Americans Are Starting To Face Up To The Unpleasant Fact That Trump Lies About Everything... All The Times

This week a network radio host, a friendly liberal, asked me to be a guest on her show. In the invitation, she asked me if I believe there was collusion between Trump and the Kremlin during the 2016 election, mentioning her certainty that there was not. I told her that I believe it 100% and that it's my gut feeling and not my field of expertise and suggested if she does a show on congressional elections she get back to me because for now I'm just avidly watching Mueller's investigation and have no light to bring beyond what is publicly available to Putin-Gate.

Poll after poll after poll, for well over a year, has found that the American public is well aware that Trump is a liar and that virtually everyone on the national stage is more trustworthy than he is-- from the "failing New York Times" and all the TV networks to American law enforcement that he is always undercutting. Now a new Washington Post-ABC News poll finds the public-- by a broad 69% to 25%-- supports special counsel Robert Mueller’s initial thrust, to investigate possible collusion between Trump's campaign officials and Russian government attempts to influence the 2016 election. Support extends to half of conservatives and more than four in 10 Republicans. Backing for Mueller’s work goes further: Americans by 64% to 32% also support his investigating Trump’s business activities.

The survey also finds lower believability for Trump than for fired FBI Director James Comey, whose interview with ABC News chief anchor George Stephanopoulos airs Sunday night in advance of publication of Comey’s new book. Americans by a 16-point margin, 48-32 percent, find Comey more believable than Trump.

The public, by a similar 14-point margin, 47-33 percent, disapproves of Trump’s decision to fire Comey. That’s even though Comey’s own favorability rating is weak: Thirty percent see him favorably, 32 percent unfavorably, with a plurality, 38 percent, having no opinion of him.

Partisanship informs many of these views. Ninety percent of Democrats and 70 percent of independents support Mueller investigating possible campaign collusion with Russia, vs. 43 percent of Republicans. (That’s still a substantial number within the president’s own party, notable especially given the Republican National Committee’s criticisms of Comey, including a website titled “Lyin’ Comey.”) Forty-two percent of Trump’s own approvers also support the Russia investigation by Mueller.

Thursday night, Illinois ex-congressman Joe Walsh, a self-described Tea Party Republican tweeted "I'm disgusted by the war that @FoxNews has declared on Robert Mueller. I'm disgusted by Fox doing Trump's bidding to destroy the reputation of a good man. It's wrong."

I haven't read A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership-- and neither has Señor Trumpanzee. Maybe he got someone in the White House to give him a one-or-two page version-- with pictures. Or maybe he's seeing all the TV coverage. This morning he exploded, referring to Comey as a weak and untruthful slimeball, sure to send book sales soaring onto the best-seller charts. Or perhaps someone read him the analysis from Politico, which emphasized that Trump is "untethered to truth"and that depicts his leadership as "mafia-esque." Meanwhile, CNN called the book "nothing less than the most devastating, contemporaneous takedown of a sitting president in modern history. Comey "painted Trump as a relentless liar who is obsessively unethical, devoid of humanity and a slave to his ego, who is clueless about his job and unconcerned about a Russian assault on American democracy. Jabbing the President in a strikingly personal way, Comey noted the size of Trump's hands, said his skin looked orange and described white rings around his eyes from tanning goggles. But Comey isn't just out to hurt Trump's feelings. He is on a more profound mission: His book is a parable about the threat from a brazen President who demands a warped concept of loyalty and has only disdain for the rule of law." Every American should be concerned-- very concerned.

Does Truth Matter? Not To Ben Smith

I never met or spoke with quintessential Inside-the-Beltway political scribe Ben Smith. I never found his Politico gossip column interesting enough to read and I laughed when he tried belittling my efforts on behalf of progressive candidates by describing me as a former L.A. d.j. He had it wrong, though not 100% wrong. My first job in the music business, when I was a teenager, was working on a college radio station, WUSB on Long Island. But if Smith was a journalist instead of a propaganda tool, he would have mentioned-- especially after other bloggers corrected him-- that I was more recently the former president of one of the biggest and most successful record companies in the world. But that didn't fit into the harmlessly deceptive narrative Smith was attempting to create on behalf of one of his cronies. He works for a different website now and he made national news last week by defending Paul Ryan's vociferous jihad against Truth.

