The Lies Didn't Start with Trump, Part 2
The GOP relies on policy deceptions to trick its base into voting against their interests
Time was, one political party would offer up policy ideas, then the other would either agree, present arguments against it, or negotiate. For Democrats - at least until they threw up their hands in futility - that was pretty much how things have continued when GOPrs make proposals. But not so for Republicans: Democrats can propose almost anything designed to help our citizens, and Republicans respond with a litany of absurdities, where every idea is just a hop, skip and a jump from American annihilation.
Provide school lunches to poor children? Why, that will expose them to the gay and transgender agenda! Adopt basic education standards for math, science and English that were proposed by George W. Bush, but that Republicans lie came from Barack Obama? That will make kids anti-Christian, anti-American and - as always - turn them gay! A non-binding resolution of there United Nations calling for countries to keep an eye on sustainability? A global conspiracy to ban America’s golf courses, grazing pastures and paved roads! Provide health insurance to all? Well, government bureaucrats will murder your grandmother! A proposal to go door-to-door, providing Americans with information during some off the worst of the COVID pandemic, providing information and support? The government is going to kick in your door to forcibly vaccinate you - oh, and take your guns! Move toward renewable energy? No more hamburgers for Americans! Temporarily pause issuing new oil and gas leases to review the 9,000 ones previously issued that aren’t being used? Banning oil and gas! Rebuild the nation’s crumbling infrastructure? It’s the five-way highway to socialism that will destroy the nation! (But of course, after the infrastructure bill became law, many of the “socialism” wailers took credit for the benefits it brought.)
The worst part of all of this is how Washington reporters handle the duplicity. The first story - “Senator Lying McLiar says middle class tax cuts will cause children to burst into flames” - is usually nothing more than stenography. Reporters are so frightened at seeming biased that they are willing to allow politicians to tell bald-faced lies without so much as asking a follow-up question. Or the failure to hit hard with questions: When Republicans mouth the Big Lie shibboleth that the 2020 election was a fraud, why does no reporter ask them, one after the other, whether they also believe Trump’s claims of fraud every other time he has lost anything? Do they believe that millions of undocumented immigrants voted in California in 2016? Prove it. Do they believe that Massachusetts residents drove to New Hampshire to vote illegally? Prove it. Did voting machines switch votes from Republican to Democrats - in 2012? Prove it. Did a man Trump didn’t like win Scotsman of the Year because of “the same people kept voting over and over again? Prove it. Did Trump not win an Emmy for The Apprentice because the award was rigged? Prove it. Did a fellow student only achieve a higher grade than Trump on a high school chemistry test through cheating? Prove it.
Oh, and hey, Senator Ted Cruz: You slavishly repeat Trump’s lies about the 2020 election being stolen. So, was Trump telling the truth when he said you committed fraud to win the 2016 Iowa caucuses, which is why he didn’t win? At the time, you said he was having a “Trumpertantrum.” Are you saying Trump is a liar? What has changed your mind?
The point of this is, when Republican politicians are willing to become groveling sycophants to Trump in attacking our democracy - solely so they can appease their base, remain in office and get the best seating at Georgetown restaurants - they should be held accountable for every lie that Trump has told when he lost something. Because if they are willing to attack the foundation of this country’s political system, should anyone be surprised that they will lie about Democratic policies, as well as anything else?
Because Trump lies about everything, in this part of my continuing series of GOP lies, let’s only deal with the falsehoods told by the former president’s compatriots. They go back a long time
Biden
a. Ukraine/Hunter Biden: This one is bad because it is both a easily disproven conspiracy theory, an attack on policy with lies, and complicated. In other words, the perfect line of nonsense for the GOP to splutter on Fox, despite the risk of destabilizing an ally in the midst of a war against an aggressor.
The Republican conspiracy theory is simple: Hunter Biden was on the board of a company called Burisma, Burisma was being investigated by Viktor Shokin, then the Prosecutor General of Ukraine, Biden threatened to withhold $1 billion in loan guarantees to the country unless the valiant Shokin was fired. The Ukrainian government fired Shokin, killing the Burisma investigation and enriching the Biden crime family.
