Posted on 10/29/2004 7:15:23 PM PDT by Congressman Billybob
There are two ways to tell when a political party thinks it is losing an election. The obvious one is where the candidates are choosing to campaign. If they’re stumping in their own backyards and shoring up their bases, while the other side is on the attack, that’s a clear sign. But so is the level of lying. When all is almost lost, the unethical campaign will haul out the lies – the bigger the better.
Others have commented on the political geography of where Bush and Kerry are respectively campaigning in the closing days of this campaign. This comments on the new and worst lies in the closing days by Democrats and their enablers in the media. Here is a baker’s dozen of them.
John Kerry on Social Security: In Florida, where more than their fair share of retired people both live and vote, Kerry said that the Bush Administration would “reduce Social Security by 30%.” I’ve been unable to find even a twisted scrap of a suggestion of a fact to support that statement. It’s clearly intended to scare the elderly into voting for Kerry.
The same theme is picked up in the national ads for the Kerry/Edwards ticket. The ads claim that “Bush will privatize Social Security.” The thin reed of truth behind that charge is this: Bush, as well as many others, has proposed for years a test program allowing the youngest workers voluntarily to invest up to 3% of their SS contributions in private investments. SS for older workers would remain as is.
A 3% change will neither privatize nor destroy SS. What it will do is provide an object lesson that the stock market in general has always done better than the government growth in SS, even in the decade that included the Great Depression. It is that comparative example which the Democrats fear. And that is the reason behind the Democrat lies on Social Security.
Erskine Bowles on “independence:” Here in the Tar Heel state, Democrat Erskine Bowles is running behind Republican Richard Burr. This is Bowles’ second try; he lost to Elizabeth Dole in 2000.
I just saw a new Bowles commercial. He says, “Burr is trying to make this election about Bill Clinton. It isn’t. I’m my own man.” Well, now, let’s see. Bowles was Chief of Staff to Clinton (him). Burr has been running ads that tie Bowles to his former boss, and they’ve had some effect.
If someone once rode with Quantrall’s Raiders, is would be a fair presumption that he was a murdering bandit. If someone rode with Jesse James, it’s fair to conclude that he was a bank robber. And if someone rode with Bill Clinton, it’s right to think that they are a brass-plated, pathological liar. So, Bowles is lying about being his “own man.”
New York Times on missing explosives: Jill Abramsom is the Editor at the Times who let this story run as is. Less than a day later, the blogosphere came up with the fact that NBC reporters were embedded with the 101st Airborne when they took over this Iraqi base in the third week of the war. There were tons of weapons at the location, which were seized and destroyed. But these specialized high-explosives were not present when the Americans came in. Easily available prior reporting showed that the Times story was false when it went on the press.
Today’s news showed an American major whose specialty was ordinance disposal. His unit removed from this site and destroyed more than 250 tons of ordinance, including high explosives. This is the third basis (aerial photographs were the second) for concluding that the newspaper’s account was both premature and false. The Times, like Dan Rather for 10 days in Memogate, has not yet apologized for its incompetent (and probably biased as well) reporting.
Ellen Ratner on the Oil for Food scandal: This week Ellen Ratner, a Fox News contributor, was seeking to defend the UN as an honest and valuable source of information and action. She dismissed the corruption in the UN saying that “every large organization has a little corruption.” If the US were as corrupt as the UN, the President would be taking bribes through his offspring. An agency head, like Secretary Rumsfeld, would be taking bribes personally. And leading political figures like Speaker Hastert (equivalent to the French in the Security Council) would be taking bribes through associates to sell their votes.
Ratner would consider this “a little corruption.” This is grossly foolish, and the Dayside show audience hearing her reacted that way to her remark. But it’s of a piece with Ratner’s remark on-air in January that she “hoped” that enough “Americans would die” so that “Bush will be defeated.”
Don Riegle on the Nixon Example: Senator Don Riegle said on Fox News this week that Al Gore “accepted the Nixon example.” That he “allowed” the election to go to Bush, after the Supreme Court decision. Gore did the polar opposite of Nixon; he took every legal and practical step he possibly could to reverse the election result. That is what Nixon avoided, by accepting the results as announced and not challenging possible election fraud in Chicago that gave Illinois and the whole election to John Kennedy.
Bill Brock, the Republican on this segment, asked Riegle “what he is smoking.” That was too kind. The proper question would have been, “Why are you lying so shamelessly in front of God and everybody?”
