Category: Presidential Politics

Paul Ryan and the Obama-Hating Drum Circle in Tampa

9 comments

This RNC is difficult enough for me to tolerate as it is, but last night Mitt Romney’s mini-me, Paul Ryan, (R-WI) gave a speech that was a reasonably dull pack of lies. When your campaign strategy is about deliberate, brazen lying on the one hand, and whining about the press calling you out on it, on the other hand, you’ve got a huge problem. 

The lying part – sure, it happens in most campaigns everywhere. Oftentimes, it’s not outright lying but mere puffery or exaggeration. But Romney and Ryan – they simply lie. They lie about stuff – important stuff – directly in your face. They do it without a hint of embarrassment, scruples, or irony. They will quite literally say one thing to one audience one day, and another thing the next. When even your official party organ – the Republican Komosomolskaya Pravda – Fox News calls you out on lying, you’re going to have a credibility problem as the campaign-without-end drags on. 

  • Ryan said that Obama promised “in 2008” that the stimulus would save a GM plant in Janesville, Wisconsin, but “that plant didn’t last another year.” In reality, Obama made those remarks in February 2008 while running for president, the plant’s closing was announced in October 2008, and it closed in December 2008 — before Obama even took office, and months before the stimulus went into effect.
  • Ryan thundered that Obama “created a bipartisan debt commission” which “came back with an urgent report,” but Obama simply “thanked them, sent them on their way, and then did exactly nothing.” Ryan did not mention that he was on the debt commission, also known as Simpson-Bowles, and he voted against the plan it came up with.
  • Ryan accused President Obama of plundering hundreds of millions of dollars from Medicare. The only part of Obamacare that Ryan kept in his budget plan? Those Medicare cuts.

Take, for instance, Paul Ryan’s speech to the assembled faithful last night. It contained a lot of red meat for the party that has become nothing more than an Obama-hatred drum circle.  The lies as Fox News sees them: 

Fact: While Ryan tried to pin the downgrade of the United States’ credit rating on spending under President Obama, the credit rating was actually downgraded because Republicans threatened not to raise the debt ceiling.

Fact: While Ryan blamed President Obama for the shut down of a GM plant in Janesville, Wisconsin, the plant was actually closed under President George W. Bush. Ryan actually asked for federal spending to save the plant, while Romney has criticized the auto industry bailout that President Obama ultimately enacted to prevent other plants from closing.

Fact: Though Ryan insisted that President Obama wants to give all the credit for private sector success to government, that isn’t what the president said. Period. 

Fact: Though Paul Ryan accused President Obama of taking $716 billion out of Medicare, the fact is that that amount was savings in Medicare reimbursement rates (which, incidentally, save Medicare recipients out-of-pocket costs, too) and Ryan himself embraced these savings in his budget plan.

Elections should be about competing based on your record in the past and your vision for the future, not competing to see who can get away with the most lies and distortions without voters noticing or bother to care. Both parties should hold themselves to that standard. Republicans should be ashamed that there was even one misrepresentation in Ryan’s speech but sadly, there were many.

The right wing will whine about “Obamanomics”, which they thwarted or watered down at every opportunity, thus crippling its impact. But as Paul Ryan blames Obama for something that he didn’t do, recall that if the auto bailout hadn’t happened, there wouldn’t just be no SUV plant in Janesville, WI – there wouldn’t be a GM, or a GM plant, anywhere, doing anything. And all the ancillary suppliers and vendors would be out of work, too. Without the stimulus – watered down as it was – and without the auto bailout, the great recession of 2008 would have been a second depression. And it would have been thus because our country and its leaders over the last 20 – 30 years practically made it a policy to forget all the lessons learned during the Great Depression of the 20s and 30s. 

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/32545640

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

This Romney campaign, however, has already declared that it will not be reality-based, or factually accurate. This is why they still have surrogates like Donald Trump going around calling Obama a Kenyan Muslim. 

When are we, as Americans, going to demand truth from our candidates? Why do we tolerate 24 month-long campaigns that boil down to crazy talk, who can raise the most money, and superficial horserace nonsense? 

This campaign has become the worst season of Big Brother, ever. 

