The GOP’s Modern Addiction to Lies

Thom Hartmann - Recently, I mentioned that when I was 13 years old I went door-to-door with my dad for Barry Goldwater. Three years later I was living on my own in East Lansing getting tear gassed and beaten for demonstrating against the Vietnam War and continuing segregation in the South. In other words, I’ve seen — and participated deeply — in both the right and left sides of American politics.

Although his position against the Civil Rights Act was reprehensible, I took Goldwater at his word that it was based on his concern about federal overreach and the 10th Amendment; having read both his books, I came to deeply respect his principled stands, even though I also deeply disagreed with most of them.

As most historians will confirm, Barry Goldwater believed what he said, and never, so far as I can find, knowingly lied to the American people.

That was my dad’s Republican Party. They’d spin or shade the truth, but rarely told what they knew were naked lies. And many among them deeply believed in the principles they espoused.

That party is dead.

Today’s Republican politician quite literally lies for a living, as you can see on any of the Sunday political shows or whenever a Republican is interviewed on CNN or Morning Joe. Consider just a handful of the pre- and post-Trump versions of the GOP.

Before Trump, Republicans largely only shaded the truth:

• Ronald Reagan repeatedly claimed his tax cuts “paid for themselves,” a misleading but not entirely fabricated notion since some revenue returned via economic growth, though far less than claimed.
• George W. Bush’s administration asserted “we know” Iraq has WMDs. The statements danced on ambiguous intelligence, carefully presenting suspicions as certainties.
• Their “War on coal” job-loss talking points made blanket claims that EPA rules would “kill jobs” even though labor data and research consistently showed EPA regulations were a minor layoff driver relative to collapsing demand for coal in the face of a gas fracking boom.
• Reagan’s “Welfare queen” rhetoric was based on one egregious fraud case (Linda Taylor) but was then generalized to stigmatize all welfare recipients and wielded as a racialized caricature.
• Republican pitches for the Keystone XL pipeline claimed it would create “42,000 jobs,” but those were just short-term construction and support jobs; the long-run permanent jobs were only in the dozens.
• The Bush administration defined “torture” in legal terms that excluded waterboarding, technically denying “torture” while knowingly permitting harsh practices.
• Paul Ryan’s claims about Obama “raiding Medicare” to fund the ACA gracefully omitted that Obamacare’s cuts were to overpayments, not to benefits.
• Sarah Palin’s “death panels” warning about Obamacare referenced end-of-life planning provisions, not anything like “death panels,” but skirted the border of outright fabrication.
• GOP messaging around the Clinton tax hikes of the 1990s predicted economic downturns, assertions based on selective economic forecasting, not contrary evidence.
• Republican officials regularly portrayed the estate tax as a “death tax hitting family farms.” Cases of family farms being lost were extremely rare, but not fabricated entirely.