‘Obamacare’ and the Big GOP ‘Job-Killing’ Lies

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.inthesetimes.com/working/entry/6871/the_big_gop_job-killing_lies/

Wednesday Jan 19, 2011 2:06 pm

By David Moberg


U.S. Representatives Michele Bachmann (C), R-MN, speaks at a Jan. 18, 2011, press conference to receive petitions calling for repeal of "Obamacare." (TIM SLOAN/AFP/Getty Images)


House Republicans are poised today to vote to repeal The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, the healthcare reform Democrats approved last year. To be more precise, they’ll be voting on a bill called “Repealing the Job-Killing Health Care Law Act.” And after it passes, it will die.

But that title is an early indication that the GOP will rely as much in exercising governmental power as it did in campaigning on a strategy that historian Rick Perlstein called “mendocracy”–rule by lying.

It seems to be working, in part. A new ABC/Washington Post poll’s questions about last year’s reform bill, according to The Note, “showed that 46 percent of Americans think the law is likely to cut jobs, 54 percent think it's likely to hurt the economy, and 62 percent see it as increasing rather than decreasing the federal deficit.”

One problem: all those beliefs are wrong or, being generous, either open to debate or simply impossible to say definitively. But Republican mendocracy is winning that war of ideas.

On the other hand, the same poll found that only 18 percent of Americans favor complete repeal, as Republican members of Congress plan to vote today, and just 19 percent more favored repeal of some parts of the law but not all of it. So there's still hope that voters may see through some of the fog of misinformation.

In making their case for repeal, Republicans launched an attack on the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) that has gone well beyond the usual bipartisan grumbling about CBO “scoring” of legislation. The main arguments Republicans made in attacking the CBO–particularly for its conclusion that the existing law will reduce federal deficits by $230 billion over the next decade–and conversely, the Republican bill will increase deficits, despite their posturing.

FULL story at link.

[rfranklin]

1. The truth has a well known liberal bias...

They are the inheritors of the Goebbels big lie technique.

[ProgressiveEconomist]

2. 'MENDACRACY (govt by LIES)"--what a great name for R rule in the House

Omaha Steve, you've "buried your lead" IMO. K & R.