There's something you should know about the Republican party; they lie. Somewhere along the line (let's say, the Bush administration), it became the worst thing in the world to point this out. You can use the word "misled," you can say someone "fudged," you can use almost any synonym you like, but you can't call a Republican a liar. I suppose it's supposed to be incivil and I'd be inclined to agree in cases where the charge is itself a lie, but calling a lie a lie is just a statement of fact. If Republicans find being called liars offensive, they could always take the drastic step of knocking off all the lying. It seems to me this is the easiest remedy to the problem, but it's also the least likely one to happen.Not that I'm saying that Democrats are truth-machines either. If you drop a comment after this post pointing that out, I'll take that as proof you didn't even read this to the second paragraph. All politicians lie, but Republicans make it look easy and run to that strategy like it's the only tool in their toolbox. I think that if you looked at history, you'd see that, while Democrats tend to lie in defense of themselves ("I did not have sex with that woman"), Republicans tend to lie to attack other people.
What gets me most about all of this is just how shameless GOP lying is. Republicans will drop a lie, get called on it, and keep telling it. It doesn't make any difference that this has been proved wrong, what matters is that the lie has been focus-grouped and market-tested and the data shows it works. For example, House minority leader John Boehner recently put out "10 Facts Every American Should Know About Speaker Pelosi's 1,990-Page Gov't Takeover of Health Care." It included this little morsel of BS:
MASSIVE CUTS TO MEDICARE BENEFITS FOR SENIORS. Despite grave warnings from CBO, FactCheck.org, and the independent Lewin Group that cuts to Medicare of the magnitude included in Speaker Pelosi’s bill would have a negative impact on seniors’ benefits and choices, Speaker Pelosi’s health care bill stays the course and cuts Medicare by hundreds of billions of dollars.
Two problems here; one, the Lewin Group study has been widely debunked, yet the GOP keeps going back to that same well. The group is "independent" in the same way that a wad of chewed gum you find under a movie seat is a pearl. According to the PR watchdog site SourceWatch, Lewin Group is "wholly owned by the health insurance giant UnitedHealth Group." The site says, "The Lewin Group has a reputation as the 'go to' firm for beleaguered organizations in need of reports and research to support controversial positions and issues." Like a professional witness, Lewin Group reaches the conclusions they're paid to reach... [CLICK TO READ FULL POST]
