The GOP Fact Vacuum

By Charles Blow, The New York Times

01 September 12

onesty is a lost art. Facts are for losers. The truth is dead.

Pick one.

Whatever the term of art, they all signal a dark turn, and, this week, the Republican Party took that turn with reckless abandon.

Lying is certainly nothing new in politics. One could even argue that it's fundamental to politics. Saying incredible things in a credible way is the art; using math of vapors to sell dreams of smoke is the craft.

But Paul Ryan's acceptance speech on Wednesday took things up a notch.

Sally Kohn, a contributor to Fox News, said:

"Ryan's speech was an apparent attempt to set the world record for the greatest number of blatant lies and misrepresentations slipped into a single political speech. On this measure, while it was Romney who ran the Olympics, Ryan earned the gold."

Business Insider called it "factually shaky." A Washington Post blog called it a "breathtakingly dishonest speech." Salon's Joan Walsh said the speech was "stunning for its dishonesty" and contained "brazen lies." Jonathan Cohn at The New Republic used the headline: "The Most Dishonest Convention Speech ... Ever?" You get the picture.

So much was written about this and other Republican attempts to distort and deny the truth this week. But I'm beginning to worry that many Americans are growing weary of isolating the lies, coming as they did in torrents.

The Romney campaign seems to be banking on this fatigue and counting on The Fourth Estate being reduced to little more than a fifth wheel in the political zeitgeist. One of its pollsters said this week that the campaign would not be dictated by fact-checkers.

Romney's speech at the convention on Thursday avoided the flat-out falseness of Ryan's, containing what FactCheck.org called only a "few bits of exaggeration and puffery." The greatest transgression Thursday night was the bizarre scene of Uncle Clint babbling back and forth with an empty chair that contained an invisible Obama.

But Romney's restraint does not erase the damage already done.

Mediaite's Tommy Christopher looked at the fact-checking site PolitiFact's tallies on Aug. 10 and found that:

"Mitt Romney's statements have been judged Mostly False, False or Pants on Fire 46 percent of the time, versus only 29 percent for President Obama. In the Pants on Fire category alone, Romney is more than four times as likely to suffer trouser immolation than the president. Nearly 1 in 10 statements by Romney earned flaming slacks, versus 1 out of every 50 for Obama."

On Friday, PolitiFact still had Romney's statements as Mostly False, False or Pants on Fire 42 percent of the time, compared with 27 percent of the time for Obama.

Propaganda is one thing; prevarication is another.

There is some degree of mythmaking and truth-stretching in every campaign, but the extent to which Republicans have embraced ignobility in this campaign is astounding. They have used their convention podium to unleash a whole lot of half-truths, so many that fact-checkers have been working overtime. But trying to chase down every lie is like trying to catch every bug in a log. It's almost impossible.

If the news media has to pour so much energy into fact-checking, which is noble and necessary, I worry that the big picture gets short shrift. The convention itself was shockingly low on vision and high on venom.

Yet the candidates are virtually tied in most polls. What does this portend for the republic? I worry deeply about this, not simply because I work at a newspaper, but because I am an American.

If we allow our leaders to completely abandon any semblance of honesty, what do we have left? When rancid disinformation stands in the space where actual information should be, what will grow?

And how can a party that incessantly repeats the mantra that our rights were granted by God repeatedly violate a basic tenet of almost every religion: truth-telling? What does it mean when a party that trafficks in American greatness trades in human horridness?

Romney long ago demonstrated that he was willing to do anything and take any position - even if they contradicted previous ones - to make it to the White House. And while that may be fine for him, it shouldn't be fine with us.

We deserve better and should demand better. We deserve better than a weather-vane candidacy that doesn't care whether it's being candid. We deserve better than a party and a presidential aspirant so wanton that they refuse to let facts get in the way of a fairy tale.

They Built That: How a Republican Lie Turned Into an Alternate Universe

By Michael Cohen, The Guardian UK

31 August 12

The GOP's scorched-earth rhetoric about government has completely warped their actual grasp of economic reality.

n 17 July, President Barack Obama spoke at a campaign rally in Roanoke, Virginia. It was a typical event for an incumbent president who is seeking a second term. In his remarks, he offered his vision of government's role in spurring entrepreneurship and creating jobs in the United States:

"If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you've got a business – you didn't build that. Somebody else made that happen. The internet didn't get invented on its own. Government research created the internet so that all the companies could make money off the internet."

This is all fairly boilerplate rhetoric – a basic recitation of how Democrats view the role of government and its interplay with the private sector. But in this statement, there was one phrase that Republicans have grabbed on to like a famished dog with a new bone:

"You didn't build that."