CBS News on the missing explosives: As bad as the story is about the dishonest reporting on this subject, there’s a worse story about CBS’ “60 Minutes.” Producers from that show are quoted in the national press this week as saying that they intended to report this story in their broadcast on 31 October, to “knock the Bush Campaign into a crisis mode.”
Had this false story been run then, it might have been too late for the blogosphere to find the flaws in the report, get the word out, and force it into the MSM (Mainstream Media) as they have already done with the New York Times story this week.
Apparently CBS has learned exactly nothing from the experience of Dan Rather being forced to back down from his Texas Air National Guard story, based on forged documents. It’s still willing to put out a story that any competent researcher or editor would recognize was based on bad information and should not be run – exactly as Dan Rather said of the Guard story, but only after clinging to it as valid for 10 long days.
Ambassador Richard Holbrooke on missing explosives: He rejected the report of the embedded NBC reporter, and said “we don’t know what happened.” But he used the word “looted,” which means the explosives were stolen after the American military reached the scene. In short, he used the choice of verb to present a lie. He rejected the distinct possibility that Hussein himself moved the explosives to elsewhere in Iraq or across the border, after the UN pulled out and before the Americans came in.
He also actually defended the use of the phrase that “the war on terror is a metaphor.”
John Edwards on the vaccine gap: Of all people, John Edwards, millionaire trial lawyer, claimed that the lack of flu vaccine in the US was the fault of President Bush. Let’s get some facts on the table.
Flu vaccine has to be produced annually, since the strains of flu change annually and last year’s vaccine would be less than effective against this year’s flu. Producing that vaccine is a six-month process, as it is cultured in chicken eggs. When British authorities shut down the last manufacturer for cleanliness failures, there was no immediate replacement for that one source.
But why did all of the American manufacturers of flu vaccine get out of the business in the last two decades? Trial lawyers shut them down. First, they got a ruling in American courts that manufacturers could be liable in court even without a finding of negligence. Then they backed up the money trucks to the courthouse doors and hauled in the loot.
Not only is Edwards lying about the Bush Administration on this issue, he’s also lying about a potential Kerry/Edwards Administration. The last known special interest group in the US that still supports Kerry at more than 90% is trial lawyers. Edwards is the poster child for the source of this problem; he cannot, ever, offer any solution for this problem. Not unless a leopard can change its spots.
The Guardian on democracy: Political sources in the US are not the only purveyors of lies. The far-left British newspaper, the Guardian, came up with the bright idea that they should hand out the names and addresses of Americans in Clark County, Ohio. Initially, there was a spate of smarmy letters from Brits to ordinary Americans to set them straight and get them to vote for Kerry.
The replies, both directly to the paper and indirectly on the Internet, came fast and furious. Many of the replies were quite funny. Some of them used language that cannot be printed in a family newspaper. Suffice to say, neither the Guardian nor its benighted readers have an honest clue about American democracy. It wasn’t their business to tell us how to make our political decisions in 1776. It still isn’t.
The Guardian quickly pulled the plug on its own project in a few days, and acknowledged that it was a mistake. Though it demonstrated days later that it hadn’t learned its lesson, when one of its columnists called (indirectly) for the assassination of President Bush. The paper had to print an apology for that attempt at “humor,” as it called it.
Ted Kennedy on women’s earnings: Senator Kennedy, stumping for the Democrat ticket this week, repeated the canard that women only receive “78% of the wages of men.” The purpose was to fool women into supporting Democrats again in wide numbers. The reason was that the gender gap has almost entirely disappeared in this election, according to the polls.
What is the truth of male-female relative wages? When you make an apples-and-apples comparison, employees with the same educational backgrounds and the same years of work experience, the difference between men and women is an effective tie. Women earn 98% as much as men, in the same occupations.
The lie is based on ignoring the biological fact that women have babies, and the life choice that many mothers stay out of the workforce when their children are very young. And this oft-repeated charge by Ted Kennedy demonstrates why political lies work.
First, the reporters covering the speeches don’t do their homework, and point out that this charge falls at the end of Mark Twain’s list: “There are lies, damned lies, and statistics.” Second, millions of women are expected to take it seriously, without using a few mouse clicks on the Internet to get to the truth of the matter.
A Raft of Democrat Candidates on the 23% Tax: Because I live cheek-by-jowl with the intersection of three state borders – NC, SC, and GA – I have the benefit (?) of political ads from three jurisdictions. In all the close races, a common theme has appeared on the Democrat side. It is that the Republican in question is going to “raise your taxes by 23% on everything.”
