Wednesday, November 5, 2014

Republican lies are a Ponzi scheme for American voters

Chaz K writes, "The midterm elections were a repudiation of Obama and his policies."

I would agree with him except that the Republican party spent over $100 million running attack ads that misrepresented the issues and the candidates' positions. What he are saying is, if Fox News and the Koch Brothers were successful in buying the election, then the election is a repudiation of the president and his policies. This position is nonsensical. If Bernie Madoff convinced a thousand people to invest in a Ponzi scheme, it doesn't prove Madoff's Ponzi scheme is a good investment. More to the point, it doesn't "repudiate" the laws of mathematics that prove Ponzi schemes don't work. 

But the Republicans began opposing Obama and his policies before they even knew what they were. They opposed his policy of marriage equality, falsely saying it would legalize polygamy and somehow devalue traditional marriage.They opposed limited intervention in the Middle East, saying that Obama was a closet Muslim who favors ISIS. They opposed the Affordable Care Act, saying it would destroy the US medical system (it hasn't), bankrupt the economy (it hasn't), and create death panels (it hasn't). They opposed the EPA policy of decreasing coal production and burning in the atmosphere, by saying that Climate Change is a myth created by the scientists because...scientists don't know anything about what they spend their whole lives studying.

If the Republicans lied about the policies of the administration to win the election, their repudiation is only a repudiation of the fantasy that Republicans created with their lies. In other words, it was a repudiation of nothing. In addition, the Republicans have suggested no alternatives to policies they oppose--because they know those policies are reasonable and there are no defensible right-wing alternatives.

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