UPDATE: 

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ukkJYkANZ98&w=640&h=360]

Ryan, Romney, Regression

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So, Mitt Romney selected Wisconsin Representative Paul Ryan to be his Vice Presidential candidate. Ryan is popular among conservatives, so this should help shore up some rightist support for the wishy-washy Romney. Ryan’s popularity comes despite the fact that his policies are all about doing more for those who have everything and doing less for those who have nothing. 

Don’t say there’s no difference between the Republican and Democratic tickets this year. The difference couldn’t be starker. 

Forward!

Reid Gives Republicans A Taste of Their Own Medicine

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Did you hear how Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) took to the Senate floor to accuse Mitt Romney of not having paid income taxes in 10 years? He says someone with deep knowledge of Bain Capital finances told him that, but he’s unwilling to reveal his source, and the Republicans and Romney are going absolutely out of their minds about it. 

Is the charge true? Is it false? Who knows? Obviously, the easiest way to prove its falsity is to release 10 years’ worth of tax returns – something Romney has repeatedly refused to do. The Romneys say we people have all we’re going to get from them – an incomplete 2010 return and a 2011 estimate. Romney deliberately omitted a document he would have filed with the IRS detailing the holdings he has in foreign banks in Switzerland, the Caymans, Bermuda, and other traditional tax-evasion havens with expanded secrecy laws to help, e.g., absolve Americans of their duty to pay taxes (and more nefarious reasons like money laundering). ABC News pointedly asked Romney whether he’s ever paid less than 13.9% in income taxes, and he said he’d go back and check – that’s not a “no”. He never came back to tell us one way or another. 

The Republicans are going nuts, demanding Reid’s taxes, Pelosi’s taxes, Obama’s college transcript – they’re grasping at completely manufactured straws and bringing up remarkable non-sequiturs to avoid one salient fact: 

While the rabid right-wingers in Breitbartland demand a “vetting” of Obama that happened in 2008 and they’ve conveniently ignored, they absolutely refuse to vet their own nominee. That refusal to vet – hey, rich white guy, former Governor – is already haunting them. You can’t complain about transparency when you have a candidate who’s hiding something. You can’t complain about job creators and taxes when your ultrawealthy one percenter candidate pays no taxes. 

(Why aren’t we demanding to see how much Chris Collins has been paying in taxes?)

But if you read anything about the set of balls on Harry Reid, you should read this piece from the Rude Pundit. His writing is NSFW, but I haven’t yet found anything that more creatively and pointedly explains why this is all fantastic.  (Quote after the jump, due to language – those with vapours should avoid).  Read more

Romney: Cultural Warrior

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Mitt Romney thinks that the Palestinian people are culturally inferior to the Israeli people because Israel economically outperforms the Palestinian territories. Romney writes: 

“During my recent trip to Israel, I had suggested that the choices a society makes about its culture play a role in creating prosperity, and that the significant disparity between Israeli and Palestinian living standards was powerfully influenced by it. In some quarters, that comment became the subject of controversy. But what exactly accounts for prosperity if not culture?”

Well that’s an interesting assertion. It ignores the 64 year history of epic conflict in the territory formerly known as the Palestinian Mandate, not to mention millenia of ethnic and religious strife between people of different nationalities, and among the three major monotheistic faiths. To simply denigrate Palestinians as ethnically or culturally inferior to any other culture is, simply put, chauvinism. 

Germany is currently economically outperforming the United States, despite Europe’s sovereign debt crisis. By Romney’s logic, Germany’s culture is superior to America’s. 

tl;dr, Mitt Romney is a cheap chauvinist idiot. 

The Dog-Whistle Election of 2012

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It was reported yesterday that an un-named advisor to Mitt Romney complained to a foreign publication how President Obama doesn’t share or “appreciate” the shared “Anglo-Saxon heritage” of America and Great Britain. The Romney campaign itself later disavowed this unbelievably stupid comment, but that’s not dissimilar to a celebrity apologizing for an insensitive Tweet. 

You know they meant every word of it. They just realized that it was inconvenient. 

First of all, Anglo-Saxon Britain ended in 1066 with the Norman conquest at Hastings. Like their persistent use of “Soviet” and “Soviet Union” to describe the country known as the “Russian Federation”, the Romney folks need to brush up on their history. 