I'm not trying to claim Smith is being paid by the Romney campaign-- I'd bet he's not-- or that he's even necessarily a Republican or a conservative-- although I wouldn't wager on that one. I'm just saying he's looking to promote himself by purposefully failing at the journalism part of his job. Paul Ryan is now widely discredited as a liar among journalists who have finally been forced to pay attention to the bullshit spewing out of him. That's inconsequential to Ben Smith. Paul Ryan has been lying-- and blatantly-- about his roadmap, his budget and about healthcare-- for many years. And you don't have to have paid any attention to a former dj to know it. Princeton Economics Professor and Nobel Prize laureate Paul Krugman has been patiently explaining it in the NY Times for years. Surely even Smith knows what a flimflam man is. And former Labor Secretary and UC, Berkeley Dean Robert Reich has patiently explained how the entire Romney-Ryan campaign is built on a flimsy tissue of blatant lies. He even makes little cartoon videos about it for busy self-promoters with short attention spans.



So why is Smith defending Ryan and excusing his campaign of lies? No idea what his motivations are, just the website he works for ought to get to the bottom of them. As ThinkProgress pointed out yesterday, "Smith doesn’t really try to argue that Ryan’s statements are actually true. He just employs language to diminish their importance. The piece refers to 'exaggerations,' 'simplifications,' 'being tendentious,' and ''caricature[s]'.”

Smith is correct, however, that Ryan would “turn Medicare into a less-expensive voucher system and … cut health care spending for poor people deeply.” That’s why his false statements about his plans are so consequential. He’s attempting to mislead the American people into accepting a policy agenda that, if presented honestly, they would be unlikely to support.

In his convention speech, Ryan was not honest about how he would “turn Medicare into a less-expensive voucher system.” Ryan said he “will protect and strengthen Medicare.” He didn’t admit that he plans to “cut health care spending for poor people deeply.” Rather, Ryan said the “truest measure of any society is how it treats those who cannot defend or care for themselves.”

Smith acknowledges Obama’s policies would “maintain” the current Medicare program. But Ryan told millions of people that “the greatest threat to Medicare is Obamacare,” blasting Obama for “$716 billion, funneled out of Medicare.” Ryan doesn’t mention that he included the same savings, which come from providers not recipients, in his own plan and that Obamacare provides billions in additional benefits to Medicare recipients and extends the life of the program by eight years.

Smith’s defense of Ryan’s claims on welfare reform, which even Republican governors supporting Romney and Ryan have acknowledged are false, is weaker. But his underlying point is the same. Underneath the false statements, there is a real policy dispute, so we should cut Ryan some slack.

Smith’s defense of Ryan’s claims on welfare reform, which even Republican governors supporting Romney and Ryan have acknowledged are false, is weaker. But his underlying point is the same. Underneath the false statements, there is a real policy dispute, so we should cut Ryan some slack.

The opposite is true. In 2008, Hillary Clinton claimed she came under sniper fire when she landed at the Tuzla Air Base in Bosnia in 1996. Video of the incident proved this never occured. What Clinton said was clearly false but there were no obvious policy consequences. She was not, after all, basing her campaign on the idea she would be quick on her feet on the battlefield.

Although Clinton acknowledged her error, Smith-- who was writing at the time for Politico-- had no issues with relentlessly covering the story for weeks. You can see examples of his coverage here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here. He was just one of many reporters covering the story for Politico.

Paul Ryan’s false statements on matters of real importance deserve more, not less, scrutiny.

But Ben Smith has his own narrative to create and "matters of real importance" can't be allowed to get in the way, regardless of any potential consequences for America.

Having an entire political movement "liberated" from reality is, really and truly, bad for America

(Don't forget to click on the cartoon to enlarge it.)

by Ken

The other night I was talking to Howie trying to explain what I mean, and to me what it's a crucial distinction, maybe the most crucial one to be made in today's cultural environment, when I say that the Modern Right-Wing Republican-slash-Conservative Movement now conisders that it has blanket permission to lie.

This is something I've been saying since the thick of the presidential campaign, when I was transfixed by astonishment that with maybe an exception here and there every single word out of every single Republican-slash-Conservative was a flat-out, bare-faced, unmitigated lie. And since there were no referees to say, "Sorry, you've got to take a timeout for flat-out, bare-faced, unmitigated lying," the result was that it's now officially okay. We are now officially off the reality standard.

