Politics: September 2012 Archives

As I mentioned in a previous post, there's some Democrats out there attacking McKenna, saying he is "not who he says he is." In the first two ads, they just told a bunch of lies about him.

But they've given up on that line: in their latest ad (I saw it tonight, and can't find it online yet) they start out like the rest, saying "he says he's a moderate, but the national Republican agenda would [insert boring lies about a so-called 'war on women']." But, of course, even if it were true, it wouldn't apply to McKenna.

Maybe that's their game here: they hope ignorant voters on the left will believe the lie that a. those things are true and b. McKenna is somehow tied to them, while hoping informed voters on the right will say "actually, he *is* moderate, and I don't like that, so I won't vote for him!"

If so, maybe they're actually clever. But it's still lies, and they are still admitting they are lying, which makes them horrible people.

For a long time, I've held the view that if an organization puts "truth" in its name, you should be extremely wary.

I started thinking this way back when the anti-tobacco group thetruth.com first came on the scene, and they basically put out a lot of rubbish information (along with their scare tactics) that they couldn't back up. I even e-mailed them asking for them to back up some of their claims, and they couldn't: they simple pointed to some long papers mentioned on their "resources" page and said "it's in there."

Examples like this come and go all the time, and Barack Obama's "Truth Team" is no exception. Some of their current lies:

• They say Mitt Romney said rich people should pay a lower tax rate than middle-class people. It never happened. What he did say is that investment income (which many middle class people receive) should be taxed at a lower rate than wage income (which many rich people get).
• They say Mitt Romney plans to tax Social Security benefits. No, he doesn't, and didn't even hint at it. They make this one up by saying that the only way Romney's stated plan makes sense is if he taxed Social Security benefits. By the exact same logic, I can say that Obama's stated goals of fiscal sanity can only happen if he sells Alaska to Russia, so therefore, he plans to sell Alaska to Russia.

Meh. I could go on, but it's boring. Pretty much every claim they make is a lie, and I'm not using hyperbole. And don't think they don't know they are telling lies: they just know they won't be held accountable for it. There's no serious downside to lying for them, because the people who might vote for them either don't know, or don't care (and that, of course, includes most of the news media).

There's a few ads out there running against Rob McKenna for governor, and bizarrely, every single claim they make is a lie.

One, called "Clean Up", shows a guy cleaning his garage and saying McKenna is "not who he says he is" because he "lobbied to increase his salary," "all while" he "tried blocking a 12-cent increase in the minimum wage." All three of those things are false. He didn't "lobby" to increase his salary in early 2007, he responded to a request from the citizens' salary commission about a possible wage increase and he supported it. He also never tried to block an increase in the minimum wage in late 2010: he gave a proper opinion that the law did not require an increase. And the "all while" is false too, since those two things happened about four years apart. In fact, when he was giving a legal opinion about the minimum wage, he opposed a salary increase.

Another video, called "Meet", asks us to care that a Republican worked to get Republican presidential candidates George W. Bush and John McCain win, saying that this is somehow at odds with being a moderate. That's patently stupid, of course, since there's nothing contrary about being a moderate Republican and wanting the Republican candidates to win, but it gets worse: it flat-out lies by saying McKenna filed a lawsuit that would have denied women access to birth control and cancer screenings. No such lawsuit has ever existed. You simply cannot rationally or honestly claim that not giving something to someone is "denying access" to it. By that "logic," government denies me access to a '68 Shelby Mustang.

When the only way you can attack a candidate is to tell lies, it tells me you don't have anything true to attack the candidate on.

In September 2012:

* Obama's Fed chairman has been printing a lot of money, which has directly resulted in another credit downgrade. A couple of years ago, Obama said that a credit downgrade was one of the worst things that could happen, resulting in increased cost of debt and other terrors; now he says of our massively increasing debt that caused all this, we don't have to worry about it short term.

* Our ambassador to Libya and three other American embassy personnel were killed in Libya by terrorists in a coordinated, preplanned attack on September 11, and Obama has several times directly lied to the nation by saying that the only cause of the attack was spontaneous reaction to a video that almost no one had ever seen. He then sent America's top military general to pressure a private citizen to withdraw support for the video, pressured Google to ban the video, and investigated the people involved with the making of the video, all in an attempt to scapegoat law-abiding people in America to redirect blame away from himself by literally and explicitly undermining the right to free speech.

* Obama has done his best to offend our two more important allies in the Middle East, shunning the Prime Minister of Israel (again, lying about why he wouldn't meet with him), and saying Egypt isn't an ally (which his State Department corrected him on later).

* Because of Afghan troops turning on American troops for months, and direct assaults on U.S. bases in Afghanistan last week, the U.S. has ended cooperative training and patrols between U.S. and Afghan forces, that have been central to U.S. plans to leave Afghanistan.

* Far more people dropped out of the workforce than got new jobs, as the number of Americans not working reached historic highs.

* Democrats have still refused to even try to pass a budget, for the third straight year (Fiscal Year 2013 begins October 1, once again starting the year without a budget).

