Photo: President and First Lady Biden and other dignitaries at Dover AFB as casualties of the Kabul airport bombing are brought home.
From CNN, Monday, August 30, 2021 (story here, with original links left in):
“On Saturday night, an entirely false claim about President Joe Biden went viral among conservatives on Twitter. ‘Our heroes were returned to American soil and Dover AFB today. Nobody from the Biden White House attended,’ tweeted Buzz Patterson, a Republican congressional candidate in California. Patterson’s tweet — posted before 11 p.m. on Saturday — generated thousands of retweets. And similar claims were made by other conservatives with substantial Twitter followings.”
For example,
“Fox News host Laura Ingraham amplified a similar tweet [and] added, ‘The Biden administration doesn’t care about our troops.’ Richard Grenell, who served as acting director of national intelligence under President Donald Trump, also amplified a similar tweet [and] added, ‘How could this be? It’s so offensive.’ (When another conservative commentator replied that the claim had not been confirmed, Grenell added, “I pray no one made this mistake.”)
The truth:
“It’s completely false that nobody from the Biden administration showed up at Dover Air Force Base to greet the remains of the 13 troops killed in a terror attack on Thursday outside Kabul’s airport. President Joe Biden and First Lady Jill Biden — along with Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and other administration officials — attended the dignified transfer at Dover on Sunday morning. The viral tweets accusing the Biden administration of being absent at Dover were posted hours before the remains actually arrived at the base.”
And this:
“The false claims were previously noted on Twitter by Travis Akers, a progressive Navy veteran. Ingraham, Fournier, Grenell and Patterson ended up deleting their tweets, at varying speeds, after their inaccuracy was pointed out.”
They deleted their tweets after they were caught lying.
This wasn’t a one-off. Dating at least back to Nixon, Republicans have engaged in “dirty tricks.” Nixon and Trump were impeached for that. For decades, GOP operatives have systematically lied, photoshopped, and fabricated slanders against Democratic incumbents and office holders. This is the standard rightwing modus operandi. (It doesn’t stop there, of course; they also rely on gerrymandering and voter suppression to gain political power while in the minority.)
Why? Conventional wisdom argues that Republicans create distractions and demonize the opposition because they can’t honestly debate the issues. I have my own theory about why they have no conscience about it: They believe they’re “doing God’s work,” so the ends justify the means, and anything goes.
There’s something positive to be said for an ideology that champions individual liberty, restraints on government power, capitalism and free enterprise, limited taxation, and economic policies that favor job creation, economic growth, and low inflation. They’re not good at the things Democrats are known for: The social safety net, safe workplaces and fair treatment of workers, education, health, racial equality and social justice. In theory, the parties could (and should) complement each other, and healthy political competition could (and hopefully would) extract the best ideas from both camps, while the parties act as checks and balances on each other to prevent excesses.
It doesn’t work that way. The GOP doesn’t have a guiding ideology anymore, and has gone rogue. There’s no space for negotiation and compromise; Gingrich and McConnell turned it into a “Party of No.” It’s racist; Nixon and Trump turned it into a white supremacy party. Then the pandemic came along, and the GOP turned itself into a public health menace.
This brings us full-circle back to the lying. The things Republicans say these days aren’t the careless mistakes of lazy people who fail to fact-check. They’re deliberate, calculated, premeditated slanders. They’re the clever, carefully thought-out, work products of smart people who lack character, integrity, and decency. We can’t have conversations with them, nor do they want conversations with us. They want to rule, not govern; and that being the case, all we can do is try to protect ourselves from them, any way we can, and most of all at the ballot box.
Related stories: (1) Rightwing liars falsely claimed U.S. military dogs were abandoned at the Kabul airport (read story here). Among those peddling this lie is actor James Woods, a Trump supporter who’s been kicked off Twitter “multiple times” for promoting “falsehoods and conspiracy theories,” according to Wikipedia (here). The dogs in question are rescue dogs belonging to an animal welfare group; the U.S. military was not responsible for getting them out of the country.
(2) Prominent Republicans, including Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-TX), promoted a false story that the Taliban executed a man by hanging him from a helicopter. The video is real, but the man is a Taliban suspended in a harness trying to unfurl a Taliban flag (read story here).
These two stories aren’t by any means isolated incidents where someone got the facts wrong. They illustrate how Republicans deliberately distort facts to score cheap political points, and they do this all the time.
So what?
All human beings lie. Politicians of all stripes lie. We even have the noble lie. [This comment has been edited.]
This wasn’t a noble lie, it was an ignoble lie.