speaking.)

Four months earlier, the financial markets had melted down plunging the U.S. economy into its worst freefall since 1929. As they were meeting in January, the United States was suffering its worst job losses in a month in 34 years. Over 3.5 million jobs had been lost in 2008, nearly 2 million of those losses had occurred in the three months prior to the GOP fatcats’ elegant dinner meeting. And there was no end to it in sight.

[…]

Wrong Again, Issa – the Bush and Reagan Administrations Were ‘Most Corrupt,’ And TARP Was Bush’s Bill, Not Obama’s

Jon Ponder

History will likely record that one of House Speaker John Boehner’s worst mistakes was his decision to allow California Rep. Darrell Issa to head the government oversight committee. It was Chairman Issa, after all, who called an all-male panel to discuss contraceptives earlier this year. The optics of this stupid move instantly became an undeniable symbol that Republicans were engaging in a war on women.

Issa, a one-time accused car thief and arsonist, is best-known in California as the guy who funded the initial effort to recall Democratic Gov. Gray Davis, in 2003, so that Issa himself could become governor, only to break down into sobs, with local news cameras rolling, when action star Arnold Schwarzenegger stepped in and bigfooted him out of the way.

More recently, in the weeks after Boehner appointed Issa to the chairmanship, Issa created a stir by predicting that the Obama administration would become the most corrupt government in history. This week, in an interview with Bloomberg news, Issa doubled down on his prediction:

[…]

MSNBC Host: Romney, Boehner, Cantor and McConnell Are All Criminals – We Need to Chop Their Heads off in November

Jon Ponder

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

On MSNBC’s “The Last Word” last night, host Lawrence O’Donnell opened a segment of the show by calling on his viewers to decapitate four members of the Republican Party’s leadership:

O’DONNELL: I’ll tell you this right now. If Mitt Romney becomes the president in November, I will either be dead or in jail by this time next year. You can’t galvanize and promote — if you can’t galvanize and promote and recruit people to vote for Barack Obama, we’re done. We will be a suburb of Indonesia next year. Mitt Romney, John Boehner, Eric Cantor, Mitch McConnell — they’re all criminals. We are patriots. We are Braveheart. We need to ride into that battlefield and chop their heads off in November.

Okay, cue the Republican outrage.

Of course, O’Donnell was really just riffing on what Mitt Romney uber-supporter Ted Nugent told his half-witted but fully armed supporters recently:

[…]

Ronald Reagan Supported What His Party Now Calls Class Warfare on the Rich

Jon Ponder

Pres. Ronald Reagan, June 6, 1985:

We’re going to close the unproductive tax loopholes that allow some of the truly wealthy to avoid paying their fair share. In theory, some of those loopholes were understandable, but in practice they sometimes made it possible for millionaires to pay nothing, while a bus driver was paying ten percent of his salary, and that’s crazy. […] Do you think the millionaire ought to pay more in taxes than the bus driver or less?

Think Progress, Oct. 3, 2011:

[…]

Republicans Flip-Flop on Federal Power: No on Obamacare Last Week, Yes on DOMA This Week

Jon Ponder

Andrew Cohen at the Atlantic:

Congress has no constitutional authority to punish people who don’t want to have health insurance, Paul Clement argued last week before the United States Supreme Court. This week? The heralded attorney is arguing, to another panel of federal judges, that Congress has plenty of constitutional authority to punish people who don’t want to marry someone of the opposite sex. Last week, Clement defended states’ rights and labeled as “unprecedented” the federal health care policy. This week, he says that Congress can dictate terms of a federal marriage policy over the objections of states which have legalized same-sex marriage.

Welcome to the forlorn world of the Defense of Marriage Act, the teetering federal law which defines marriage as solely that between a man and a woman and thus deprives same-sex married couples of certain federal rights and privileges.

Fox News Schools Its Viewers: Rising Price of Gas Not the President’s Fault

Jon Ponder

One of the Republican Party’s propaganda narratives being driven on Fox News these days is that it is Pres. Obama’s fault that gas prices are rising. Actually, it’s even worse — Fox is pushing the idea that the president wants gas prices to rise.

This issue came up during the president’s news conference yesterday in this exchange with Ed Henry, the GOP-Foxbot embedded in the White House press corps:

FOXBOT: Related to Iran and Israel, you have expressed concern about this “loose talk of war,” as you call it, driving up gas prices further. Your critics will say on Capitol Hill that you want gas prices to go higher, because you have said before that will wean the American people off fossil fuels onto renewable fuels. How do you respond to that?

PRES. OBAMA: Ed, just from a political perspective, do you think the president of the United States going into reelection wants gas prices to go up higher? Is that — Is there anybody here [in the White House press corps] who thinks that makes a lot of sense?

It is unlikely that that exchange made it onto the air on Fox News yesterday, which could explain why, in his concession speech last night after losing all the Super Tuesday primaries but one, Newt Gingrich felt free to lie about what the president said:

NEWT GINGRICH: And I thought today, in one of the most shallow and self-serving comments by a president that I’ve heard in a long time, he was candid in his press conference. He said, “You know, I’m really worried about higher gas prices because it will make it harder for me to get re-elected.”

I did not make this up.

Actually, Newt, you did.

[…]