A blistering article about how blatant, unchecked lying has become the centerpiece of modern Republican strategy and the Romney/Ryan campaign in particular.

Today, for Republicans, up is down and front is back. Lying has become so ingrained into the conservatives’ national dialogue that they are now dangerously demagogic or, worse, severely unhinged. Blind rage at the election of Barack Obama has wrecked a once great political party. Its leaders have made so many deals with the devil in their almost pathological obsession with unseating Obama that they have pushed the GOP into its own version of political hell – unable to speak truths to their now-rabid and conspiracy-addled base and unable to right the party back onto a path of responsibility.

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II.  They are demagogues. What is it about the state of Wisconsin? First it brought us Joe McCarthy, now it brings us Paul Ryan – two men willing to say anything, tell any lie, appeal to any fear, if it means advancing their political careers. The willingness to lie is bad enough, but when it is used to play on people’s ignorance and passions, a politician has crossed the line from dishonest to dangerous. The distant drums of demagoguery are growing ever closer. They began with Sarah Palin’s mantra about “real Americans.” They started their inexorable approach when GOPers bowed down to the conspiracy theorists in their own party – the same people who considered fluoridation of water to be a communist plot – with winks and nods that maybe Obama wasn’t an American citizen. Forget the fact that, as the son of a parent who is a citizen, he is a citizen. They allowed this fear to spread without ever calling bullshit. “I accept the President at his word” was considered a strong response, instead of “Don’t be ridiculous.” (Imagine how outraged – rightfully – the GOP would have been if the Dems had reacted to the loons in their midst who said Bush orchestrated 9/11 by saying that they took the president at his word that he didn’t arrange the attack.)  We have had the birth certificate since 2008, the Hawaiian State Health Department says its real, and no one has ever come up with a reason why this question is even being asked in the first place.” But the rabid mobs liked the idea of the black man as foreigner, and so it continues. Add in the other mantras – Obama hates America, Obama wants to give your money to minorities, Obama wants to let gays destroy the sanctity of marriage – and the GOP has successfully created the “other,” the internal enemy that threatens to undermine the country. First it was the communists, then the fundamentalists, and now Obama. (In fact, since I started with McCarthy, look at history: Truman, large swaths of the GOP intoned, was a Communist, deemed the central enemy of America. Now that conservatives see the new enemy as Islam, Obama, large swaths of the GOP intones, is a Muslim.)  The modern GOP has used lies to appeal to irrationality and a lack of knowledge – I have had Republicans tell me that they are scared for their parents because Obama is going to euthanize them, that Obama is planning to plant tracking chips in all Americans after the election, that a civil war is coming, that Obama had advanced warning of 9/11,  and on and on. This is a form of mass delusion that can only end badly, if allowed to fester or be validated in any way. GOP leaders have stoked this furnace of hate, and in the process have both trapped themselves with a new base of voters divorced from reality and allowed for the empowerment of the reckless and dangerous people who used to be at the fringes of the Republican party. Demagogues depend on hate and fear; once they are unleashed, though, those emotional forces are hard to put back in the bottle.

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Reagan tax cut mythology part 3: At a meeting in the Oval Office, Obama commented on the fact that tax rates are lower now than they were under Reagan. After the meeting, Rep. Michelle Bachmann – one of the dangerous Republicans whose certainty to knowledge ratio might well be the first to exceed 100 percent – scoffed that Obama was fibbing. Of course, as the mantra goes, we have been pilloried with higher taxes in the years after Reagan. But no – Obama was right. The total Average Federal Tax Rate for all income quintiles was between 21 and 22 percent in the Reagan years. When Obama took office, it was 17 percent. If the Democrats introduced the “Ronald Reagan Tax and Fairness Act” (I made the name up) calling for a return to the tax rates under Reagan, we would be talking about a 23 percent tax increase. Tax rates are at historic lows, which is why it is perfectly reasonable, in the face of massive federal debts, to raise them.

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6. The “Job Creators”: Let’s do the two-second version of this. A millionaire gets a $340,000 tax cut. And this translates into a job how? Maybe he’ll hire another housekeeper, maybe buy some more from Tiffany’s, but the vast majority of that money will not be spent on goods that drive the economy – it will be put into savings. Usually, that can be a good thing, but in a stagnant economy, the people whose financial activity creates jobs are the middle class. Give a middle class family $10 during a rough economy, they spend it. And that is how an economy gets moving. What we need is more tax cuts for the middle class, not tax cuts for the wealthy. (And, again, you have to look at actual numbers. The Bush tax cuts went into place in 2002: employment remained fairly stagnant until the financial crisis of 2008, when unemployment skyrocketed. They cuts have remained in place throughout the Obama Administration; so if the tax cuts fuel hiring, where the hell are the jobs?

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7. The GOP is the party of tax cuts: I was horrified by something I saw in Obama’s first State of the Union in 2010 (not the GOP congressman who yelled out “you lie!” which should have led to his being sanctioned by Congress.) Instead, it was a point in Obama’s speech when he mentioned that the stimulus had given the middle class the greatest tax cut in history. It’s true – it did. This was not something I figured would be controversial. The Democrats jumped out of their seats and applauded. The Republicans did nothing – no applause, nothing. That was the moment that really put me on a path of contempt for a party I had once supported: they didn’t care about tax cuts, only about tax cuts for the rich.

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the GOP has become a childish, self-centered party that is unfit to govern. You don’t need to look any further than in their immature refusal to call the Democratic Party by its real name – instead, they insist on the Democrat Party, the same way that the bully in some 1980s movie would call a character “slob” if his real name was “Bob.” What is the purpose of this? I don’t know. It demeans every Republican candidate when they say it. But it also is of a piece with the Republican inability to engage an elected president from the Democratic party. Republicans didn’t just go after Clinton’s policies – they called him a murderer, a drug dealer, a rapist. They didn’t just go after John Kerry’s policies – they accused him of faking his heroics, of lying his way to a Purple Heart and a Silver Star (in the process raising doubts about the integrity of those awards for every soldier who has won them), and of shooting a boy in the back. They don’t just go after Obama’s policies – they accuse him of being a Kenyan, a socialist, a communist, a euthanizer, and on and on.

Read the full article here.