I've been saying this at intervals ever since, and nobody bats an eyelash, which I take to mean that either it's obvious to everyone else or people just aren't grasping what I'm saying. Maybe it will help if I try to make clear what I'm not saying.

* I'm not saying that nobody ever lied before in politics. Gimme a break! As it happens, after a long hiatus, I've only just resumed my reading of Rick Perlstein's monumental historical reconstruction, Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America, having left off -- for personal reasons (too painful to relive) with the elder Mayor Richard Daley's 1968 Chicago convention-jamboree-riot -- and going through the ensuing campaign and coronation, er, inauguration -- I was forcefully and nauseatingly reminded just how sick and crazy Nixon was. The difference, though, is that Nixon not only knew but was perhaps the greatest master in history of the difference between reality and appearances. While Rick acknowledges the RMN did actually sometimes believe his own bullshit, for the most part he knew perfectly well when he was lying, and why he was lying, and above all how to make it look as if he wasn't lying, because he understood that there was a steep price to be paid if you were caught telling whoppers in the public arena.

NIXON SIDEBAR: PARANOIA IN OVERDRIVE

Singularly brilliant is Rick's re-creation of Nixon's state of mind on Election Night, when he made clear to the people around him that the calm confidence of victory he had been projecting was just make-believe, that in fact he was quite sure that he might lose. Rick really mines the guy's paranoia, suggesting that Nixon deep down was convinced that once again something that was rightfully his was going to be stolen from him. His deepest paranoia related to the hopelessly stalled Paris peace talks, and the possibility that somehow the Hated Others would bring peace, damn their souls -- even though he knew this was impossible, because as we now knew Nixon himself had rigged the peace talks. He was responsible for the hopeless stalling of the peace talks, having deployed the loathsome opportunist Anna Chenault, the Dragon Lady, to whisper in the South Vietnamese negotiators' ears that they would get a better deal by holding out.

On the other hand, maybe this wasn't so much paranoia on Nixon's part as his sheer crookedness. After all, if he could rig the peace talks to ensure more war, who's to say that somebody equally nefarious couldn't rerig, or counterrig, or outrig his rigging?)

* Nor am I saying that the suspension of all conditions for belief on the Right is brand-new, something just invented for the convention. The obvious fact is that the Bush regime spent eight years test-driving the new model of reality, where reality is some combination of (a) what you think it is, (b) what you wish it was, and (c) what the loudest- and vilest-mouthed right-wing sociopath says it is. You remember, I'm sure, how those of us who persisted in insisting that there was a standard for truth were derided by the acolytes of the regime as "the reality-based community." Clearly, in order to make such a distinction, those people had to be aware that they couldn't actually change reality. They simply followed the opening left for them by the patron saint of Right-Wing Unreality, Ronald Reagan, who preached that reality doesn't matter, all that matters is how you feel about stuff.

I know some people understand what I mean. I think of the Daily Show correspondent several years back who categorically rejected an argument based on "facts," on the ground that "the facts are biased."

What I'm saying is that the Right has become so far unmoored from reality that (a) it no longer feels any obligation, or even the slightest tug, in the direction of any piece of data that interferes with its ideological fantasy, not to mention its daily talking points, and (b) society gives every indication of having accepted this state of affairs. So they're not necessarily more dishonest than Nixon (how would you go about being more dishonest than Nixon?); they're just freed from the shackles of having to pretend otherwise.

TO ILLUSTRATE:
TAKE DICK ARMEY (PLEASE!)

Paul Krugman offered this tidbit on his blog today:

Armey of ignorance

In the midst of a seriously disgusting interview with Dick Armey, the former House majority leader offers his analysis of the financial crisis:

But at what point do we allow the government to order people that you must sell your product to this person or that person, irrespective of any good judgment? We saw what happened in housing when they ordered banks to make loans to people who weren’t qualified. Are we now going to have the same destructive influences in health care because we’re going to order doctors to provide services and so forth?

There’s a persistent delusion, on the part of many pundits, to the effect that we’re actually having a rational political discussion in this country. But we aren’t. The proposition that the Community Reinvestment Act caused all the bad stuff, because government forced helpless bankers into lending to Those People, has been refuted up, down, and sideways. The vast bulk of subprime lending came from institutions not subject to the CRA. Commercial real estate lending, which was mainly lending to rich white developers, not you-know-who, is in much worse shape than subprime home lending. Etc., etc.

