Tag: GOP Lies
Fox News Schools Its Viewers: Rising Price of Gas Not the President’s Fault
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.
Republican TV Host Joe Scarborough Outraged over Mitt Romney’s ‘Lie’
Mitt Romney, the GOP frontrunner, has never let the fact that he is really bad at lying slow him down one bit. But Romney told such a bald-faced lie at a campaign stop in Ohio on Monday that it sent Joe Scarborough, the stalwart Republican host of “Morning Joe” on MSNBC, into paroxysms of apoplexy during Tuesday morning’s show.
The controversy arose after Buzzfeed writer Andrew Kaczynski uncovered an op-ed last week that was written by Romney and published in USA Today in July 2009, during the debate over health-insurance reform. In the article, Romney urged Pres. Obama to adopt the individual mandate — the system developed by the right-wing Heritage Foundation that Romney had deployed when he was governor of Massachusetts — as the central cost-saving mechanism in the federal health-insurance reform plan:
Santorum Forced to Admit President Never Said Everyone Must Go To College
Rick Santorum came thisclose to admitting he has repeatedly lied about Pres. Obama’s position on higher education this weekend, and it happened on in an interview with Chris Wallace on “Fox News Sunday“:
“I agree with the president that we should have options for a variety of training.”
– Rick SantorumWallace pressed Santorum on the issue of higher education. The candidate had recently called Obama a “snob” for wanting “everybody in America to go to college,” but Wallace pointed out that what Obama actually encouraged was for all Americans to have at least one year of higher education or some kind of vocational training or apprenticeship.
Santorum acknowledged that he might have made a mistake.
“Look, maybe I’ve read some comments where at least it was characterized that the president said we should go to four-year colleges,” he said. “If I was in error, you said you haven’t found that, I certainly read that… if it was an error, I agree with the president that we should have options for a variety of training.”
We’ll just have to take Rick Santorum on his word, as he might say, that he misheard Pres. Obama on the multiple occasions when he has called for increasing resources for community colleges and similar job-training facilities. For example, we’ll have to assume Santorum blanked out during the president’s 2012 State of the Union Speech when he made this reference to the decades-old, public-private job training programs at Central Piedmont Community College in Charlotte:
Santorum Caught Lying – Claims the Netherlands Involuntarily Euthanizes the Sick and Elderly
Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
Remember death panels — the “lie of the year” in 2009? Well, now GOP presidential candidate Rick Santorum has come out with a false statement along similar lines that is a contender for 2012’s lie of the year — in the Netherlands:
Lazy Lying Republicans – Obama Calls U.S. Corporatists ‘Lazy,’ GOP Falsely Claims He Was Referring to All Americans
In the art of political warfare, if you’re on defense, you are losing. After being pilloried by the press and even among their own party’s establishment for a series of stoopid gaffes, outright lies and displays of monumental ignorance over the past month or so, Republican presidential candidates and the party’s propagandists are now desperately trying to get off defense by breitbarting Pres. Obama over a comment he made at the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) meeting over the weekend.
“[There] are a lot of things that make foreign investors see the U.S. as a great opportunity — our stability, our openness, our innovative free market culture. But we’ve been a little bit lazy, I think, over the last couple of decades. We’ve kind of taken for granted — well, people will want to come here and we aren’t out there hungry, selling America and trying to attract new business into America.”
– Pres. Obama
– Pres. Obama
In a Q&A with Boeing CEO James McNerney at the APEC CEO Business Summit, Pres. Obama said that corporate leaders have “been a little bit lazy” in their efforts to recruit new foreign investments in manufacturing in the United States. He went on to cite his administration’s efforts to address the corporate sector’s laziness in attracting new business through its SelectUSA program which “organizes all the government agencies to work with state and local governments where they’re seeking assistance from us, to go out there and make it easier for foreign investors to build a plant in the United States and put outstanding U.S. workers back to work.” (Emphasis added.)
Deploying a deceptive tactic out of the playbook of racist provocateur Andrew Breitbart, Republicans, including candidates Rick Perry and Mitt Romney and propagandists like the Washington Post’s Charles Krauthammer, have taken the president’s comment out of context, implying that he was criticizing the American people as being lazy.
Here’s the transcript of the president’s comment, in context:
Something to Cry About
The Valentine’s Day 2011 issue of the National Enquirer features a story alleging that GOP Speaker John Boehner has had adulterous dalliances “with at least two different women” in Washington.
