Liar-in-Chief

It continues to be hard for my brain to accept that, in a nation built on bedrock principles of democracy, the Republican machine runs a campaign built on lies.  Not the usual political stretches that virtually every politician will make, but total fabrications that do harm to the country and its people.  Can a party be so inept, so without a set of beliefs that it can present as alternatives, that it must create its own truths and then spin them so as to win the votes of people who don’t have the time nor willingness to separate fact from fiction?

Apparently.

We’ve seen the neoncon campaign strategy since long before Carl Rove. During the Nixon regime, pranksters dominated the scene. The story of Lee Atwater sheds some light on political campaigns and elections. He made an art out of using dirty tricks and shady tactics to win an election at any cost. Ultimately, before his death from a brain tumor, he apologized to many of the people that he had campaigned against. That was helpful. 

Don’t expect an apology from any of his progeny.  These guys are a lie machine–intimidating, no holds barred–a factory of lies, misrepresentations, canards, deceits, deceptions, distortions, equivocations, exaggerations, fallacies, falsifications, fibs, half-truths, libels, obliquities, perjuries, pretenses, prevarications, slanders, untruths, and whoppers.

In fall 2008, YWC!LI sponsored a showing of Boogie Man; The Lee Atwater Story at the Huntingtion Cinema.  One revealing moment in the movie was when it showed that Atwater wasn’t so much a big supporter of the Republican Party, but rather, for him, it was all about winning elections by any means necessary. When the GOP sold out to his tactics in order to win, and continued to win using these tactics, it lost its way–entirely. Conservative beliefs were no longer the centerpiece of the presidential campaign.  Deceit was then and remains the centerpiece of the misinformation campaign that has Romney doing as well as he is.

Scary.

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