This is all nonsense, one where the villains become heroes and the heroes villains. Indeed, the Republicans are literally throwing their support behind a corrupt prosecutor whose mere existence in the government led to mass protests and international outrage. They are declaring, for Fox News talking points, that our policy was corrupt and we should side with the bad guy, abandoning the position of our Western allies, the International Monetary Fund and global institutional investors. In other words, they are willing to undermine America and our allies so long as it gives them an attack line.
Here is reality which, like most reality, is more difficult to explain that GOP lies: In 2013, the United Kingdom - not Ukraine - launches a money laundering investigation of Mykola Zlochevsky, owner of Burisma Holdings, for actions he took while an official in the Ukrainian government. In February 2014, the UK requests that Ukrainian prosecutors deliver documents to assist in the investigation of Zlochevsky. In response, Ukraine opens its own investigation of focused on potential money laundering by Zlochevsky and the embezzlement of public funds. Again, the investigation in Ukraine/UK was of actions taken by Zlochevsky personally, having nothing to do with Burisma.
Two months later, Burisma brings several Americans onto its board of directors to help oversee a development of better compliance procedures. The company’s lawyers, the esteemed international firm of Boies Schiller Flexner, named Hunter Biden, who was of counsel to the firm, as their representative. Named at the same time were Cofer Black, former head of the CIA's Counterterrorist Center under George W. Bush and foreign policy advisor to Senator Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign, and a former Polish president, Aleksander Kwasniewski. A little less than a year later, the Ukrainian investigation of Zlochevsky is shelved.
Now, Zlochevsky is a Ukrainian oligarch, and Shokin, the prosecutor general, refused to charge cases of corruption against such people. The case was dropped under Shokin, which was viewed by the Obama Administration as just one more instance where the prosecutor general refused to pursue corruptions. In fact, according to Zlochevsky's allies, he used the threat of prosecution to try to solicit bribes from Zlochevsky and his team, leading the Obama officials to consider launching their own criminal investigation into Zlochevsky for possible money laundering.
Shokin’s alleged corruption to protect Ukrainian oligarchs flourished, with the result that both the European Union and international investors were threatening to pull their money out of the country. After this, in December 2015, Biden spoke in Ukraine telling the government the Obama Administration’s policy: The $1 billion loan guarantee would be pulled if corrupt officials like Shokin remained as prosecutor general. So, with the EU, international investors and the United States putting pressure on Ukraine - nothing happened. Shokin remained in office.
Two more months passed. During that time, Shokin had also been identified globally by anticorruption officials as undermining corruption fight in Ukraine. More than 100 members of the Ukrainian parliament called for his ouster. But it was IMF that finally got President Petro Poroshenko to act. That month, in February 2016, the head of the IMF, Christine Lagarde, threatened to pull $17 billion (and ultimately $34 billion) of financial support for Ukraine unless it rooted out corruption. IMF officials said this was directly targeted at Shokin, and told Ukraine’s president as much. This threat hit Poroshenko hard, and he telephoned Lagarde to assure her he would take action. With that threat, Poroshenko’s choice was either defend Shokin or preside over the collapse of the Ukrainian economy.
Then things got worse for Shokin. On February 15, five days after IMF threatened to pull its money, Deputy Prosecutor-General Vitaliy Kasko went on national television and resigned, accusing Shokin of hindering corruption investigations. This set off more demands in Ukraine for Shokin's. This set off more demands in Ukraine for Shokin's ouster. Four days later, under pressure from Poroshenko, Shokin resigned.
Now the narrative has even more to it than this, with wide scale protests by Ukrainians demanding the Shokin be fired. But let’s focus on the timing: EU and institutional investors rattle their swords about Shokin. Months later, Biden gives his statement. Nothing happens. Two months after that, IMF issues its threat. Five days later, Shokin's deputy resigns, accusing him of corruption to protect oligarchs like Burisma’s founder. Four days later, Poroshenko announces Shokin has resigned.
Three years later, the Republicans arrive in the form of Rudolph Giualiani, and the lie begins to be developed. In January, 2019, Giuliani spoke by phone with Shokin about alleged misconduct by the Bidens. Shokin lied, sending Giuliani down the Burisma path. The former New York mayor also began courting another former prosecutor, Yuriy Lutsenko, who played along with the game for a bit before finally announcing that there was “no evidence” Hunter Biden did anything wrong. That enraged Giuliani, who declared that Lutsenko was corrupt, and Shokin a hero.