Secondly, this is all part of a wider theme that’s taken hold of much of the American right since Obama’s nomination and election. It all has to do with painting Obama as a foreign savage devil. How that characterization is made depends somewhat on the person making it, and the intended audience. It may also have something to do with the intelligence of the person making the characterization. 

For instance, the extremely dumb and ignorant – oft racist – will simply aver that the President is a foreign-born Kenyan who was raised at a madrassa in Indonesia as part of a worldwide Communist/Muslim conspiracy to take over the United States – a plot dating back to 1961 at least. People mildly more intelligent will simply “ask questions” about the President’s birthplace and loyalty. 

The less stupid will say they don’t doubt the President’s birth certificate is real, and “take him at his word” that he’s Christian. The scale slides as people more benignly accuse Obama of “not sharing our values”, or being “socialist”, or going around the world “apologizing for America”. 

All of it has a central theme of Republican omniphobia, and of being so fundamentally out of ideas – ideas that plunged the world into a couple of quagmire-y wars and a crushing, long-lasting worldwide economic crisis – that this is all they have to fall back on. Literal demonization of the foreign usurper President, and urging reversion to the very policies that got us into this mess in the first place. 

Obama may not be perfect, but he’s not a foreign Communist savage, either. Mitt Romney, however, is by no means the answer to any sane or rational question. 

Corporate Welfare King Complains About Socialism; Obama Looks Forward

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A couple of weeks ago, President Obama gave a speech in Virginia where he somewhat clumsily made the assertion that even self-made businessmen didn’t get successful on their own. They had teachers who inspired them, firefighters and police who protect them, roads that help them engage in commerce, and that ours is a society in which we are somewhat interdependent on each other; i.e., “government” to help private enterprise thrive. It is thus everywhere, despite the current fad among some to denigrate government and everything it does. Fox News is, naturally, at the forefront of this phony nontroversy, even trotting out a couple of little kids to discuss how N0bama is nationalizing their lemonade stand, or something. 

So, Mitt Romney – who purports to be a self-made businessman, facts notwithstanding – put out this ad: 

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fLZpMFbxyxU]

Jack Gilchrist, the New Hampshire business owner Romney features in that ad, is right out of Republicanland central casting. He whines that the President is “demonizing” people like him, who, with his father, built his business, “through hard work and a little bit of luck”. Also, the black Kenyan guy doesn’t “believe in America”. So, there’s that. 

Yet Jack Gilchrist didn’t just get where he is thanks to hard work, luck, teachers, roads, and civic protection services. He also got there thanks to thousands of socialist government dollars. 

In 1999, Gilchrist Metal received $800,000 in tax-exempt revenue bonds issued by the New Hampshire Business Finance Authority “to set up a second manufacturing plant and purchase equipment to produce high definition television broadcasting equipment,” according to a New Hampshire Union Leader report at the time…

Last year, Gilchrist Metal also received two U.S. Navy sub-contracts totaling about $83,000 and a smaller $5,600 Coast Guard contract in 2008, according to a government web site that tracks spending.

Gilchrist also is a recipient of an SBA loan of about $500,000, with matching funds from the federally-funded New England Trade Adjustment Assistance Center.  In other words, Gilchrist got where he is thanks to hard work, a little bit of luck, and over a million dollars in federal and state corporate welfare. Out of all the businesspeople available in the country to use to send this message, Romney’s campaign didn’t even adequately vet their Obama-hating generic middle-aged blue-collar rich guy. 

By contrast, in the wake of the Aurora shootings, the Obama campaign took the opportunity to speak frankly to the American people about what’s really at stake in this election, and he also directly addressed Romney’s clumsy rejection of civic society: 

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBorRZnqtMo] [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z0yK5NakN2o]

The Obamian Candidate

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Layers!!11!

Birtherism is the right-wing fever-dream that won’t die. For Democrats and independents, it’s long gone from being puzzling to hilarious – especially since the President released his “long-form” birth certificate in April 2011. The theory? Usually it comes down to Obama being a secret Muslim, Kenyan-born, Manchurian candidate, set up since birth in 1961 by a communist cabal intent on destroying the United States. Like the Romney campaign, this wing of birtherism still lives deep in the heart of the Cold War. 

