By OcJim

There is a Republican pattern that has grown in the last several years. It’s called lying — in more and more cases bold-face lying. It goes beyond distortion of truth or stretching the truth, which is normal in political arguments on both sides.

It is outright lies which a video or facts can readily disprove. Republicans can be confident that Fox News will back their lies most of the time and that the mainstream news will either follow a Fox lead without bothering to seek documentation, or just report news straight from sources, not concerned so much with truth as they are with spectacle or entertainment value. Anyway resources for analysis have been cut.

A most recent example for the Romney campaign is its insistence that Romney retired from Bain Capital on February 11, 1999 to run the Olympics in Salt Lake City. In fact Romney did interviews on Fox, CBS, NBC, ABC and CNN to declare unabashedly that he left Bain in February of 1999 and that Obama should apologize for linking him to gross exploitations of Bain-held businesses afterward.

The same day as the interviews, The Boston Globe reported that Mitt Romney, contrary to his claims, remained CEO of Bain until 2002, receiving not only tens of millions in returns on his investment but also a salary of over $100,000 per year, being listed in nine SEC filings and financial disclosure documents Romney filed in Massachusetts.

The Obama campaign’s two-minute TV ad features steelworkers from a Kansas City, MO steel mill that was taken over by Bain Capital and eventually went bankrupt. Bain was the majority shareholder in GST Steel beginning in 1993, which filed for bankruptcy in 2001. About 750 workers lost their jobs, and were left without any health benefits and reduced pensions. The federal government, reminiscent of Wall Street banks, was forced to infuse $44 million into the company’s underfunded pension plan. According to Reuters, Bain received $12 million on its $8 million investment and got over $4.5 million in consulting fees.

Recently, Republican senators have been caught in whoppers as well. Senator Scott Brown of Massachusetts tells needless lies to emphasize his importance — and repeats them often, like Hillary Clinton, the Vice President and other top officials seek his advice on important issues constantly, or Brown has everyday meetings and consultations with kings and queens, or he can confirm seeing Osama bin Laden’s dead body. Of course, the media and Democrats will check such stories and found them untrue.

Then there is the famous whopper told by Senator John Kyl that 95% of planned parenthood involves abortions. When called for the lie (it’s actually 3%), his spokesperson said, “It wasn’t intended to be a true statement.”

I don’t want to bore you with a complete list of lies. They are too numerous. But we can condense most lies into somewhat broad categories over the last several years.

As for lies (truth in parentheses) repeated so many times by all Republicans that they have assumed the proportions of myth, but are accepted by too many Americans:

1. President Obama tripled the deficit. (Obama’s first budget reduced Bush’s huge deficit by $1.29 trillion).
2. President Obama raised taxes, which hurt the economy. (Obama cut taxes for the stimulus.)
3. President Obama bailed out the banks. (Originated by Bush.)
4. The stimulus didn’t work. (The independent CBO said it raised employment by 1.4 to 3.3 million jobs.)
5. Businesses will hire if they get tax cuts. (Demand thru government spending determines hiring, which Republicans block.)
6. Health care reform cost $1 trillion. (Health care reform reduces government deficits by $138 billion.)
7. Social Security is a Ponzi scheme. (It is completely sound for 25 years.)
8. Government spending takes money out of the economy. (Government is We, spent on us.)

I must say that the Democrats and the Obama administration do a poor job of responding to Republicans lies, but for some two decades now Republicans have been masters at controlling the debate and putting Democrats on the defensive.

I am sure you have noticed.

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