But in Dick Armey’s world, in fact on the right as a whole, the affirmative-action-made-them-do-it doctrine isn’t even seen as a hypothesis. It’s just a fact, something everyone knows.

Truly, sometimes I despair.

AND SPEAKING OF PROF. KRUGMAN DESPAIRING

Yesterday's column struck me as an important one. Now that the Republicans-slash-Conservatives have established their untrammeled right to define their own version of substitute reality, we should perhaps concern ourselves with the question of what their build their fake reality out of. After all, Shangri-La was a fantasy too, but that isn't at all the kind being peddled these days by the loons of the Right. Clearly one of the most heavily represented sources for their delusions is paranoia. And yesterday the good professor took as his subject Paranoia Strikes Deep, arguing "that the G.O.P. has been taken over by the people it used to exploit," and relating the teabaggers to Richard Hofstadter's famous 1964 essay "The Paranoid Style in American Politics." He concluded:

[T]he party of Limbaugh and Beck could well make major gains in the midterm elections. The Obama administration’s job-creation efforts have fallen short, so that unemployment is likely to stay disastrously high through next year and beyond. The banker-friendly bailout of Wall Street has angered voters, and might even let Republicans claim the mantle of economic populism. Conservatives may not have better ideas, but voters might support them out of sheer frustration.

And if Tea Party Republicans do win big next year, what has already happened in California could happen at the national level. In California, the G.O.P. has essentially shrunk down to a rump party with no interest in actually governing — but that rump remains big enough to prevent anyone else from dealing with the state’s fiscal crisis. If this happens to America as a whole, as it all too easily could, the country could become effectively ungovernable in the midst of an ongoing economic disaster.

The point is that the takeover of the Republican Party by the irrational right is no laughing matter. Something unprecedented is happening here — and it’s very bad for America.

Thank you, professor, these are the words I've been groping for: This business of an entire political faction openly divorced from reality, it's very bad for America.

#

Can we really have a presidential election in which one side does nothing but lie? (Apparently so.)

[Click to enlarge, of course.]

"Everywhere it is power that is at stake, between states, between parties, within parties. Everyone constantly talks about morality, and everyone lies."

-- German literary historian Victor Klemperer (1881-1960),
in a diary entry of August 10, 1957

by Ken

Am I the only one in a state of stupefaction over the course the presidential election has taken? Oh, we saw it coming, but now that it's here, is it any less shocking?

We have a campaign in which essentially every word out of every mouth on one side is a lie.

Oh, we've seen the the extremified Right heading this way, rejecting all obligation to, even minimal respect for, the concept of truth, instead applying the word to what Stephen Colbert has conveniently dubbed "truthiness," which can be either (a) what one thinks ought to be true or (b) what one wishes were true. These are actually very different things, but functionally they have in common that they represent an abandonment of the basic standard of truth.

It's an astonishing thing to watch, and unlike so many progressive commentators, who can tell you exactly how a battle against it should be fought, I'm for the most part struck dumb. I don't see anything the least "postpartisan" about our time, but I see all too clearly that it's "posttrue." And once the public has lost all interest in actual truth, and yet in screeching, almost murderous, hysteria proclaims its lies to be truer than truth, what is there left to discuss?

The Sarah Palin phenomenon is part of the package. In saner times, she would be dismissed by all but the hard-core delusionals as an irrelevant ignoramus, and the McCranky campaign would get the old Gong Show hook and never be heard from again, having admitted that in terms of having anything to say of any relevance to the governance of the country it is 0 for the campaign. Instead, this person of absolutely no qualifications for any public office, let alone the vice presidency of the U.S., is breaking the rule that in presidential elections people don't vote for the VP candidate. It appears that large numbers of voters are prepared to vote for McCranky the empty suit because of the appallingly ignorant Palin and her random snatches of ultra-wacko extremist ideology.

Most appallingly, the emergence of the know-nothing candidate appears to have remoralized, not just the hard-core Republican base, which has long made clear its devotion to, even worship of, ignorance, but the Republican "middle" (meaning the "merely far right" as opposed to "far, far, far, and then some right") that has taken over the GOP. In the process this means that our actual sitting president, the Tiniest George Bush, has disappeared from their consciousness. People who finally came to understand at least some of how catastrophic Tiny George's regime has been no longer have to account for either the man, or his actions -- or their votes for him.

