Almost All Of Our Politicians Lie To Us With Alacrity... Which Is Why Bernie Is So Loved Even By People Who Don't Agree With All His Policies

Yesterday in this time slot, we looked at one of the Bloomberg lies from the last debate: "All of the new Democrats that came in and put Nancy Pelosi in charge and gave the Congress the ability to control this president, I bough... I, I got them." It wasn't just the oligrachal hurbris of the word "bought." The word "all" wasn't close to a factual description. "Some" would have been more appropriate and a recognition that he was part of a team-- not even the leader of the team-- might have shown a little

a- humility
b- connection to reality

People create their own narratives, sometimes by exaggeration, sometimes out of wishful thinking, sometimes out of thin air, sometimes, in later life, due to the onset of senility. Chief executives-- particularly in business, but increasingly in politics-- do this is a matter of course. And no one challenges them. That's why CEOs are unfit for public office. Trump and Bloomberg are both absolutely perfect examples. Let me come back to Trump, the world's biggest public liar, in a moment. First a tangent to the fuzzy and deteriorating world of Status Quo Joe. Jonathan Turley explained Biden's latest big lie-- about how he was arrested in South Africa fighting to free Nelson Mandela. (If Biden could dance like these guys, I'd stop writing about what a monster he is. He'd still be a monster; I'd just stop writing about it.)





As you read this, keep in mind that Biden's early career was premised on only one thing: showing Delaware racists how he would fight against integration by derailing busing. Turley on the eve of the South Carolina primary where Biden's entire political career now rests on the shoulders of elderly, largely rural African American voters:

After weeks of confusion, Joe Biden’s campaign have finally admitted that he was not arrested while visiting Nelson Mandela. Biden has made some false claims in the past but this was particularly bizarre. No one had any record of such a historic arrest in South Africa. While Biden did not take responsibility personally for the exaggeration, his deputy campaign manager admitted today that Biden was not arrested but merely “separated from his party at the airport.” That is a bit of a nose bleed of a step down from an arrest with Mandela to an airport separation. Hard to imagine how you confuse the two since one ordinarily involves custody, cuffs, and confinement.

The claim of the arrest was viewed as a pitch to help Biden’s campaign in South Carolina but was widely ridiculed. The problem is that Biden identified his own witness in his account by noting that “I had the great honor of being arrested with our U.N. ambassador on the streets of Soweto trying to get to see [Mandela] on Robben Island.”

However, Andrew Young, who was the U.N. Ambassador at the time, stated “No, I was never arrested and I don’t think he was, either.”

The campaign then tried to explain but only made the claim more offensive that Biden would suggest that he was arrested in South Africa during apartheid: “It was a separation. They, he was not allowed to go through the same door that the-- the rest of the party he was with. Obviously, it was apartheid South Africa. There was a white door, there was a black door. He did not want to go through the white door and have the rest of the party go through the black door. He was separated. This was during a trip while they were there in Johannesburg.”

So Biden remembers separation in going through an airport door as an arrest in the cause of freeing Mandela in South Africa?

Biden has been challenged about past statements like his claiming that he Biden had traveled to Konar province in Afghanistan to give a Silver Star on a Navy captain who refused the medal, because his friend didn’t survive. The Washington Post reported that it “never happened” and said “as he campaigns for president, Joe Biden tells a moving but false war story.”

Biden was also recently challenged for saying that Biden he worked on the Paris Climate Accord with former Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping, who died 19 years before the agreement was signed.

This story however is even more insulting to those who honor the memory of Mandela. It is akin to claiming to have marched with Dr. King because you walked through an airport with him on one occasion. There is a big difference between being separated at an airport and being arrested in South Africa in the same cause as Nelson Mandela.

Yet, it is notable that CNN spent exclusive coverage on “how important is the endorsement of Rep. James Clyburn” to Biden in South Carolina rather than this astonishing claim and belated admission about Nelson Mandela.