Less insane birthers claim merely that Obama can’t be a “natural-born” citizen because under the law as it stood in the 18th century, one could not be “natural-born” if one’s father was not a citizen at the time of birth. Of course, that’s not the law in the United States. The 14th Amendment confirmed that any person born on American soil is automatically and by birthright a natural-born citizen. So, that theory’s out the window. 

The less inventive birthers insist that Obama’s certificate of live birth wasn’t proof of anything, despite the fact that writing on the document itself indicates that it is “prima facie evidence of the fact of birth in any court proceeding“.  So, to shut the thing up once and for all, the White House released the long form birth certificate, pictured above. 

Of course, these people immediately accused the White House and/or Hawaii of falsifying the birth certificate, analyzing the PDF version of it for “layers”, (as if the PDF wasn’t merely a scanned image in a particular format of a physical document). The “layers” theory was handily debunked here. 

There are still dummies all over the internet claiming that Obama is a foreign-born usurper and that everything is phony. In the most tea-party prone state in the Union, Arizona, a whopping (sarcasm – ed.) 1,200 emails were sent to Secretary of State Ken Bennett, (who – totally coincidentally – is also the Arizona co-chairman of the Romney campaign), to demand that Hawaii confirm Obama’s eligibility before the President is allowed to be listed as a candidate on the November ballot there. 

The emails between Arizona and Hawaii are utter comedy, but ultimately Hawaii did send a verification to Arizona, which you can see here. It seems pretty legitimate to me, even if it is a PDF and likely has LAYERS!

But for some reason, the Romney campaign has not yet answered claims that the likely Republican nominee is, in fact, a unicorn.  You see, Arizona was chasing down Obama’s eligibility, and claiming to Hawaii that it had a duty to do so. It would therefore follow that they had a duty to chase down Romney’s eligibility.  After all, Romney’s father may not have been born in Kenya, but he was born in Mexico. But Arizona hadn’t contacted Michigan, and had no plans to do so.

So, if a mere 1,200 angry, xenophobic, conspiratorial emails can get Arizona’s Ken Bennett to conduct a birther investigation, then certainly 15,000 emails will be more than persuasive for Mr. Bennett to conduct an investigation into the shocking, un-contradicted claims of Romney’s alleged unicornhood. 

The Republican rush to appropriate and placate the tea party is going to start coming back to haunt it – the tea party, which is at its core little more than a reactionary movement that facially opposes “spending” but never really coalesced for some reason until 2009. I wonder what that reason might be? 

After all, here’s a chart that shows a comparison of the growth in government spending between the Obama administration and other recent Presidents. (It starts with 2010, because the 2009 budget was passed in 2008 under President Bush). 

If conservatism is about smaller government, shrinking the federal budget, and lower spending, it would perhaps seem as if our political labels may be, quite frankly, reversed. The deficit? It wasn’t caused by spending – it was caused by a dramatic reduction in revenue during the 2008 downturn. 

But the longer we blama Obama for outrageous “spending” and for not being “natural-born”, the longer we’ll just keep going around and around, not really solving any big problems, but instead punting and making them worse for future generations. 

Email me at buffalopundit[at]gmail.com

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A Democrat Not Playing Perpetual Defense?

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If you thought Obama 2012 was going to be like the Democrats of yore, who would forever be on defense and let the Republicans control the message, you’d be wrong. 

For instance, this ad is now airing in Ohio.  It should be called “boom goes the dynamite”. 

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R5e0QoUdPJM]

And for those of you wondering whether Obama will run on his record, wonder no more. 

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1WbQe-wVK9E]

Romney v. Ledbetter

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From a Romney campaign conference call a few weeks ago: 

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sxl05HYTCZ0]

The Lilly Ledbetter Act was the first bill President Obama signed into law in 2009. It legislatively reversed a Supreme Court decision, to make it easier for women to sue an employer when pay discrimination is suspected. While Romney eventually said he wouldn’t repeal it, he also won’t say whether he’d have signed the act.  

It sometimes seems as if the Romney campaign is unprepared to be distracted from its reactionary “tax breaks for millionaires”-heavy “platform”. 

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