And so another segement of the commentariat bites the dust: the sages who told us so knowingly that the political alignment set in motion by Richard Nixon, which has effectively defined our politics for the last 40 years, has ended, to be replaced by . . . well, who knows what?

This was a tack taken by several reviewers of Nixonland, Rick Perlstein's monumental study of that political transformation, as reflected in the turnaround from Lyndon Johnson's landslide victory in the 1964 presidential election to Richard Nixon's landslide victory in 1972. Well enough in its way as far as it goes, those commentators sniffed, but that's so, so yesterday.

No, I think we're still living in Nixonland, only now it's Nixonland with fun-house mirrors. Thanks to the ideological warriors of the Far, Far Right, the country has been half-insanitized. Of course it's been done mostly by people who aren't at all nuts, people who expect to reap substantial profit in terms of either power or money. But once the insanity is unleashed, how do you fight it?

One of the things I've been reading while on temporary hiatus from Nixonland is the equally mammoth final volume, covering the postwar years, of the diaries of the remarkable German (and for the final decade-plus of his life specifically East German) literary historian Victor Klemperer* (1881-1960, seen here in 1945). Klemperer's story is much too complex to synopsize here, except to say that he survived the Nazi years, ever so barely (saved, in fact, by the fire-bombing of Dresden, which enabled him and his non-Jewish wife Eva to escape from deportation scheduled for the next day), only to wind up in Soviet-controlled East Germany, which he initially believed held the moral high ground over what he considered essentially a Nazi successor state in West Germany. His opinion of the German Federal Republic (West Germany) never improved, but as an unreconstructed political liberal he came to understand the basic fascism of the German Democratic Republic.

In a diary entry of August 10, 1957, Klemperer wrote:

I am so disgusted, I see the mendacity on both sides and everywhere. Everywhere it is power that is at stake, between states, between parties, within parties. Everyone constantly talks about morality, and everyone lies. At the moment things are more brutal, Asiatic here than in the Adenauer state [referring to the man known as "der Alte," "the Old Man," Konrad Adenauer (1876-1967), West German chancellor from 1949 to 1963]. But over there is the most blatant return to Nazism -- here to Bolshevism. De profundissimus.

I apologize for giving such an inadequate representation of the experience and thinking of this remarkable man. The final entries of his diary, with their awareness of impending death, which he both dreaded and hoped for (we're left to imagine the three and a half months between the last entry he was able to make, in October 1959, and his death in February 1960), was a more difficult and painful parting than I've had with most of the people I've lost in my actual life. But one thing I hope will nevertheless come through in this diary entry is the well-founded depth of Victor K's despair.

We can count ourselves lucky that we haven't reached that stage. But we have one political party that has now made this its actual agenda, and people like Karl Rove and Tom DeLay did everything in their power to turn the country into a one-party state. And important segments of the other party -- the crypto-Republican DLC-ers, the "insider" careerist Emanuelites -- have resisted only insofar as the Rove-DeLay agenda didn't allow for a share for them. and another that resists it only when convenient.

As of now we still have a clear electoral choice. But with half the country apparently joyfully embracing insanity, well, I think Victor K would have understood what I'm feeling.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
*If you're not familiar with Victor Klemperer and wonder, as I did when I first heard the name, whether he was any relation to the great conductor Otto Klemperer, the answer is yes, they were first cousins (meaning, obviously, that their fathers were brothers), though their relationship was fairly slight. Readers of Peter Heyworth's biography of the conductor know, however, that Victor's oldest brother, Georg, a distinguished medical professor who specialized in neuroscience and wound up settling in Boston, played an important role in Otto K's life.

Victor was clearly intimidated by his famous cousin's celebrity, but there's a poignant episode in the postwar diaries when Otto K is guest-conducting in Dresden and makes a considerable effort to establish contact with his cousin. (It didn't succeed. Victor was in Berlin at the time.)

*

DO WE REALLY NEED ANOTHER EXAMPLE
OF THE MADNESS? WELL, OKAY --

Awhile ago a colleague passed on this melancholy note to a list I'm on:

When I signed in this AM at Yahoo, one of the lead stories was:

"Obama blames Wall Street woes on GOP Policies."