Where do you even start with Trump? By now we all know they every word out of his face is a self-serving lie, right? Well... depends how you define "we." This should be self-explanatory-- if you click on it and blow it up so it's legible:

Basically 32% are not part of "we." For one reason or another-- my guess is IQ-- they're going to follow Trump right into the jaws of the pandemic. Remember what I said about thinning the herd yesterday? I know it's horrible and cruel but that 32% is what I was talking about.

REPUBLICAN PARTY'S LATEST SPIN CYCLE-- THEY'RE AGENTS OF CHANGE

We've tried to cover the jaw-dropping spin coming from the various committees that make up the Republican Party's Inside the Beltway Establishment as they make excuse after excuse for their abysmal losing streak in the Special elections of late. We even did a little video clip, a special one. Today's Washington Post finds we're not the only ones who think the GOP should stop spinning and start a process of serious self-examination.

Most party insiders pray that they'll manage to scrape by in the GOP stronghold in northern Mississippi and can banish the unpleasant idea of any kind introspective analysis for a few more months. But even as conservative and Stepford-like a hack as Texas' Jeb Hensarling realizes a time for reckoning is upon them: "It's a time of sober reflection and, to some extent, resolve. I hope these special elections are a wake-up call."

After the party was devastated and demoralized by shocking defeats in overwhelmingly Republican districts in Illinois and Louisiana NRCC chairman Tom Cole (R-OK) blamed the low calibre of Republican candidates, although not as a way of looking in the mirror and examining how extreme the party has become or how out of sync their positions are from the aspirations and judgments of everyday Americans. He mentioned that the party is out of money and that if they had another big messy scandal in the headlines they'd be sunk.

As if on cue, within days, the tale of Staten Island's hypocritical congressman Vito Fossella starts unfolding like a soap opera on TV. "Just when Republicans thought they had seen everything, Rep. Vito Fossella (R-N.Y.) admitted Thursday that he has a 3-year-old daughter from a long-running extramarital affair with a retired Air Force officer. Fossella, who is married and has three young children at home in Staten Island, is also facing drunken-driving charges in Virginia. GOP strategists are debating whether he should resign or announce that he will not seek reelection in November. Fossella's resignation [expected this week] would mean another special election, this one in the nation's most expensive media market."

If they lose Tuesday in Mississippi it will clearly be because they haven't learned anything at all from watching which way the wind is blowing. The NRCC and right-wing front groups are still pouring millions of dollars into the campaign to poison the atmosphere with irrelevant filth about Reverend Jeremiah Wright, as though that is going to make up for Republican policies that have wrecked the economy and left us stranded in a no-win war in Iraq.

Independent analysts agree that a loss Tuesday would leave Republicans with no excuses. They blamed poor candidates in races in Louisiana and Illinois, where the GOP lost a special election for the seat long held by former House speaker J. Dennis Hastert.

"The Republicans would be ignoring reality if they try to explain away this race," said Nathan Gonzales, political editor of the Rothenberg Political Report.
Since 1994, Republican Roger Wicker has been reelected to his House seat with between 63 and 79 percent of the vote.

But with Wicker appointed to the Senate to fill the seat vacated by Trent Lott, who retired, Republicans are having difficulty unifying behind Greg Davis, the mayor of Southaven, a Memphis suburb in the northwest corner of the 1st District. Davis beat a Republican from the eastern portion of the district in the March primary. That win puts Davis on the ballot in November, whether he wins or loses this week's special election.

Democrat Travis Childers, a court officer in Prentiss County, came within a few hundred votes of outright victory in the first round of special-election balloting April 22, prompting national Republicans to send out an SOS for Tuesday's runoff. Davis, the NRCC and conservative allies have flooded the airwaves with a multimillion-dollar campaign that tries to negatively tie Childers to Pelosi and Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.).