Frankly, the article, which was leaked by the website Boy Culture, seems pretty thin. There’s a rehash of the story broken by Mike Stark, an openly liberal D.C. journalist, after Labor Day alleging that Boehner, 61, had had an ongoing affair with a printing industry lobbyist, Lisbeth Lyons, who appears to be in her late thirties or early forties.
The speaker and his wife Debbie, a real estate agent in Ohio, have been married for 37 years and have two children. But there may be more here than a politician breaking a pledge to his wife. If the allegations are true, it appears Boehner’s affair smacks of corruption, according to Stark:
Boehner’s Alleged Affair – and Gingrich’s Confirmed One – Go Unmentioned by the New Yorker – Yes, the New Yorker
Peter Boyer’s nearly 9,000 word profile of Speaker John Boehner in the New Yorker last month filled in a few gaps in what is commonly known about Boehner’s biography, but there was a notable item missing — the fact that just four months ago the Capitol was aswirl with rumors that Boehner was having an extramarital affair with a (female) lobbyist.
Similarly, in describing events that led to the ouster in 1998 of House Speaker Newt Gingrich, Boyer omitted one of the central reasons — some would say the real reason — Gingrich was forced out: At the same time he was driving efforts to impeach Pres. Bill Clinton over a perjurious cover-up of an affair with a staffer, Gingrich was himself engaged in an affair with a congressional staffer, his current wife, Callista Bisek.
Why Are Republicans So Giddy about Tossing 2 Million Jobless Americans to the Wolves at Christmas?
Mike Barnicle’s debate with outgoing Arizona GOP-T Rep. John Shadegg on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” has gotten attention because of the outrageous new Grover Norquistian talking point about unemployment benefits that Shadegg trotted out:
It wasn’t Shadegg’s audacious lying that was remarkable — you can see that 24/7 on Fox — it was his swagger, the near-giddiness with which he consigned 2 million unemployed Americans to the wolves at the same time that he was demanding tax breaks for people so wealthy they don’t need to work.
BARNICLE: What about the fact that unemployment benefits pumped into the economy are an immediate benefit to the economy. Immediate.
SHADEGG: No, they’re not. Unemployed people hire people? Really? I didn’t know that.
BARNICLE: Unemployed people spend money, Congressman, because they have no money.
SHADEGG: Ah — ah — So your answer is it’s the spending of money that drives the economy. I don’t think that’s right. It’s the creation of jobs that drive the economy.
BARNICLE: But if you spend money in a variety store —
SHADEGG: Actually, the truth is the unemployed will spend as little of that money as they possibly can. Job creators create jobs.
A little later, Barnicle followed up on unemployment benefits:
BARNICLE: Let’s go back to what you said about unemployment checks. Unemployment checks, people don’t spend that money?
SHADEGG: No. They will spend as little as they can because they’ll hold on to it as long as they can. In reality, they don’t create jobs. You still haven’t told me how unemployed people create jobs.
CA Gov: Despite What You Heard on ‘Meet the Press,’ Meg Whitman Did Not Win Registered Independents
Calbuzz is one of the go-to sites for straight-shooting journalists’ insight into California politics. Earlier this month, they nailed the campaign of Republican Meg Whitman — who lost by a whopping 13 points on Nov. 2 — for what they referred to as post-election “bullshit” coming from the campaign’s top operative, Mike Murphy:
[When] we saw meathead David Gregory interviewing our friend Mike Murphy, the $90,000-a-month campaign guru for Meg “Biggest Loser” Whitman, on “Press the Meat” the other day, we felt compelled to get up off the floor and say something.
“We got beat and, you know, I ran the campaign, and I take responsibility for it,” Murphy said, at least acknowledging that he had been in the neighborhood. But then came excuse, No. 1: “It’s a very blue state and it’s getting bluer. As the red, you know, wave kind of went one way, there was a bit of a blue riptide coming the other way.”
And then, excuse No. 2: “CEO candidates who are doing kind of a tough medicine message . . . Meg and Carly Fiorina in California, they weren’t buying it. So we just couldn’t get there. We could win the Republicans, win the independents, but in California if you don’t win a lot of Democrats — you don’t win and we did not.”
Whoa there, big fella. “Win the independents?” If Meg and Carly had actually won the actual independents, they would be governor- and senator-elect.