Five minutes later the Obama story was replaced by:

"McCain says his highest priority will be to reform Wall Street."

This is just one example of what we, and the Obama Campaign, are up against.

I suppose our new mistress of American finance Governor Who??? will tell us again -- assuming she's asked -- that the problem at Lehman Bros. and Merrill Lynch was all those taxpayers dollars we've been shoveling in.

Sigh.

*

UPDATE: WHEN IT COMES TO McCRANKY CAMPAIGN LIES,
YOU JUST CAN'T MAKE THIS STUFF UP

So it turns out that in nearly identical talking points -- or should we call them "blithering point" -- the Ticket from Hell is out there blithering about how they're going to "reform" Wall Street, ending such abusive practices as those shockingly abusive golden parachutes given to failed corporate executives to make them go away. (And even as commentators commentate that if the Lehman Bros. "problem" hadn't been resolved by this AM, the entire financial sector was set to go down the tubes, Young Johnny assures us that the fundamentals of the economy are sound. As if he would know a fundamental of the economy if it kicked him in the groin.)

There isn't a syllable or pause for breath anywhere in this that isn't a bald-faced, unmitigated lie. We've got a pair of lying ignoramuses spewing garbage that everyone with a working brain knows is a flat-out lie. Nobody is more squarely in favor of the rankest corporate abuses than these two, whose entire careers, in fact their entire lives, are paid for entirely by corporate abuses. It would be no exaggeration to say that Young Johnny McCranky and Governor Who??? literally are corporate abuses. It is the only reason that either of them exists as anything but a burden to their own families.

You can laugh or cry, but of course we all know that one of Young Johnny's chiefest economic advisers, seriously rumored to be VP timber before Governor Who??? was invented, ousted HP CEO Carly Fiorina, is one of the worst golden-parachute abusers, having walked away from her catastrophic tenure with some $42M. (And now our Carly is whining that Tina Fey's dazzling SNL impersonation of Governor Who??? was "sexist" (and Amy Poehler's portrayal of Hillary Clinton in the same sketch was what, Carly?). I suppose Carly is touch about preserving her status as one of the dumbest people on the planet, in which case she needn't worry. Not only one of the dumbest, but one of the most totally corrupt beneficiaries of the corporate malfeasance the GOP ticket-toppers lyingly claim they will reform.

But aren't they biting the corporate hands that feed them?

Now you might wonder: Aren't McCranky and Who??? asking for trouble among the very people they're most dependent on right now, the corporate lions who are finally shoveling cash into their campaign?

And you might have a point, if anybody with even minimal brain activity thought they meant a word of what they're saying. But of course every CEO with one of those golden parachutes written into his/her contract knows for a guaranteed certainty that they're kidding -- just making up stupid little stories to tell to incredibly stupid voters so gullible that they'll apparently believe anything. And of course the media will pass on all the lies without even cracking a smile, because . . . well, because that's what they believe they're paid to do.

Anytime either McCranky or Who??? opens his/her lying mouth, it should be taken for granted that he/she has simply edited out the announcement that what follows is the Lies of the Day. Really, they should begin each spiel, "Oh wait, I've got one!" and then, in Maxwell Smart mode, say, "Would you believe that . . . ?"

#

Now that a working majority of Connecticut voters see Holy Joe Lieberman for the lying swine he is, the trick is to get these messages across IN TIME

"The public can see the truth, whether it is the truth about Lieberman or any other corrupt warmonger in any other part of the country. That reality should encourage us all in our ongoing work to get the truth out."
--David Sirota, in a new blog post, "Another Poll Shows Public Sees Lieberman's Lies"

Say, didja hear where Connecticut's finest (not!), Sen. Holy Joe Lieberman, is ticked off at being accused of warmongering just because of that resolution laying the grounds for war on Iran which he and that other peerless prince of peace Arizona Sen. John Kyl shoved through the Senate? No, no, His Holiness pules! Dontcha see, we're trying to prevent war!

Unfortunately for the Ghostly One, it's getting harder for him to fool anyone with:

(a) an IQ in the double digits or higher, and

(b) a shred of honesty.

Have you noticed how quickly these days serial Democratic turncoats--like California's Senator DiFi--are branded "the new Lieberman"? And everyone knows what it means. (And there sure are a bunch of 'em.)

