In the GOP debates, the lies fly so thick and furious you don’t know where to start, and credulous GOP audiences seem to swallow them whole — or they just don’t care. It’s not unusual for candidates to say things in the heat of debate that don’t withstand scrutiny, but being fact-challenged and prevaricating are two different things.
Carly Fiorina not only tells monstrous fibs, she’s also a serial liar. Not a quality you want in a national leader.
For example, in the first debate, Carly attacked Planned Parenthood by describing a gross video that purportedly showed a “fully formed fetus on the table, its heart beating, its legs kicking, while someone says we have to keep it alive to harvest its brain.” There were several things wrong with this statement. (1) The video wasn’t made in a PP facility. (2) If you watch it, which she apparently didn’t, no one says anything about harvesting a brain. (3) But here’s the ringer — it’s not even a video of an abortion, it’s a video of a miscarriage.
But that didn’t stop Carly, who wants us to elect her to America’s highest office, from using it as an excuse to defund the non-abortion, basic health, services that PP provides to millions of mostly poor, most rural women, most of whom don’t have other readily accessible health care alternatives. (Read story here.)
Now, in the third debate, Carly attacked Obamacare by asserting, “We have 400,000 small businesses forming every year in this country …. The bad news is, we have 470,000 going out of business every year. And why? They cite Obamacare.” It took a few days to track this down, but Mother Jones has found the source of these statistics (read story here) — a 2014 Brookings study, a summary of which is graphed below:
Do you see a problem here? So do I: The sharp drop in new small businesses and the sharp rise in small business closures began around 2005, roughly coinciding with the full implementation of Bush43’s tax cuts and long before Obamacare was even a daydream, and is part of a larger trend that began back in the 1980s.
Oops.
Assuming Fiorina’s researchers and speechwriters (if she has any) looked at the same chart we just did, this couldn’t possibly have been an innocent misinterpretation of these data. Fiorina lied to debate viewers, simple as that. It was a deliberate, calculated, cold-hearted lie meant to shore up the disputed Republican meme that Obamacare destroys jobs. Whether or not it actually does, these particular data clearly do not support that argument.
And given that it isn’t Fiornia’s first fib, it’s fair to conclude that Fiorina has adopted lying as a willful and conscious campaign tactic. What does she get from it? In propagating these lies, Fiorina is simply regurgitating standard-issue Republican propaganda. It appears she’s trying to demonstrate to the Republican good ol’ boys that she’s one of them, or at least willing to do their bidding, i.e. a loyal party servant who — if supported by the party establishment — will faithfully fulfill her duties as Republican storyteller-in-chief. In other words, she’s reliably Republican.
In other words, she’s carrying water for the same people who claimed that Federal Reserve policy implemented to save the economy from another 1930s-type depression would produce massive inflation; and who, after running up trillions in debt to pay for tax cuts for the wealthy and two failed wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, now claim it’s necessary to slash entitlements because America is drowning in debt. And on and on.
Is that who you want running our country? You may tell yourself, no, you would never vote for such people. But what if you don’t vote? Plenty of people will vote for them — all the credulous fools who unthinkingly swallow these lies because it’s exactly what they want to hear; and if you don’t vote, that’s who will elect our next leader.