And yet somehow, with all this, it's supposedly interesting that Mitt Romney said some stuff in a video that some people found insulting. The stuff that really matters -- the debt, the budget, dead ambassadors, relationships with our allies in the Middle East, jobs -- is being ignored, and we are instead whining about insults to poor people and a mythical "war on women."

You get the government you deserve, people. If you don't care about the important things when you vote, then neither will your elected officials.

I want one example. Please. Just one.

Just one example of when the Republicans in Congress, under Obama, opposed legislation just because they wanted to hurt Obama.

The left keeps throwing out this line about how Republicans said their top priority was to get rid of Obama. Well, yes, just as Democrats said about Bush in 2000. It's not on the record, but we know that's what happened. They spent 3.5 years -- a brief reprieve due to 9/11 -- trying to get rid of Bush.

But neither the Democrats in 2001 nor the Republicans in 2009 ever said they would oppose everything the President wanted. The Republicans actually have agreed to a lot of legislation under Obama. The legislation they've opposed (sorry, "obstructed") is legislation that they disagreed with ... which is what you're supposed to do if you disagree with something.

Maybe the Republicans refused cooperation on some legislation just to hurt Obama, though I know of no example. Every example I know of is where the Republicans and Democrats have actual disagreements. That's not to say that you shouldn't work harder to cooperate, but the Democrats have been at least as guitly of this as Republicans.

And please don't say the Republicans agreed with "ObamaCare." There's zero evidence supporting this claim. Yes, some Republicans supported some parts of the ACA at various times, but that cannot possibly imply agreement with the bill as a whole. It's so unintellectual an argument that it's barely worth responding to. If I support tax cuts, that doesn't mean I should vote for a bill that has tax cuts, and also requires dog owners to kill their firstborn male pup. You have to consider the bill as a whole, and there are many objectionable items in the ACA that justify opposing it, for any Republican (or, really, any Democrat).

The Democrats have been attacking John Koster for awhile now, but they haven't actually said anything of substance. Everything they bring up is either completely false, or is a silly and boring "guilt by association" fallacy.

The latest from the DCCC covers both grounds. First, they falsely claim that seniors would pay $6,400 more for Medicare under Ryan's plan; then, they falsely claim that there is a causal relationship between Medicare reform and tax breaks; then, they falsely claim Ryan's plan is to "end Medicare."

And all this as a proxy just so they can tar Koster for saying he "loves" Paul Ryan. Koster loves Ryan, and Ryan wants to do all these terrible things (even though he doesn't)! Therefore Koster is bad (even though he isn't)!

The rank stupidity of the DCCC and its allies is troubling. Is it too much to ask that your opponents aren't idiots? Seriously: if Koster is so bad, where's the real criticism? So far, the Democrats have come up completely empty.

It almost makes you think they don't have any real criticisms.

Someone told me the other day that the GOP platform reflects on Mitt Romney, that even if he says he disagrees with a part of it, he controls the platform's contents so he really must actually agree with it.

I pointed out, no, that is not how the platform works. You get delegates from around the country to write it and then vote on it, and the President cannot force that process, unless the delegates choose to go along with it. The rules don't allow it. It's a democratic process, not a top-down decision. You cannot assume that the candidate agrees with the platform, because the candidate doesn't control the platform.

Apparently, that is how it works for the Republicans, but not the Democrats. Obama wanted changes to his platform -- reverting changes that removed mentions of "God" and Jerusalem as the capital of Israel -- and convention chair Antonio Villaraigosa violated rules by pushing through those changes against the clearly expressed will of the voting delegates: he needed a 2/3 vote to approve the changes, but he could not have even reasonably concluded to have a majority.

For those of us inundated with the annoying "Suzan DelBene!" ads before the primary, this ad from John Koster is nicely cathartic. Though, they could've left out the pirate thing.

So this time, PubliCola says John Koster is wrong about private Social Security accounts. Koster said recently, "Just think how much further, how much better off we'd be, if we'd started [optional private Social Security accounts] ten years ago."

PubliCola, knowing little and assuming much, says, "... according to data on Yahoo Finance, seniors would have seen a 39.4 percent crash in retirement savings invested in the market tracking a year out from the crash to right afterward." But why would anyone invest their retirement savings only a year before the crash, until right afterward? The whole point of private accounts is not for current retirees, or people retiring soon, to dump their money in the market, but to provide a stable long-term option for people whose retirement is farther off. Cherry-picking a window that would apply to few, if any, retirees is inherently dishonest.

Koster was explicitly talking about long term: he said "ten years ago." Any possible sensible and honest analysis will look at what would happened in that ten-year window to see if he was right. And it turns out, Koster was right: the DJIA has seen a 50 percent increase in the last ten years, which is pretty huge. From August 2002 to August 2012, it's increased from over 8700 to over 13,000.

There's only one ten-year window that would not have seen a net gain in the DJIA: from late 1998 until around early 2001 to 2008/2011, which brings us from soon after the crash until the beginning of the recovery. And every 15-year window shows dramatic gains.

Of course, past success is no predictor of future success, and there's measurements other than the DJIA that may be better. But the point is that private accounts -- to this point, as best we can tell from the facts -- would have worked just fine for the younger workers they were aimed at, and PubliCola is still telling false stories to try to smear Koster.