Just because some of its wheels have come flying off, that doesn’t mean the GOP clown car isn’t still moving down the road toward Election Day.
Presidential Race
The Surviving GOP Hopefulls and Their Audacious Lies
Americans are still struggling to come to terms with the loss they felt as the wackier GOP candidates fell by the wayside. For pure entertainment value, the mendacity they offered on the campaign trail couldn’t be beat.
Who can forget Herman Cain worrying about how China, a member of the club for almost a half-century, is now “trying to develop nuclear capability”? How can one top the convincing specificity of Michele Bachmann’s claim that on “page 92” of the healthcare reform bill, it says “people can’t purchase private health insurance after a date certain, which means people will ultimately go into a single-payer plan”? We have to admit that we’ll miss Rick Perry telling us wild tales of Obama’s totalitarianism extending to “telling us what kind of light bulb we can use.”
Those kind of bizarre untruths were like a series of small gifts for political watchers and late-night comedy writers alike. But just because some of its more colorful wheels have come flying off, that doesn’t mean the GOP clown car isn’t still moving down the road toward the November elections.
We thought we’d take a look at some of the brazen falsehoods offered up by the candidates who remain standing today.
1. Mitt Romney: No Apologies
Mitt Romney wrote a book called No Apology, and has repeatedly said on the campaign trail that Obama took a world tour at the beginning of his presidency to issue mea culpas to dastardly foreigners everywhere. This lie is so brazen not only because it never happened, but also because Romney uses the talking-point in speech after speech.
Ironically, as James Taub noted in the New York Times, “In a major speech in Cairo in 2005, Condoleezza Rice, then Mr. Bush’s secretary of state, said that ‘for 60 years, my country, the United States, pursued stability at the expense of democracy in this region here in the Middle East — and we achieved neither.’ What was she doing if not apologizing on behalf of the United States — and vowing to put an end to a pattern of misguided policy?”
2. Newt Gingrich: Christmas Warrior
Why should the nutjobs at Fox News have all the fun? In Davenport, Iowa, on December 19, Gingrich revealed the results of something he said he’d “been investigating … for the last three days.” What was it?
Apparently if the president sends out Christmas cards, they are paid for the Democratic or Republican National Committees because no federal official at any level is currently allowed to say ‘Merry Christmas.’ And the idea, I think, is that the government should be neutral. … I’m going to go back and find out how was this law written, when was it passed. We’ve had this whole — in my mind — very destructive attitude in the last 50 years that we have to drive religion out of public life.
Guess what? Yup – he just pulled that one out of… perhaps one of those mass emails your crazy right-wing uncle keeps forwarding you.
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Contributed by Joshua Holland of AlterNet.