Oh, really? Not even the most liberal Democrat would support such an idea. Well, maybe a couple of the hard-left Congresscritters, but that’s about it. So what rock is this idea crawling out from under?
I knew the answer as soon as I saw the first such commercial against the incumbent Congressman in my own District. The “23% tax hike” next appeared only a day later against the Republican candidate for Senate in South Carolina. These are people who are willing to consider the total abolition of the Internal Revenue Service, all of its 100,000 pages of laws and regulations. It would be REPLACED by a national sales tax, and that 23% tax would replace the current income from the income tax.
The Fair Tax plan, HR 25, would abolish ALL taxes – personal, corporate, Social Security, excise taxes, etc. The 23% sales tax would replace all of those, without exception.
So the honest statement is that some Republicans are considering the abolition of the IRS and its replacement by a sales tax. That might sound favorable. Only the flat-out lie, that the Republican favors an additional tax of 23%, will help the Democrat. And as I said in a speech this week, these ads depend on the voters being really, really stupid to fall for this canard.
And, of course, Grand Master Bill Clinton on intimidation of black voters: As Bill Clinton said on the stump this week to a largely black audience, “They did it in Florida, now they’re trying it everywhere.” Even the heavily biased US Civil Rights Commission and the left-wing New York Times did not find a single black voter who was intimidated in the last Florida election, much less “millions” of them.
But then, that’s the point of a grand lie from a grand liar. It’s to prevent the listener from even thinking about the truth of a statement. All it seeks, all he seeks, is a visceral reaction. He counts on no one checking the facts and discovering the lie.
Am I suggesting that the courts, or any other part of the government, should seek to prevent any of these lies from being said, and broadcast? Absolutely not. I hold, now and forever, with Thomas Jefferson, who wrote that the opposition to falsehoods should come “from the truth, in the free marketplace of ideas.” Sorting out the truth from the lies is the right and the duty of the sovereign people, in the sanctity of the voting booth, on 2 November.
About the Author: John Armor is a civil rights attorney who lives in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina. CongressmanBillybob@earthlink.net
BTTT.
EXCELLENT!
Thank you Congressman. This thread is priceless!
There are two ways to tell when a political party thinks it is losing an election. The obvious one is where the
candidates are choosing to campaign. If they’re stumping in their own backyards and shoring up their bases,
while the other side is on the attack, that’s a clear sign.
I just heard that John Kerry is spending Monday afternoon in Detroit. If he didn't have Detroit locked up pn the day he announced he was running for President he must have real problems. This makes no sense to me. Am I missing something?
I am SO glad there are people like you to make sense of things in writing for people like ME!
Thanks from the bottom of my heart!
Another touch of uncommon, common sense.
Hope you don't mind if I email it around a bit.
(believe it or not, I have a few friends that are reluctant to visit FreeRepublic.com, despite the jewels that I find here and send to them!)
Two corrections. The second paragraph about Ellen Ratner spells her name as Rather. (I know, obvious Freudian slip. Unless I already caught that one.) The other error is that I used the word "ordinance" twice. That means law; the correct word for military ammunition is "ordnance."
I've made those corrections in my publication versions of this. But I always post on FreeRepublic first. I don't want your friends to think I'm careless. LOL.
Billybob
Outstanding!
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Nice article.
Kerry lies when he says he would have allies. HE trashes all our allies--especcially when they are in trouble and need a friend. Countries notice this.
He trashed the S. Vietnamese as corrupt and unworthy of our efforts. Sure, they were corrupt, but they didn't touch the communists for injustice.
Of course he trashed our own soldiers as war criminals.
Kerry trashed Awali as an American stooge.
Then when Bush works with allies--the Northern Alliance--Kerry says Bush "outsourced" the attack at Bora Bora to the Northern Alliance who, Kerry claims, had "been our enemies a week before." What is he talking about here? Bin Laden murdered the head of the Northern Alliance Massoud two days before 9-11. Massoud wanted the US to go after Bin Laden and warned us that OBL would try something.
How were they our enemy?
"A Raft of Democrat Candidates"
I found out this summer that a bunch of floating sea otters is called a "raft"(alaskan cruise). They collect in groups and float around on their backs.
I love word origins. cb.
I can easily imagine RATner saying this. She's a sick puppy, heck they all are.
Prairie
Great paragraph!
Thanks for the ping! Good stuff, CB!
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