This is the second special election this month in which House Republicans have tried to turn the race into a referendum on a Democratic candidate's ties to Obama. The strategy was unsuccessful in Louisiana, but Republicans view the Mississippi district as more receptive because it is slightly more conservative and has fewer African American voters.

But while Tom Cole doubles down on the negative campaigning and puts the whole bankroll of Rev. Wright, less extremist minds within the party realize it's a strategy with little hope for success.

Tom Davis, who chaired the NRCC for four years, said he doubts the effectiveness of the anti-Obama strategy because of the contrast between the consistently unpopular Bush and the likely Democratic nominee.

"When Bush tries to articulate a vision," Davis said, pausing to choose his words carefully, "he will butcher the Gettysburg Address. Obama, he will make an A&P grocery list sing."
House Minority Leader John A. Boehner (R-Ohio), in a private meeting with Republicans on Tuesday, admitted the limitations of the anti-Obama strategy and tried to sell his troops on an Obama-like message of "change" as their only hope for success.

"We can't win SOLELY by tying our opponents to Barack Obama and his liberal views. We also have to prove Republicans are agents of change," Boehner told his colleagues, according to talking points prepared by his staff and provided to the Post.

With the party's presidential nominee having rubber stamped every significant agenda item on the Bush-Cheney agenda, spinning the GOP into agents of change isn't likely to get much traction, not even in northern Mississippi. And the Republican congressional leadership will have a difficult time transforming the GOP image as the party of obstruction and rubber stamp docility for a hated and failed president into one that stands for any kind of acceptable change-- unless they can convince people that more war, more deregulation, more greed and avarice, more corruption and more divisiveness is the kind of change they're looking for. Sounds like a tough row to hoe. GOP professional propagandists share, at least to some extent, the myopia of the party's leaders. "The political environment isn't as bad as it was in 2006 when Republicans lost both houses of Congress and a lot more," writes the cloistered and clueless Fred Barnes in the Weekly Standard. Still he has to admit that "more than 80 percent of Americans believe the nation is heading in the wrong direction. Democrats have steadily maintained the 10 percentage point lead in voter preference they gained two years ago. And President Bush's job performance rating is stuck in the low 30s, a level of unpopularity that weakens the Republican case for holding the White House in 2008." Maybe what they need to do is listen to a little Velvet Underground, something I suspect not many of them were doing back in the 60's and 70's.




UPDATE: IS ROY BLUNT TRYING TO SABOTAGE McCAIN? OR IS HE JUST STUPID?

Think Progress found a major discrepancy between two McCain surrogates, Mitt Romney and Roy Blunt. Both were in CNN's Late Edition this morning-- but with very different messages about what NcCain would be if-- God forbid-- he ever got to the White House. Romney claims McCain will be a big change from the failed and hated policies of the Bush Regime. Blunt, perhaps more honest than Willard would ever be, admits that McCain is just the same snake oil in another vial:

BLITZER: So it would be in effect a third Bush term when it came to pro-growth tax policies?

BLUNT: It would be. I think it would be. And I think that’s a good thing.

GOP CLAIMS THEY KEEP LOSING SPECIAL ELECTIONS BECAUSE THEY HAVE CRAPPY CANDIDATES RATHER THAN CRAPPY POSITIONS

Click to see who's fightin' who

Republicans, starting with Tom Cole, are just not getting the message from the Specials. Republicans are losing-- not just long shot races in Massachusetts and California, but the ones they should be winning with no problems, open seats in disproportionately red districts. Their reactionary policies are not what Americans want to hear; their messaging is atrocious; their strategy-- Reverend Wright-- is worse. But party officials are blaming everything and everyone but themselves. Yesterday it was all about how if they could have only spent more millions on smearing Don Cazayoux as though he were a participant in some kind of Pelosi-Obama-Wright cabal they would have won. When they started dumping millions of dollars into cynical and idiotic ads Cazayoux was ahead 49-46%. When the ballots were counted 3 weeks later, Cazayoux won 49-46%-- and the GOP and their shady front groups were out several million dollars.

