GOP Lies // Current

Ex-GOP Congressman Tom Tancredo walks off MSNBC set

While in the middle of a heated debate over healthcare reform between former... more

sonjasreality
added this
19 days ago
|
1 comment

Tom Tancredo debates Kos, storms off set

On MSNBC Friday night, David Shuster (filling in for Ed Shultz) addressed hateful... more

SleepDirt
added this
19 days ago
|
1 comment

At Least Dick Cheney Has Credentials

Last week, Liz Cheney berated the President of the United States for publicly honoring... more

slarabee
added this
23 days ago
|
12 comments

A Real War on the Press

For a genuine presidential war on the press, see the one FDR waged in the 1930s.

How touchy can you get?

The White House fires a few pop-guns in the direction of Fox News Channel, and suddenly everybody from Louis Menand in The New Yorker to Michael Scherer in Time to Charles Krauthammer in the Washington Post is heralding the Obama administration's declaration of war on Rupert Murdoch's cable station.

The direct declaration came not from Barack Obama, but underlings Anita Dunn, who called Fox the communications arm of the GOP; David Axelrod, who said Fox isn't really a news station; and Rahm Emanuel, who invoked the president's views to say, "It's not a news organization so much as it has a perspective." The closest His Obamaness has come to criticizing Fox on the record was in June, when he complained of "one television station that is entirely devoted to attacking my administration."

o get a genuine picture of what a war on the press looks like, you can't fan the pages of Nexis for grouchy things George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, or even Richard Nixon said about reporters, newspapers, and networks. You've got to go back to the 1930s, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt raged against the press like noisy clockwork.

Roosevelt's fury couldn't have been more displaced, in part because newspapers and reporters received him like a conquering hero after his 1932 election, reports Graham J. White in his 1979 book, FDR and the Press:

The initial victory of Franklin Roosevelt over the Washington press was swift and glorious. Demonstrating a virtuosity that amazed them, the new president took the Capital correspondents by storm, winning, from the outset, their affection and admiration; securing, over the crucial early stages of the New Deal, their allegiance and support.

Roosevelt especially disliked "interpretive reporting," which Time and Newsweek were popularizing, writes Betty Houchin Winfield in her 1990 book, FDR and the News Media. Roosevelt recoiled when a reporter asked him what interpretive angle the president would take if he were to write a piece about the Democratic Party's 1934 landslide victory. "I think it is a mistake for newspapers to go over into that field in the news stories," Roosevelt said. His prescription for what reporters should do for readers: "Give them the facts and nothing else." (One can almost see Dunn and Axelrod giving Fox the same advice.)

The president reserved his greatest disdain for press proprietors, whom he blamed for what he considered unfair and distorted coverage. "It is not the reporter" who is responsible for "colored news stories and the failure on the part of some papers to print the news," Roosevelt said in December 1935. "It goes back to the owner of the paper."For a genuine presidential war on the press, see the one FDR waged in the 1930s.... more

atomiclegion
added this
29 days ago
|
0 comments

Communications arm? Fox & Friends recites misleading GOP press release on stimulus

Fox & Friends hosts Brian Kilmeade, Steve Doocy, and Gretchen Carlton parroted a House... more

slarabee
added this
1 month ago
|
1 comment

There's A Rep For That: Fake Apple Commercial Mocks Republicans In Congress (VIDEO)

A blogger with a grudge against Republicans in Congress made a fake ad this week... more

atomiclegion
added this
1 month ago
|
17 comments

Boehner Can't "Find" Anyone Who Supports Public Option; Woman Who Contacted Him Claims Otherwise

House Minority Leader Rep. John Boehner (R-Ohio) said Thursday that he's never met an... more

WakeUpPeople
added this
1 month ago
|
5 comments

Bachmann: Health care reform will create "sex clinics" in schools and abortion field trips (VIDEO)

Last night on the House floor, Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) spoke to Congress about... more

WakeUpPeople
added this
1 month ago
|
28 comments

The public knows the GOP are fibbing: Poll

"I can't tell you how many foreign leaders who are heads of center-right governments say to me, I don't understand why people would call you socialist. In my country, you'd be considered a conservative." -- President Obama, Sept. 20, 2009

There have always been two basic arguments for health insurance reform: one based in morality, the other self-interest. For a documented 45,000 persons to die prematurely in America each year because they can't afford proper care is a national disgrace. Almost everybody apart from "conservatives" whose moral imagination is limited to judging other people's sex lives understands that.

The current cruel, wasteful system is indefensible. Surely that's why almost three-quarters of physicians polled by the New England Journal of Medicine favor genuine reform. About 63 percent of doctors surveyed nationwide support a public option; 10 percent would prefer a single-payer system, basically Medicare for everybody.

For all the hullabaloo, it appears alarmist rhetoric hasn't scared ordinary people as much as it has cable TV anchors. A Bloomberg poll asked which right-wing objections people found legitimate, and which were "scare tactics." Basically, voters rejected GOP rhetoric almost 2-to-1. About 63 percent think Sarah Palin's "death panels" are a distortion, versus 30 percent who fear them. It's 61 to 33 percent on the claim that health reform means government-paid abortions, 58 to 37 percent on the false claim that illegal aliens will get subsidized insurance, etc.

In short, hardcore opposition is mainly confined to the Republican "base," itself increasingly confined to the South. Why has Sen. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, started making conciliatory noises? Consider these remarkable statistics from a Research 2000 poll: Voters in the Northeast overwhelmingly dislike congressional Republicans. The party's favorability rating there is a minuscule 7, yes 7, percent. Moreover, it's a paltry 13 percent in the Midwest; 14 percent in the West. Only in the South is the GOP politically relevant, with a 50 to 37 percent advantage over Democrats.

more at link..."I can't tell you how many foreign leaders who are heads of center-right governments... more