Gene Lyons: How the GOP Gets Away With It

[flpoljunkie]

How the GOP gets away with it
It's pretty simple: They repeat the same thing over and over until everyone gets tired of correcting them

BY GENE LYONS


AP/Salon
Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky.

Has the Republican Party gone completely off into Cloud-Cuckoo-Land, or have its leading spokesmen simply decided to mimic the party's entertainment wing: trusting its loyal audience to believe even the most brazen falsehoods, and, equally important, to remember nothing?

Does unwillingness to engage reality signal an acceptance of minority status, or merely disdain for the GOP base?

After all, you can trick a cow with an empty feed bucket once or twice. By the third try, it won't even look at you.

GOP savants act as if Republican voters are more easily guided.

Consider Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky. For weeks, McConnell has been trying to prevent action on pending financial-reform legislation by claiming that it would lead to "endless taxpayer bailouts of Wall Street banks."

In reality, the proposed law would do exactly the opposite: liquidating failed investment firms' assets through a process like the one used by the FDIC to shut down insolvent savings banks. Management would be fired and shareholders given nothing until creditors had been paid. Wall Street firms would be required to pay into a fund underwriting the arrangement. Taxpayer dollars wouldn't be used.

Even Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., who helped draft the legislation, has pointedly contradicted McConnell's mischaracterization. New York Times columnist Paul Krugman has characterized it as "possibly the most dishonest argument ever made in the history of politics."

(Really, professor? More dishonest than Hitler's "stab in the back" charge that Jews and Socialists conspired to make Germany lose World War I? More dishonest than the Tonkin Gulf resolution that dragged the United States into Vietnam?)

Even so, Krugman's hyperbole is understandable. Say what you will about academia, in professorial debate so blatant a misrepresentation would be seen as a shameful confession of weakness. Somebody who can't win an argument without resorting to a simple "black is white" lie gets as little respect as he deserves.

more...

http://www.salon.com/news/bank_reform/index.html?story=/opinion/feature/2010/04/28/how_gop_gets_away_with_it

[SpiralHawk]

1. "What worked for Big Brother in 1984 works for us." - Republicon Homelanders

[OHdem10]

2. Gene Lyons is one of my favorites but I beg to disagree. Who

may I ask corrects them???? Not many Journalists and
certainly not the Dems on the hill.

[emulatorloo]

5. In the last few paragraphs, he agrees with you. Dems from the hill try, but media

doesn't bother fact checking, and just presents Dem statements as "he said she said"

<SNIP>

Blogger Matt Yglesias fears that such tactics do nothing but work. "True or false," he writes, "the overwhelming evidence is that the media gets bored with these fact checks very quickly and that if you just put your head down and charge forward, you come out a couple of weeks later back into 'he said, she said' territory. The only real test for whether or not lying works is whether or not you can bring your ideological fellow travelers along. Will Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck echo your line? Will the Weekly Standard and National Review? Will the bulk of your legislative caucus? The answers are yes, yes, and yes."

Actually, we're already there. Just watch. Virtually every TV report on the financial-regulation bill you see will feature a sound bite from McConnell, who'll continue to shill for Citibank and Goldman Sachs while pretending to defend the little guy. Bailout, bailout, bailout. The fact that he's engaging in pure doublespeak is highly unlikely to be mentioned. Instead, you'll likely see a snippet from a Democrat making the opposite claim. For an awful lot of viewers, that's like flipping a coin.

For Fox News viewers and Limbaugh listeners, it's actually easier than that. Conditioned by decades of propaganda about liberal media bias, many react with overt hostility to any and all information from other sources. I must get 50 angry e-mails a week calling me a liar for citing some easily verifiable fact at odds with right-wing doctrine.

<SNIP> more at link

[Beetwasher]

3. The Fact That McConnell Can Spout This Lie Continuously, And There Are Media That Allow Him To

Without calling hims a LIAR, is a really sad, frightening commentary on the current state of our media.

[Jeff In Milwaukee]

6. You're exactly right....

Why bash Republicans for telling lies? Hey, fish gotta swim and birds gotta fly, right?

We should be bashing the media for cheerfully repeating their nonsense without pointing out that vitrually everything that comes out of the Republican leadership and the RNC is a pack of bald-faced lies.

[wiggs]

10. Yes. Media complicity is key....and not incidental. It is a deliberate, planned

aspect of national politics and public discourse that took decades and billions of dollars to achieve through the establishment of RW think tanks, consolidation of media, slow creep of dishonesty by journalists pundits and politicians, lowering of the bar in tactics (rove), persistent and unwavering denigration of facts/science/education, promotion of belief and doctrine (many sorts) over reason, polarization of the nation into philosophical "clubs" to which loyalty is primary, elevation of the marketplace and corporate profit to religious status, etc..

This is a multi-headed strategy used to undermine democracy and control knowledge. It is very sad and frightening. And brilliant. And it's working.

[elleng]

4. Repeat lies > Goebbels

“The most brilliant propagandist technique will yield no success unless one fundamental principle is borne in mind constantly - it must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over."

http://thinkexist.com/quotation/-if_you_tell_a_lie_big_...

Success is the important thing. Propaganda is not a matter for average minds, but rather a matter for practitioners. It is not supposed to be lovely or theoretically correct. I do not care if I give wonderful, aesthetically elegant speeches, or speak so that women cry. The point of a political speech is to persuade people of what we think right. I speak differently in the provinces than I do in Berlin, and when I speak in Bayreuth, I say different things than I say in the Pharus Hall. That is a matter of practice, not of theory. We do not want to be a movement of a few straw brains, but rather a movement that can conquer the broad masses. Propaganda should be popular, not intellectually pleasing. It is not the task of propaganda to discover intellectual truths.

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Joseph_Goebbels

[Rosa Luxemburg]

8. Yes Goebbels would be proud of them (of course they are all RWers)

[Supersedeas]

7. the Corporate Media Advertising Model not longer serves a fact checking function

Entertainment and cheerleading are what they do.

[harun]

11. They claim to cover "both sides" of the story, but if both are lies,

what's the point?

[Orsino]

9. He's got it backward.

The MSM and its employees (which include the GOP and most Dems) are how Big Money gets away with it.

Republicans don't invent this shit. They just work here.