“The chain of events is not real, but for Lutsenko and for Giuliani, it was not important,” said Serhiy Leshchenko, a former member of Ukraine's Parliament who exposed cash payments by Ukrainian politicians to Trump's campaign manager, Paul Manafort. “For them, it was necessary to make this conspiracy theory possible.
No matter. All of this bogus information went to Trump, who then told current Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy that he would withhold arms for the country unless Zelenskyy acted on the “corruption” of Biden. And it was terrible how badly Shokin had been treated. “I· heard you had a prosecutor who· was very·good and he was shut down and that's really unfair,” Trump said. “A lot of people are talking about that, the way they shut your very good prosecutor down and you had some very bad people involved.”
Trump didn’t much care about there being an actual investigation of the Bidens, just that Zelenskyy announce one - and that he do it on CNN. Of course, all of this blew up in Trump’s face, and he was impeached for his extortion of Ukraine for his own political benefit. No matter: Hunter Biden had been thrown into the GOP conspiracy waters, and now is at the center of endless numbers of crimes in the MAGA mind - even a movie was made based on all of the fictions.
Here, it’s easy to see how GOP lies are so effective: It took one paragraph to describe the nonsensical conspiracy theory, and eleven to explain why the argument was utterly, completely false. But the reason I spent this much time on this one issue is that, unfortunately, if the GOP takes the House in 2022, they are planning to hold innumerable hearings about their Hunter Biden conspiracies; this will be just like when the Republicans launched the Benghazi lie against Hillary Clinton. (I’m not going to spend the time to explain all of the falsehoods in that one. Instead, here is an article I wrote at the time doing just that.)
b. Biden and the Energy Industry. It’s no secret that the GOP carries a lot of water for oil and gas companies; it is also no secret that the United States cannot change its reliance on fossil fuels overnight. But no matter: Each time Biden does anything about energy, the GOP declares he is killing that industry (even though all of the big players like Exxon and Chevron are making record profits.)
In March, House Minority Whip Steve Scalise tweeted that rising gas prices during Biden’s presidency “is what happens when you destroy America’s energy industry”— ignoring the fact that the cost of energy was going up worldwide as the pandemic passed, creating a massive disparity between supply and demand.
But let’s look at the “destroy” part of that lying tweet. In his first year in office, the Biden administration approved more drilling permits than Trump did in any of his first three, according to data compiled by the conservation group Center for Western Priorities. Last year, it also held the largest offshore oil and gas lease sale in American history. But a federal judge later tossed out those leases, ruling that the Biden administration failed to account for climate effects when it held the auction. Kind of the opposite of the GOP claims.
How about when Biden shut down the Keystone XL pipeline? Along with scores of other Republicans, Rep. Jim Jordan raged about that. Biden “Biden “shut off the Keystone Pipeline,” Jordan lied. “Get the Keystone Pipeline operating again!” Others, like Rep. Dan Crenshaw, lyingly suggested that, but for Biden, we could have replaced all of our imports from Russia with oil from Keystone.
Reality: The $8.5 billion Keystone XL pipeline was a proposed project that would have transported about 830,000 barrels of oil per day from Alberta, Canada, to Nebraska. It was not operational. Only 8 percent of the pipeline was constructed when Biden pulled the plug, and it never carried oil. But ask any Republican voter and they will parrot the lies of Republicans and Fox: Prices went up at the pump because Biden killed Keystone XL. And there is one other big reason the pipeline, even if finished, would have no impact on energy in the United States: The vast majority of the oil was going to be refined here, then shipped overseas.
c. The Inflation Reduction Act. Once again proving that the GOP cannot honestly debate a policy issue, Republicans trotted out a largely made-up number to claim that this new law pushed by Biden would cost small business and middle class families about $20 billion more in taxes. A complete fabrication. By this logic, I could say that small businesses and middle class families will be buying Lamborghinis. Virtually nothing would be coming from that group, but Republicans love to make the non-wealthy believe that they will suffer when taxes hit the rich. They simply took a number that said nothing like they claimed, and lied about it.
I could keep going on this for quite awhile, because there is virtually nothing Biden says or does that doesn’t spark GOP lies. But I want to make it clear that these lies are not something that emerged post-Trump, nor is it all from the sleaziest of sleazy Republicans. So, let’s go back to the 2012 election, where the now-kind-of-respected Senator Mitt Romney and his running mate Rep. Paul Ryan showed how dishonesty is just ingrained in the GOP psyche.