That single phrase, taken out of context by Republicans, has become the GOP's symbol of Obama's supposed contempt for the free market and entrepreneurship, and for his socialist assault on America. Sure, it's a misleading lie to cast it that way. But in the hands of Republicans intent on furthering their vision of the free market as a fragile institution whose success relies on as little interaction with the federal government as possible, it quickly became a stand-in for all that is wrong with Obama.

And so, the Republicans made "We built that" the theme of Tuesday's convention proceedings. Speaker after speaker hammered on this theme, accusing Obama of disrespecting small business. But they did so with almost a wilful sense of hypocrisy. For example, Delaware lieutenant governor candidate Sher Valenzuela attacked Obama for the line despite the fact that, just a few months ago, she gave a detailed speech to a business group about how they could do a better job getting government contracts.

The shining example, however, was Phil Archuletta, a New Mexico businessman whose business makes outdoor signs – in part, for the federal government. Archuletta's chief complaint against the president was that Obama's stimulus bill had made it harder for him to win government contracts – an odd message for an evening dedicated to the notion that small businesses need government to get out of the way.

Democratic partisans were busy tweeting out the fact that Obama has signed multiple pieces of legislation providing tax breaks for small businesses, but such "facts" simply bounce harmlessly off the GOP's protective truth shield. Indeed, if there is one overarching takeaway, not only from the sessions so far at the Republican convention, but also from the last year of political campaigning, it is that Republicans not only toil in their own narrowly and misleadingly constructed world, but really are just making stuff up.

There were plenty of instances on display last night, beyond the "you didn't build it" meme. The most pernicious and racially-coded example is the oft-repeated claim by the Romney campaign that Obama, by granting waivers to states, has gutted the work requirement of the welfare reform bill (passed more than 15 years ago). The charge has become a crucial element of Romney's attacks on the president, even though, as many independent fact-checkers have pointed out, it simply isn't true. It's another lie; and yet, it was repeated last night by former Democratic Congressman Artur Davis, and again, by failed presidential candidate Rick Santorum, who went a step further and accused Obama of creating a "nightmare of dependency".

These are the big lies; but there are so many other ones that it's almost impossible to keep track. For example, speaker after speaker denounced Obama for running up $5tn in debt. While budget deficits that have increased the national debt have occurred during Obama's presidency, only someone who believes history began on 20 January 2009 (when Obama took office) can think he is fully responsible.

As this handy chart, put together by the folks at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, the debt is a result of a confluence of factors: the Bush tax cuts, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the decline in tax revenue from the economic downturn, Tarp, and – very slightly – recovery measures put in place by President Obama. Republicans have completely washed their hands of any role and any responsibility for America's ever-increasing red tape – and it should be noted that the budgets of both Romney and Ryan (when he served in the House) would, because of massive tax cuts, further explode the deficit.

Republicans also decry the president's jobs record and they certainly have a point, but again, to blame Obama for 8% unemployment is to ignore the fact that Congress exists: it has regularly blocked any and all job creation measures ever since Obama's stimulus bill, which did create about 2.5 million jobs.

Then, there are assertions like keynote speaker New Jersey Governor Chris Christie's claim that Americans are "overtaxed", even thought the tax burden on taxpayers is at its lowest point since the Truman administration – and Obama has repeatedly cut taxes as president. Indeed, as Tom Schaller, a political scientist at the University of Maryland, Baltimore said to me:

"Republicans say they value low taxes and hard work but fought until the 11th hour against the only tax levied directly on work: the payroll tax."

But all of this is at pace with a conservative worldview that considers government to be nothing more than malevolent interference with the smooth operation of the private sector – except when it's not. "Jobs don't come from government," said Texas Senate candidate Ted Cruz last night, a view that basically sums up GOP economic thinking. But if you listened to Republican governors on Tuesday, you might have found yourself surprised to discover that, in their states, the government has played an oddly integral role in spurring job creation. If you listened to Mary Fallin, governor of Oklahoma, extol the virtues of the energy industry in her state and bemoan "more government, bigger spending and more regulation", you might never know that the oil and gas industry is deeply reliant on – and spends millions lobbying for – tax breaks from the federal government.

One can believe that government should play a less direct role in the workings of the private economy – clearly, this is a defensible notion. But to listen to Republicans harping on Obama's "you didn't build that" line is to hear a party that views "government" in the most simplistic imaginable terms. This isn't a governing philosophy; it's a caricature of how the economy actually works.

To be sure, it's hardly unusual for political rhetoric to take liberties with the truth, or to stretch an argument to breaking-point, but with Republicans today, the issues runs much deeper. Very simply, the way they talk about what the federal government does or should do, and about the role of spending, taxation and regulation, is more than just a compendium of lies: it describes an alternate reality.

In the GOP's defense: at least they can argue they built that.