For many months now we've heard rumblings from Connecticut that significant numbers of the Lying Likudnik's constituents have caught on to the fact that during last fall's general election campaign they were hoodwinked by the shameless one's unremitting barrage of outright, bare-faced, utterly unapologetic whoppers.

Last night David Sirota posted this blog entry:

Another Poll Shows Public Sees Lieberman's Lies

Back in September, Kos commissioned a nonpartisan poll that found that if Lieberman-Lamont election were held again, Lamont would win. In a post about Kos's poll, I cross-referenced the poll with our internal poll numbers from the campaign, showing how the voters who would change their votes are those who realized Lieberman lied when he promised voters he would help end the war if they reelected him. Now, a Quinnipiac University poll confirms that Connecticut voters have woken up to Lieberman's dishonesty.

Here are the key results, as reported by the Connecticut Post:

Among the 52 percent of those polled who said they voted for Lieberman in 2006, 78 percent said they would vote for him again today if given the chance, and 15 percent would switch to another candidate.

Among those who would switch, 58 percent cited his stand on the Iraq war while 41 percent said they would switch for different reasons.

As a whole, 61 percent disagree with Lieberman's position strongly supporting the war in Iraq. Meanwhile, 71 percent said they disapprove of the way President Bush is handling Iraq.

By my math, 78 percent of 52 percent is just 40 percent - pretty damn abysmal for a sitting U.S. Senator. Most of that 15 percent attrition would likely go to Lamont, of course, meaning Ned would have won in a landslide.

Why mention any of this? Because it is just another reminder of the value of educating the public on the issues. Lieberman won for no other reason than the fact that he successfully tricked a public that desperately wanted to believe he opposed the war they hated. It was very difficult to break through his lies - but it is nonetheless encouraging to know that in just a year since the election, the public has seen the truth. It means the public can see the truth, whether it is the truth about Lieberman or any other corrupt warmonger in any other part of the country. That reality should encourage us all in our ongoing work to get the truth out.

As he usually does, I think David's got the angle on this exactly right. It's too late to rerun the Connecticut Senate race. But rumor has it that there are some other elections coming up in the next year, starting with rounds of primaries at all levels.

As we've learned repeatedly, especially in the years of the Bush regime, it's often difficult "to get the truth out." There are powerful forces arrayed against it. (I'm not sure that Cheney, Bush, and their cronies have perpetrated any single more lastingly harmful outrage than their deadly assault on the very concept of truth.) But the very terror those forces feel in the face of the truth underscores the importance of getting it out.

#

Russ Feingold laments congressional Dems' Iraq "collapse" (Maybe the senator can't afford his own cadre of caution-counseling Democratic handlers?)

"We can't back down when the stakes are so high. I know you'll keep ratcheting up the pressure, and that's exactly what we need right now. Now is the time to be pulling out all the stops to end the war."
--Wisconsin Sen. Russ Feingold

Speaking of political truth-telling, as we just were, and charisma (or lack of it) as well, I suppose most politically savvy observers would say that Russ Feingold could never be a serious presidential candidate because he has too little of the latter and indulges in too much of the former. Well, maybe that's why he's worth paying attention to. He posted this on Daily Kos a couple of hours ago:

A Collapse for Democrats
by Senator Russ Feingold

Tue May 22, 2007 at 09:28:13 AM PDT

I wanted to link to a couple really good posts that I've seen in the past few days about the Democrats' strategy on the Iraq supplemental spending bill. They drive home what a mistake it is to just give up and pass a supplemental that doesn't include language to stop the war:

http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2007/5/21/17842/4957

http://electioncentral.tpmcafe.com/blog/electioncentral/2007/may/18/liberals

This situation is a collapse for Democrats. We had a strong start, pushed back against the President's failed policy and held our ground that the supplemental should include binding language to end the war. But now, as Congress gets ready to send the President a bill that does nothing to get our troops out of Iraq, we are just folding our cards. As one person commented under Greg Sargent's great post at TPM cafe, "Send the Congressional Dems over to my place for some poker--I could use a windfall right now."