Lies about Obama in 2012 election
a. Obama and welfare. In a not-so-subtle dog whistle to the racists of the GOP, Romney and Ryan repeatedly stated that Obama tried to remove the “workfare” requirement of welfare. This, one of the campaign aides said at the time, proved to be Romney’s most effective campaign ad. The fact that it was a complete lie seemed irrelevant: All Obama did was accept appeals from governors to allow them to try out some workfare ideas more suited to their local situations, rather than be obligated to follow the federal cookie-cutter rules. Fine, Obama said, so long as the number of welfare recipients going to work stayed at least the same. There was no removal of the requirement, just an acceptance of the usual GOP philosophy that states should be allowed to act in their own interest. The question that should have been asked of Romney: Would he rescind the waivers, and force states to follow the federal dictates rather than allowing them to come up with their own means of reaching the same results? Reporters didn’t bother. And don’t think that other Republicans didn’t join in on this racist strategy: Newt Gingrich (who once called Romney a liar) pronounced that there was “no proof” to back up the welfare claim; at the GOP convention, the same Gingrich climbed the podium to attack Obama for “gutting” the workfare requirement. Guess he finally read the memo from the Romney campaign that truth was not a factor in the election.
b. Obama robbed Medicare of more than $700 billion. This was one of those lies that works because explaining the truth is, once again, complicated. The obvious implication – and in fact, the frequent statement by the GOPers – is that Obama took money from seniors to pay for Obamacare, and in the process put Medicare at risk. It. Is. A. Lie. As was stressed again and again – without effect on the liars – there was no benefit cut for any beneficiary. The $700 billion was not a cut – it was the value of savings achieved through Obamacare. By the GOP argument, people who buy shoes on sale are cutting back on their shoe purchases – they aren’t, they’re just using their money wisely. So was Obama: the money came from providers who accepted the decrease because payments would be offset by the influx of new patients from Obamacare. Other savings came from eliminating overpayments to Medicare Advantage. Then more came from raising Medicare taxes on the wealthy. This not only doesn’t hurt Medicare, it extends the lifetime of the program. “The Affordable Care Act doesn’t steal anything from Medicare,” Henry Aaron, a health-care expert at the Brookings Institution, told Bloomberg at the time. “It actually improves Medicare’s finances. No matter how you slice it, the Affordable Care Act strengthens medical hospital insurance.” Check out the Bloomberg article for the full run-down on the Medicare lie.
c. The GM factory closing in Janesville, Wisconsin. Ryan made big waves about the plant closing, laying it on Obama’s doorstep. And there is no possibility that Ryan didn’t know he was lying. Obama became president in January 2009. On October 23, 2008 – in other words, before the election — Paul Ryan sent out a press release bemoaning the fact that GM had decided to accelerate the pace of the closing of the plant. Even as Ryan was spinning this lie, his local newspaper was selling an iconic image: factory workers gathered at the plant assembly line standing behind a sign that reads, “Last Vehicle Off the Janesville Assembly Line…December 23, 2008.” Oh, and by the way, don’t think this was a mistake on Ryan’s part. The fact that this statement was a lie was pointed out every time he said it. Didn’t stop him from burping out the same falsehood in his nomination acceptance speech.
d. “You didn’t build that.” This was a big attack by the GOP during an entire night of its 2012 convention, claiming that Obama had specifically stated that the government built all the small businesses in the country. Stop and think for a moment – not based on partisan lunacy, but just on logic. Any presidential contender stands up and tells business people that they didn’t build their own businesses? It takes an enormous level of self-delusion and irrationality to believe that someone is that stupid. And, of course, the truth is that Obama said no such thing. The statement came in the course of a litany about how everyone has others to thank for their successes – he cited, for example, a teacher or a coach. In the sentence leading up to “businesses” he referred to the roads and bridges that are necessary for business to function and, yes, the businesses did not build that. Now, if Obama had said “those” instead of “that,” the ability of the GOP to lie about what he said would have been minimized. But it speaks to the shallow dishonesty of the modern GOP to know that an entire evening of its convention was built on exploiting a finding a grammatical loophole to drive their truck through.