In today's CongressDaily there are a couple of stories, one from pollster Charlie Cook and one from Erin McPike, dealing with the GOP inability to deal with reality. As usual, Cook, is propping up his GOP pals and making the excuses for them that they want out there. Straight from Cole's spin factory, Cook tries to make the collapsing Republican Party look lie just another tough day at the country club. "It is very easy, often tempting, to over-interpret the meaning of a special congressional election. Many read great importance into the results of a single congressional district and try to extrapolate that meaning to 434 other districts for the next election. The truth is that there are often unique or local circumstances that play an important role in determining the outcome of the election. They don't call these contests 'special' for nothing."

No, they don't. And no one ever called Charlie Cook a pathetic and disingenuous hack without reason. There's a war going on inside the Republican House caucus and Cook's pal, NRCC head Tom Cole, is a Mississippi mile millimeter from being ignominiously dumped overboard. There is no love lost between Cole and Minority leader John Boehner. One of his allies says Cole is "wrong. If it's a national referendum on the GOP, that's bad, because people don't like us right now."

Even Cook admits that it's "tempting, if one is on the losing side of a special election, to rationalize the outcome, to focus exclusively on the unusual circumstances and deny larger truths that emerge from that or from a pattern of special elections." He then goes on to parrot the spin from the Cole camp in regard to Saturday's catastrophe, namely that it was all the terrible candidate's fault:

Republicans got saddled with a candidate who, to a certain extent, was the Pelican State's answer to Florida's former Rep. Katherine Harris.

Just as Harris couldn't lose a statewide primary and couldn't win a statewide general election, longtime conservative activist and former state legislator Woody Jenkins was very difficult to beat in a closed GOP primary but entered into a general election with a walk-in closet of political and personal baggage.

Jenkins came in on the short side of the 49-46 percent race, but a weekend in Baton Rouge last month convinced me that few thought Woody would win even then, though few thought he would lose badly either-- the district is too Republican for that.

A generic Republican would have outperformed Woody.

Similarly, the GOP loss in March of Illinois' 14th District-- formerly held by Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., and which President Bush won with 54 percent in 2000, 55 percent in 2004-- also featured another statewide loser of a Republican nominee, dairy magnate Jim Oberweis.

Oberweis brought his own complete set of Samsonite into the race, Democrats dubbed him "the Milk Dud," and the voters went with now-Rep. Bill Foster, D-Ill.

In both of these cases, again, there were unique circumstances: tough GOP primaries produced weak, ideological candidates.

Had Republicans been able to nominate better candidates in each case, they might have held onto the seats. To their credit, the National Republican Congressional Committee folks understood from the beginning that they faced significant challenges in both districts.

This is laughable spin. Doug Thornell of the DCCC sounds like he is peeing in his pants when he points out that his Republican counterparts "have painted themselves into a corner with a batch of flawed candidates out of touch with their districts. That, coupled with an extremely tarnished brand, a nonexistent message, a president with historically high disapproval numbers, and a nominee campaigning for a third Bush term makes their climb all the more arduous in November."

A week from today there's another Special (MS-01) pitting conservative Democrat Travis Childers against exactly the kind of cookie-cutter, or in Cook's terms, "generic," Republican they think they can win with. And maybe they can. The district, after all, has a PVI of R +10 and if they can't hold onto a seat in a district that Republican they might as well fold up the tents right now. Cook/Cole notes that Democrat Travis Childers beat the generic Davis in the primary (which he was just 410 votes away from the magic 50% that would have mooted the need for a runoff) because it "was a nonpartisan election, and their parties were not on the ballot."