This is no time to back down. This fight to end the war isn't something that we can just put off or kick down the road. As mcjoan pointed out, it doesn't make any sense to wait until this "mythical September" when Republicans will suddenly decide that we need to get out of Iraq. Why should this wait until September? First Americans had to put up with a Republican Congress that did nothing, and now we are faced with a Democratic Congress that is giving the President exactly what he wants-- continuing his failed policy and leaving our troops stuck in the middle of a civil war. Some strategy. We can't back down when the stakes are so high. I know you'll keep ratcheting up the pressure, and that's exactly what we need right now. Now is the time to be pulling out all the stops to end the war.

Does Al Gore really have to run for president to get us to pay attention to the harsh truths he has to tell about political (and other) realities?

"What [Gore] is telling us today--with the moral authority of a man who many believe was wrongly barred from the presidency--is that American democracy and indeed American society are in danger from the authoritarians of the right. Without much polite varnish, he warns that self-serving plutocrats and self-righteous theocrats have nearly banished reason from the public square; their machinations disable us as we try to confront the enormous problems that threaten our future. According to Gore, Americans cannot adequately protect the nation from terrorism because our ideas about national security have been distorted by fear and falsehoods. Nor can we address what he calls 'the carbon crisis,' potentially 'the worst catastrophe in the history of human civilization,' because the truth about global warming has been obscured by industrial and government propaganda."
--Joe Conason, in his L.A. Times review of Al Gore's new book, The Assault on Reason

Kudos to the L.A. Times. Normally you would expect a book as explosive as the former vice president's appears to be to be assigned for review to a neocon hack, or at the farthest left to a neolib one like the New Republic-ans. It's hard to think of anyone further from that mold than Joe Conason, who is the plainest-speaking of plain-speakers.

It's not surprising, in fact, that Joe begins by addressing this age-old question of politicians unwillingness or inability to say straight-out what they mean:

Why do our leaders feel that they can speak the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth only after they have left politics? After spending nearly half his life in public office, from which he was separated involuntarily in the 2000 election, Al Gore knows the answer. As he explains in his new book, the American political system has degenerated into a rigged game that suppresses honesty and rewards deception.

Gore, of course, was damned if he did and damned if he didn't. The fact is, if on the campaign trail he paid more attention than we wished to the handlers who counseled blandness, as Democratic political handlers usually do, he spoke a lot of plain truth in his years in government. But Gore the truth-teller got little credit--and Joe tells us that in the book that he "employ[s] the same didactic method that used to provoke irritation or even ridicule during his hotly contested presidential campaign."

Yet Gore's professorial style, with its touches of sarcasm, omniscient tone, erudite asides, and yes, its occasional exasperated sighs, elicits a different response today than it did seven years ago. Many of the same publications that once poured scorn on him now offer up paragraph after paragraph of admiring prose.

It doesn't hurt to have been proved right, as Gore has been, most notably on the issue of global climate change, with the suggestion that "those who mocked him were fools in the first place and that we can continue to ignore him only at our own peril."
But Gore himself has changed, Joe stresses:

Always unusually smart and farsighted, he nevertheless spent most of his public career emphasizing the expedient and conventional rather than the critical and visionary as nearly every ambitious politician must. Liberated from those constraints by defeat, he kept silent until fall 2002, when he spoke out forthrightly against the invasion of Iraq.

The tentative, calculating, painfully moderate approach of the past was gone, along with all of the baggage of the Democratic Leadership Council that he had helped to found.

We all know that Al Gore is never going to be Mr. Charisma. There's a suggestion in Joe's review that he doesn't in fact place great stock in charisma, and has a frustratingly keen awareness of the difficulty of dealing with substance in American political life:

His insistence on detail and thoroughness, which may seem like a personal tic in an era of sound bites, is rooted in his conviction that most Americans have little understanding of the world in which they live. He worries that mass alienation from politics and immersion in the entertainment culture along with poor civic education have created a population that is woefully uninformed.

Joe notes that Gore "remains remarkably optimistic that the emerging technologies will enable democracy's advocates to triumph":

At a time when we are learning that political responses tend to be more emotional than rational, as he surely understands, his stubborn faith that we will someday return to reason is touching. That faith inflected his political career, for better and for worse. It does not explain why this most qualified and courageous Democratic candidate has--so far--decided not to run for president again.

I don't know how successful a candidate even now Gore would make, or how effectively, if elected, he would be able to deal with the 24/7 Right-Wing Noise Machine. But it does sound as if he has some important things to say about our political system, and I'm putting the book on my reading list.