e. “Obama wants to prevent the military from voting.” This has to do with the attempts by the Ohio GOP to impede voting by blocks that tend to cast their ballots for the Democrats. A rule was adopted by which limits were placed on the ability of locals to vote, cutting into the time where there is the highest turnout of minority voters. However, an exception was made for members of the military. This was challenged by the Obama administration, not to stop members of the military from voting, but to allow everyone else to have the same rights. Rather than admitting they were trying to favor one block of voters over the other, the GOP turned reality on its head. And P.S. – the courts agreed that Obama was right.
f. Obama’s spending spree. Never happened. I could lecture on this for a while, but instead let’s turn to the words of that bastion of liberal thought, the Wall Street Journal through its Marketwatch site. A 2012 article entitled “Obama spending binge never happened,” reports that “federal spending is rising at the slowest pace since Dwight Eisenhower brought the Korean War to an end in the 1950s. Even hapless Herbert Hoover managed to increase spending more than Obama has.” But that doesn’t stop Romney from moaning that Obama has created a “debt and spending inferno.” Read the whole article – it points out that there was a huge growth in spending in Obama’s first year, but that was meaningless; 2009 was the year of the last budget of the Bush Administration. (I’ll be getting more into the GOP debt lies in a future part of this series)
g. The stimulus failed. This was not only a lie, it makes no sense. If any country spends $700 billion on infrastructure and other projects, employment will go up. Three million people got jobs from the stimulus; Wall Street firms say, without hesitation, that it worked. I’m not sure how anyone could think it wouldn’t. Some may disagree whether it was the right thing to do but to claim it failed is simply wishes replacing reality.
h. Obama raised taxes. Hard to address this, since it has no basis in reality. Obama proposed and signed the largest middle class income tax cut in history. Tax rates for the wealthy are the same. There’s nothing else that can be said about this lie.
i. “If we keep talking about the economy, we’re going to lose.” This one deserves special recognition. Romney’s first major ad featured a clip of Obama making this statement. Sounds pretty devastating, right? Except this was a clip from the 2008 campaign, and Obama was quoting his Republican opponent. The full quote is: “Senator McCain’s campaign actually said, and I quote, if we keep talking about the economy, we’re going to lose.’’’ When this was pointed out to the Romney campaign, they not only dismissed the fact that they were lying, one of the aides said they were going to keep doing this kind of thing because Obama had to be held to account for the words he spoke – as if words and meaning were two different things. “You didn’t build that” is just a continuation of that cynical, un-American philosophy of Mitt Romney.
I’m not going to claim that Democratic political campaigns and policy debates don’t stretch the truth, but they tend to do it at about the same level they have for decades. It takes a special level of shamelessness, stupidity or both to spin the kinds of fables I’ve described above. And the immorality! The Big Lie led to a direct attack on our government, resulting in death and hundreds of injuries. The Ukrainian lie threatened the survival of an ally that, the world knew, was facing a potential invasion by Russia at any moment. And the GOP will let the lies continue to spin and spin, tearing apart this country and putting us all in danger.
I hope the GOP’s desire to get good seats at Georgetown restaurants is worth all the death, mayhem and hatred their lies create. Because one thing is for sure: If there is a hell, they’ll eventually get some of the best seats there for what they have done to all of us.
I imagine that you’re going to get to the lies about the 2020 election later, but I can’t wait to make the point that the Big Lie claiming that the election was stolen from Trump was in effect a triple lie, with three goals.
First, the obvious one, pretending that Trump won and the election was stolen from him to promote the coup attempt (which itself have several prongs) and prevent Biden from taking office.
Second, providing a pretext for MAGA Republicans to run on in 2022 and 2024, keeping the MAGA base riled up, especially in the primaries where the extreme base has great power.
Third, and most dangerous, providing a pretext for GOP takeover of election administration from top to bottom. The lies have resulted in resignations of many election officials and poll workers over threats to them and their families, and the GOP is replacing them with partisan extremists, as well as fielding many MAGA candidates for top offices in charge of elections and election-related duties (Secretaries of State, Governors, Attorneys General). On top of that, they are also pushing for the “Independent State Legislature” theory, all the way to the SCOTUS, to give GOP legislatures the power to overrule the people’s vote and pick who they want to win elections, essentially cementing themselves into power permanently.
I've been a fan of yours for years. Since your book on the Archer-Daniels-Midland price fixing scandal. I'm delighted to have all of this gathered in a single source. The GOP's lies would be risible if they weren't testing apart the fabric of our republic.