Cole insists on sticking with his losing strategy of running superfluous negative advertising but he is already setting up excuses in case it doesn't work again. Cook presages next Wednesday's spin:

As is often the case, there are unusual circumstances besides the nonpartisan nature of the election in this district. Davis is from the section of the district comprised pretty much of Memphis, Tenn., suburbs. Childers is from the non-Memphis, or one might say anti-Memphis, part of the district. This situation has a lot more to do with geography than partisan politics.

But even Cook, albeit way at the end of the story, had to admit that Cole's spin about why his Louisiana strategy was sound, is absolute nonsense. "Much is being made of the fact that Republicans aired advertising tying the Democratic candidates in Louisiana and Mississippi to Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill, and his former pastor, Jeremiah Wright, despite the fact that there is no evidence that either Democrat ever met Obama or Wright. [Cole's team is] arguing that the ads took what would have been a Democratic runaway election and turned it close. Democrats are arguing that the ads didn't work. I never saw any polls showing a Cazayoux landslide. Indeed, the polls in the closing weeks were fairly close to the actual election result."

And even though the tsunami of discontent hasn't hit the Senate side yet-- only because there have been no Specials there-- the NRSC's hapless chair, John Ensign, is also desperate to do some spinning of his own. He claims the victories in 2006 by Jim Webb (D-VA), Claire McCaskill (D-MO), Jon Tester (D-MT), Ben Cardin (D-MD), Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), Sherrod Brown (D-OH), Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), Bernie Sanders (I-VT), Bob Casey (D-PA), and Bob Menendez (D-NJ) were not won on a populist Democratic message. "I don't think anybody in their right mind thought that they won on that... They won on an unpopular president. You combine the war, George Bush and the scandals, and those all combined to make a very tough Election Day for us." Poor fella... two years later, the war is worse, the GOP senators, lead by Miss McConnell are more rubber stampy and completely obstructionist, Bush is far more hated than he was in 2006 and scandals? You want scandals? As I was sitting down to write this, the entire Alaska Republican Party is in jeopardy of going to prison on corruption charges and this morning the FBI was raiding the home and the office of corrupt Bush hack Scott Bloch. Wall Street Journal: "Federal Bureau of Investigation agents raided the Office of Special Counsel here, seizing computers and documents belonging to the agency chief Scott Bloch and staff. More than a dozen FBI agents served grand jury subpoenas shortly after 10 a.m., shutting down the agency's computer network and searching its offices, as well as Mr. Bloch's home. Employees said the searches appeared focused on alleged obstruction of justice by Mr. Bloch during the course of an 2006 inquiry into his conduct in office."

Newt Gingrich is working from different motivations and isn't spinning as furiously as Cole, Boehner and Ensign. He wrote in today's Human Events that, in effect, Charlie Cook should pull his head out of Tom Cole's ass and get a grip:

Republican loss in the special election for Louisiana's Sixth Congressional District last Saturday should be a sharp wake up call for Republicans: Either Congressional Republicans are going to chart a bold course of real change or they are going to suffer decisive losses this November.
The facts are clear and compelling.

Saturday's loss was in a district that President Bush carried by 19 percentage points in 2004 and that the Republicans have held since 1975.

This defeat follows on the loss of Speaker Hastert's seat in Illinois. That seat had been held by a Republican for 76 years with the single exception of the 1974 Watergate election when the Democrats held it for one term. That same seat had been carried by President Bush 55-44% in 2004.

These two special elections validate a national polling pattern that is bad news for Republicans. According to a New York Times/CBS Poll, Americans disapprove of the President's job performance by 63 to 28 (and he has been below 40% job approval since December 2006, the longest such period for any president in the history of polling).

A separate New York Times/CBS Poll shows that a full 81 percent of Americans believe the economy is on the wrong track.

The current generic ballot for Congress according to the NY Times/CBS poll is 50 to 32 in favor of the Democrats. That is an 18-point margin, reminiscent of the depths of the Watergate disaster.

While we're waiting for Cole and Ensign to spin that, here's a little message for them: