First let me say lying isn’t a Republican trait, it’s a trait of human nature: People lie when it’s easier than telling the truth (young George Washington excepted). Honesty is something we’re taught when young, and then reinforced by those around us as we go through life, because it doesn’t come naturally to most people. Telling the truth, as opposed to saying what others prefer to hear, isn’t their first instinct.
But the majority of Americans, on the whole, are honest. So are Republicans simply less well trained, or less self-disciplined, than the rest of us? I don’t really know, but they do come across as crude at times, such as when they’re storming the Capitol chanting “hang Mike Pence!” or responding to Biden’s Christmas call to their family with a stand-in phrase for “f— you, Biden.”
We’re indoctrinated to be honest by parents, teachers, clergymen, and judges because honesty is the foundation of successful relationships. Too much dishonesty can destroy a friendship, marriage, business partnership, and land you in an IRS audit or even prison. So, in things that matter, “honesty is the best policy.”
Republicans have never been very good at formulating any policies. For example, every time they deregulate an industry, a tsunami of dishonesty comes ashore, followed by scandal and collapse (the S&L scandal in the 1980s, subprime scandal of the 2000s, etc.). So, you can’t really expect them to have a very good honesty policy. And they don’t. They lie without reservation or conscience.
For example, there’s Trump’s “Big Lie” about the 2020 election. This lie, quite simply, is that he won the election, but another term in the White House was stolen from him with fraudulent votes (or voting machines that switched “Trump” votes to “Biden” votes).
(This lie has to be qualified a little bit, because many Republicans honestly believe that black people shouldn’t be allowed to vote, therefore the hundreds of thousands of black votes counted in places like Detroit, Atlanta, and Milwaukee were “fraudulent.” This belief arguably properly belongs in the category of “delusion” and/or “racism” than “lying,” although I’d categorize it as all three.)
This segues into today’s story (here). Wisconsin state Rep. Timothy Ramthun (bio here), 65, is a Trumper freak from the Fond du Lac area (see Wisconsin map here) who apparently didn’t go to college, and has a “business consulting” background, and by inference is clueless about how our constitutional electoral system works. (Spoiler: Once Congress certifies electors, the election is over, and that result is final.)
Ramthun is a staunch believer in Trump’s Big Lie, i.e., that the election was “stolen.” In that respect, he’s no different than roughly 80% of all Republicans. The GOP has been taken over by mass delusion. But let’s skip over that, because the subject of this article is honesty, or more accurately, dishonesty — and I’m getting to that, be patient. Bear with me as I work through the details of this.
So, believing the election was stolen, even though it wasn’t, Ramthun introduced what’s called a “privileged resolution” in the Wisconsin Assembly on Tuesday, January 25, 2022, purporting to “reclaim” (i.e., repossess) the Wisconsin electoral votes awarded to Biden when the election was certified on Jan. 6, 2021. Ramthun isn’t the author of the lies that followed; rather, think of him as the repo man.
His resolution was referred to committee, as required by Assembly rules, and there it will stay, until the legislative session ends and it dies from inaction along with all the other pigeon-holed bills and resolutions that didn’t make it out of committee.
Now the lying begins. “Ramthun introduced the election resolution just before a vote on an entirely unrelated bill,” CNN says (in the story linked above). After the resolution was sent on its way to the rules committee, “the assembly went on with [an] unrelated vote” on an entirely different matter, which is shown in a video.
Then Gateway Pundit, a rightwing propaganda website, widely read by people who aren’t fussy about sources or accuracy of information, picked up that video and falsely claimed it showed Ramthun’s resolution being voted out of committee. But Gateway Pundit went even farther: “**HUGE BREAKING NEWS** — Wisconsin Assembly Votes to Withdraw Its 10 Electors for Joe Biden in 2020 Election — VIDEO” their headline screamed.
Nothing remotely of the sort actually happened.
But Republicans everywhere swallowed it whole. Kari Lake, a flake running for governor of Arizona, latched on it and bleated, “Arizona should be next!” (Lake, a former journalist, see her bio here, who should know better apparently made no effort to fact-check what is, on its face, a patently absurd story that came from a distinctly non-journalistic source.)
Kelli Ward, chair of the Arizona GOP state organization, also seized on it, proclaiming, “We should have been first!”
Meanwhile, while Lake and Ward were immersing themselves and their followers in a pond of idiocy, Gateway Pundit — the liar in this story — began backpedaling. It revised its headline to say “the ‘HUGE BREAKING NEWS’ was that the Wisconsin assembly had voted to ‘advance’ a lawmaker’s resolution to withdraw the state’s electors,” according to CNN in the story linked above, noting that wasn’t true, either.
(The resolution didn’t “advance” out of committee, or even within the committee. It was, and remains, pigeon-holed in the cubby where all legislative non-starters go.)
In short, Gateway Pundit was still sticking to its lie that the video of the voice vote on the unrelated matter showed Ramthun’s silly resolution “advancing.” The video shows nothing of the sort.
CNN points out “the false Gateway Pundit story circulated online on the same day that Deputy US Attorney General Lisa Monaco told CNN that federal prosecutors were reviewing fake Electoral College certifications” submitted by Republicans in seven states, including Wisconsin. That doesn’t look like a coincidence, and Gateway Pundit’s lying doesn’t look like an accident.
While the purpose of this latest election-related rightwing lie isn’t entirely clear, it could be to lay the groundwork for a rightwing propaganda campaign — based on lies — against such prosecutions, should they materialize.
But the main point here, today, and why I’m writing about this latest bit of Republican theater, is this: If you wouldn’t marry, or go into business, with someone who constantly lies about everything, why would you support a political party or vote for candidates who constantly lie about everything?
The people who do, I think, are lying to themselves, because they want to believe what everyone knows isn’t true.