This hilarious photo of Chairman Trey -- master of the House's select committee on Benghazi Made-Up Stuff -- was posted with Dana Milbank's column. It looks like the chairman is wearing the suit (and tie) his mommy bought for him the day he first went out selling snake oil."The Republican Party has finally admitted what has been fairly obvious for much of the past six years: It produces fake news. This is not an earth-shattering revelation to anybody who has been paying attention, but, still, it's an important step for the party to embrace the phoniness."-- Dana Milbank, in his Washington Post column"Republicans embrace their phoniness""Every word she writes is a lie, including 'and' and 'the.' "-- Mary McCarthy, about Lillian Hellmanby KenI resurrect Mary McCarthy's famous, er, tribute to Lillian Hellman, made on The Dick Cavett Show in 1979, as a rebuke to prideful right-wingers, who would have us believe that that they invented and perfected the strategy -- nay, the lifestyle -- of lying all the time, with every word, every punctuation mark, every drawn breath.It's so extreme and so utterly preposteours that it would be hilarious if it was the least bit funny.What Dana Milbank has picked up on in this column of his called "Republicans embrace their phoniness" is a report by National Journal's Shane Goldmacher which begins:
The National Republican Congressional Committee, which came under fire earlier this year for a deceptive series of fake Democratic candidate websites that it later changed after public outcry, has launched a new set of deceptive websites, this time designed to look like local news sources.The NRCC has created about two dozen of these new faux news sites targeting Democrats, both challengers and incumbents, and is promoting them across the country with localized Google search ads.
Citing the National Journal report about the new generation of NRCC website fakeries, Dana writes:
These two dozen sites, with names such as “North County Update” and “Central Valley Update” look like political fact-checking sites; the NRCC’s spokeswoman, Andrea Bozek, called it “a new and effective way to disseminate information.”An NRCC official told me the sites are legal because, if you scroll all the way to the bottom, you’ll find, “Paid for by the National Republican Congressional Committee” in small print. “They’re not fake Web sites,” the official said. “These are real attack Web sites.”Real attacks, but fake news: This is a fairly accurate summary of what the GOP’s scandalmongers have been purveying during the Obama years.
I guess maybe there has been progress in political hooliganism since Watergate after all. The Nixon crew was waist-deep in all manner of illegalities, and now the NRCC has a paid flack to assure us that this fraud they're perpetrating on the public is by God totally legal! Well, thank goodness and never mind.Unless of course we remember that the Party of Impeachment actually impeached a president because of his lie about whether he had sex with an intern. Remember all those wacko scumbags wailing, "But he lied"?DANA WALKS US THROUGH THE ALL-LIES-ALL-THE-TIMEASSAULTS ON THE MAN THE RIGHT-WINGERS HATE . . .. . . more even than they hated Bill Clinton, though you would have thought it would be impossible for anyone to hate anyone else more than the right-wingers hated Bill Clinton -- for no identifiable reason except perhaps that with every breath he drew, he reminded them of what polluted, worthless doody they are.As we know, right-wing Obama hatred has come to make right-wing Bill Clinton hatred look like a bit of gentle ribbing. And so the always-operational Right-Wing Lie Machine has been operating at fever pace all through the present administration. Remember these great moments?• "There was the assertion that the White House was covering up high-level involvement in Operation 'Fast and Furious,' a gun program under the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco Firearms and Explosives that went awry. No evidence was found."• "There was the accusation that the Obama White House pushed through money for Solyndra to pay the president's political cronies even though officials knew the solar-energy firm was going bankrupt. Didn't happen that way."• "Accusation: Obamacare would bring about the collapse of the American health-care system and replace it with socialized medicine and death panels. No such thing has occurred."• "The IRS scandal, it was alleged, could be traced back to the White House, which targeted Obama’s enemies for political reasons. Nope."BUT OF COURSE THE TRUTH DOESN'T MATTERNo, that's not what all this is about. Not even if right-wingers believed in truth, which they don't, having been taught since the hallowed ancient days of Elder Ronald of Reagan that reality is whatever makes you feel good to believe -- verification not only not required but frowned upon.As Dana puts it:
The actual truth of the allegations doesn’t matter. Each one sullied President Obama’s name, and investigators’ failure to deliver the goods did little to remove the taint. That’s why fake news works: Falsehoods can drive a president’s approval rating into the cellar while the truth is still getting out of bed.
"And now," says Dana, "we have the Benghazi exoneration."
For nearly two years, Republicans have been alleging all manner of scandal involving the 2012 attacks on U.S. facilities in the Libyan city. That somebody — Hillary Clinton? — issued a stand-down order to prevent help from getting to American officials under fire; that Clinton rejected pleas for more diplomatic security in Libya; and that the Obama White House pushed false talking points to play down the terrorist attacks before the election.The accusations have been roundly debunked, most recently in military officers’ testimony released by the GOP-controlled House Armed Services Committee.Now there’s a bipartisan report, adopted unanimously by the GOP-controlled House Intelligence Committee on July 31, awaiting declassification by the administration. It throws yet another bucket of cold water on the conspiracy theories. In a statement, the top Democrat on the panel, Dutch Ruppersberger (Md.), said the report finds that:“[T]here was no intelligence failure surrounding the Benghazi attacks.”“[T]here was no ‘stand down order’ given to American personnel attempting to offer assistance that evening, and no American was left behind.”“[T]he talking points reflected the conflicting intelligence assessments in the days immediately following the crisis.”“[T]here was no illegal activity or illegal arms sales occurring at the U.S. facilities in Benghazi.”“And there was absolutely no evidence, in documents or testimony, that the intelligence community’s assessments were politically motivated in any way.”The report is not yet public, and Republican sources indicate that there is more disagreement in the report than Ruppersberger’s statement indicates and that the report is not as exculpatory as he implies. But there has been no challenge from the Republican side to the accuracy of the findings Ruppersberger detailed in his statement.
WELL, SO WHAT?If there's one thing Elder Ronald taught his disciples, it's that the people are entitled to the lies that make them happy -- even if being happy means spending much of their existence frothing at the mouth like rabid animals. (Surely it's not our place to judge our fellow humans' choices of how they define "happiness.") So all that's really required in the case of the Benghazi "oops" is a technical adjustment.
Now that the truth is catching up to them, House Republicans will need to stay one step ahead. Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.), chairman of the select committee on Benghazi, told CNN’s Deirdre Walsh last week that, despite what the Intelligence Committee found, “there is more work to be done and more to be investigated.”
Of course if you're a right-wing whackjob, there's always "more work to be done," if by "work" we understand collaborating with our fellow loonies on new lies and delusions to prevent our fellow Americans from ever being aware of, let alone actually trying to deal with, our real problems, and there's always "more to be investigated," if by "investigating" we mean poking around among liars and conmen with claimed "corroboration" of your lies and then just making stuff up.As Dana concludes of Chairman Trey's call to battle: "Excellent. Maybe he can post his phony accusations on some fake news Web sites." Sure, what goes around comes around, or something like that.#