By Jim Hoover

Acrimony and lies are so much a part of Republican rhetoric that we need a full-time monitor just to catch and register the breadth and the scope of Republican fabrication, for it is rampant. We also need a historian to research the wild references made by demon–image-mongers (see above) running for the Republican nomination, not to speak of radical right-wing Republican governors.

With the improving economy and Obama’s rising favorability polls, opposition must manufacture an image they want to run against. The “He’s not one of us” has played even before the Tea Party. Some Republican candidates for president unimaginatively turned back to the “birther” argument, namely the vacuous Donald Trump at the heighth of his ascendency as Republican candidate for president. Now Newt is using his historical skills to dredge up a corpse he believes will rot Obama’s image, somehow placing it in the same vicinity as President Obama.

Ever hear of Saul Alinsky? Compare to Smith or Jones…or “Gingrich?” the name sounds foreign, even radical. After all he wrote “Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals” in 1971. Saul was a labor organizer and “community organizer” in the nation’s poorest inner cities. Freddy Krueger, look out.

“Obama is a radical leftist in the mold of Saul Alinsky,” says Newt the Gingrich — repeatedly. Never mind that Obama was only 10 when Alinsky wrote the book and that Obama lived in Indonesia and Hawaii at the time. Oh yes, and that Obama is, at most, a moderate, perhaps to the right of Richard Nixon and Dwight Eisenhower.

Alinsky did live in the same universe.

Then there is the would-be darling of right-wing Republicans — many are still waiting for Mitch to declare his run for president. Yes, Mitch Daniels who wants to rip unions to please the Koch brothers.

His whopper, encased in a boring rebuttal to President Obama’s State of the Union which got 91% approval rating in polls following the speech, criticized Obama for his “constant disparagement of people in business.”

That was just the beginning of his fabrication, for progressives rightly criticize Obama’s friendly treatment of corporations in all realms. Mitch’s whopper continues with statistics that can easily be disproved by anyone who stumbles into Google.

“The late Steve Jobs – what a fitting name he had – created more of them than all those stimulus dollars the president borrowed and blew.” Mitch would give Pinocchio competition. Apple has only 43,000 employees in the US and 700,000 overseas, most in Chinese sweat shops, Foxconn (see below), for example. President Obama’s stimulus plan created over 1 million jobs.

Like coyotes in the dark with media chattels watching, Republicans bay hollow lies: Mitch’s fiction about jobs, Newt’s pufferies and resurrections, Mitt’s specter of European socialism. Even while they crow in darkness, Obama’s plan to rescue 2 hostages held by the Somalis came to fruition with the kidnappers dead and the hostages safe.

But never mind. Republicans are seeking to fabricate their own candidate to run against.

The media allows them to paint the dark strokes of an imagined visage, while the real Obama gets things done quietly and efficiently.

He hasn’t delivered on all of his campaign promises, but he does have the dignity not to lie about it, contrary to Republicans.