Comparing Pundits

Two dueling op-eds in today's Washington Post are on basically the same topic: how much the other guy is lying. The difference between them is telling.

Dana Milbank's piece describes how Romney tells multiple whoppers one after the other at every appearance, completely mischaracterizing Obama's record, his speeches, and the state of the economy, and the reality of the world as we know it. Milbank also acknowledges that many politicians, including Obama, say things that they know aren't true. In particular, Milbank criticizes Obama's incorrect statement that it would be "unprecedented" for the Supreme Court to strike down the health care law.

George Will begins with the following statement:

Barack Obama’s intellectual sociopathy — his often breezy and sometimes loutish indifference to truth — should no longer startle.

And then goes on to criticize Obama for the same statement about the Supreme Court knocking down unconstitutional laws. For the record, I agree that Obama is wrong on this.

But Will's selective criticism is quite telling. Where Milbank takes a reasoned and honest look at politics and the things both sides say, Will is in full propaganda mode. He doesn't make the slightest nod to the horrific Republican record of lies, from Richard Nixon's "I'm not a crook," to Reagan's "we don't negotiate with terrorists," to George Bush linking Saddam to 9/11, to the litany of misstatements, inaccuracies and outright lies categorized by PolitiFact that Bachmann, Cain, Gingrich, Santorum and Romney have spouted throughout the Republican primary. Ron Paul is the exception to the Republican rule: his misstatements and exaggerations are in line with your average Democrat's, easily attributable to zeal rather than a hypocritical effort to rewrite history and warp reality. His acknowledgement of Republican errors is laudable, though I still disagree with pretty much everything he says. So do most Republicans, but usually for the opposite reason.

Will also says:

Obama flagrantly misrepresented the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, which did not “open the floodgates” for foreign corporations “to spend without limit in our elections” (the law prohibiting foreign money was untouched by Citizens United) and did not reverse “a century of law.”

and

[Obama's] defense will be his campaign because he cannot forever distract the nation and mesmerize the media with such horrors as a 30-year-old law student being unable to make someone else pay for her contraception.

which is an intentional lie about Fluke's testimony in service to perpetuating the Limbaugh/Republican lie that contraceptives are all for fun and games and not real health problems.  Menstrual cramps can be agonizing and some women who never have sex use the hormones in the pill to prevent the pain (no, painkillers just don't cut it). Fluke's testimony wasn't even about that: it was almost in its entirety dedicated to a friend who will never be able to have children because she was denied medication to prevent uterine cysts. That medication just happened to be in the form of birth control pills, and therefore the employer thought she was lying just to have sex.

Will is flagrantly denying reality and displaying the utmost hypocrisy here. He casually calls the president a liar, and then goes on to breezily discuss who would be best qualified to perpetuate Will's Republican hypocrisy.

His take on Citizen's United is a prime example. While it's true that the law against foreign contributions is still in place, many of the organizations spending money on our elections have no requirements to report their donors. Without that information, there is no way to know whether foreigners are funneling cash through dummy shell corporations and then into the electoral process, and thus utterly no way enforce that law. (And we already know there are plenty of people motivated by foreign interests donating money to candidates.)

When there is the appearance and possibility of corruption, and there is no way to even detect that a law is being violated, the presumption must be that corruption is occurring. This is the standard that judges are held to in cases of conflict of interest. It is the standard that Republicans use when they propose laws that require all voters to show ID at the polls, even when there's no evidence of voter fraud. To do otherwise would cause us to lose faith in the integrity of the system, they say. Similarly, Republicans insist that we need to force all workers to prove that they have the right to work in this country to prevent illegal aliens from taking jobs away from real Americans.

Preventing foreign contributions to political campaigns is in exactly the same category as stopping non-citizens from voting and working. Requiring full disclosure of campaign donors' identities (not just their dummy shell corporations) would be a good first step. Yet Republicans oppose this simple and straightforward solution because they say they believe that corporations have right to free speech, that money is speech, and that corporations have a "right to privacy" to prevent them from being unjustly attacked. A right that Republicans don't believe that individuals have when they wish to obtain an abortion or contraception.

Republican are fine with forcing doctors to harangue women, wasting their time and (our) money on useless tests, making them listen to fetal heartbeats and violating them with ultrasound wands. Republicans are completely fine with embarrassing and intimidating women who were raped or can't afford to support another child, but they don't want to embarrass multinational corporations by making them admit they're supporting Mitt Romney.

I used to be a Republican, but this sort of outright hypocrisy drove me out of the party. I was an independent for many years, voting for numerous Republican candidates for the state legislature, governor and congress. But as the years went by the Republican Party has ejected everyone I've ever voted for. They're even going after long-time conservative stalwarts like Dick Lugar. Dick Lugar!

The Republican Party has gone so far off the rails it's no longer safe to vote for any Republican. The enforced loyalty to parochial ideology prevents individual Republicans from voting their own consciences for fear of being stabbed in the back, like Lugar. This lock-step central-committee dictatorship simply doesn't exist in the Democratic Party, which is why I've gravitated there. Democrats, like the Blue Dogs, can still vote their own minds, but individual Republicans can no longer make their own decisions; their votes are dictated by the Powers That Be.

And Grover Norquist is the man that many believe is that Power. He's famous for having said that he wants to shrink the government until it's small enough to drown in a bathtub. By enforcing a tighter and more restrictive notion of what it is to be a Republican, and coercing Republicans at every level of government to kowtow to his demands, Norquist may eventually find himself able to fit the entire Republican Party into that bathtub.