Beat Goes On With Republicans, Frankenstein And Prevarications
The Republican Party continues its war on truth and it’s winning.
Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., called it a “sweetheart deal” and that was one of the kinder responses from the Republican swarm of yellow jackets after the news broke that Hunter Biden will not go to jail after admitting to income tax violations and a minor gun charge.
McCarthy and the others know full well that a first offense on tax charges rarely leads to jail time. In other words, they are lying.
An example to put the lie to his lie that McCarthy conveniently overlooked was that of Republican political trickster and trump confidante, Roger Stone, who admitted he failed to pay $2 million in taxes; for his admission, he was not even criminally charged and was allowed to repay the back taxes.
McCarthy and his unholy brothers and sisters would have you believe that with Biden, there is a “two tier system of justice,” and that he was given a “sweetheart deal” and a “slap on the wrist.” None of it is true, despite the pontification of House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer, R-Kent. Comer also is simply lying.
These are the facts: Prosecutors will recommend two years of probation in exchange for Hunter Biden pleading guilty to two misdemeanors related to failure to pay taxes in 2017 and 2018. He previously paid the IRS about $1.2 million to cover what he owed for unreported payments and gifts, a move to lessen his legal exposure.
Rather than plead guilty to a gun charge, Biden will not contest the government’s allegations that he illegally owned a handgun in 2018 because he was simultaneously using illegal drugs. In exchange, he has agreed to enter a pretrial diversion program for substance abuse and remain clean for two years. Such diversion is routinely offered to nonviolent offenders with substance abuse struggles, the Washington Post reported.
Proof that the Biden case was typical is the that the Department of Justice has reported that in 2019, there were just 298 cases brought of people falsifying their gun application records out of 27 million background checks that were completed.
And, for all the deep state conspirators, the prosecutor who negotiated the plea bargain was hired by trump when he was president.
The Biden Jr. situation is an example of the Frankenstein monster syndrome. You take a lie and another lie and another lie, like the unsubstantiated allegations against Biden and his father, glue them all together and before you know it, you’ve created a monster.
To put it another way, a subject is asked if he ever beats his spouse, though there is no evidence of any abuse. The subject denies any abuse and the headline is man “denies he beats his spouse.” Or if you ask the president if he has taken a bribe and he answers in the negative, the headline in the Fox News world is “Biden denies taking bribe.”
There was a time when politicians tried to hide their lies and fact checkers earned their keep. But the lies, largely from Republicans, are coming so fast and furious that fact checking is just about irrelevant; by the time the facts are checked and found to be false, the damage has already been done.
Lying has metastasized into an accepted part of the GOP political landscape, largely primed by the ex-president. The Washington Post documented 30,573 lies or misleading claims made by trump and the avalanche of lies continues and makes it impossible to make timely fact checks. And even if the facts are checked, the nation is so polarized that the MAGA wing would reject anything that veered from their “facts.”
Call it fake news; information disorder or information pollution; misinformation or false information disseminated without harmful intent; disinformation, false information created and shared by people with harmful intent; or malinformation, “genuine” information with the intent to cause harm. A rose by any other name is just as deadly.
A Substack column by Framelab noted that the Republican Party “has launched an all-out war against fact checkers and those who study disinformation. Using lawsuits and congressional hearings, their campaign against the truth seeks to scare fact checkers and disinformation researchers into silence. The objective is clear: To make it impossible to distinguish between lies and truth.”
One glaring example is the echo chamber of noise being repeated by Republicans and trump apologists about President Biden; his son, Hunter; and Burisma, an energy company from Ukraine. Republicans in Congress referred to a redacted document that the FBI uses for unverified reporting. Republicans say the document shows that as vice president, Biden took $5 million from Burisma, the Ukrainian energy company that gave his son a seat on its board when he was vice president. The GOP interrogators also claim that a whistleblower has also come forward claiming audio recordings exist of a Burisma executive bribing Biden.
The whistleblower has not been identified and the information in the alleged FBI document has not been confirmed while some have speculated that former trump lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, crafted the document. That same Giuliani now claims that the key, mystery whistleblower has died.
And by the way, neither House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer, R-Ky., nor Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, the FBI or Giuliani have the allegedly incriminating tapes. Grassley even said there may be no tapes.
The explosive, unproven, unattributed claims led Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., one of the biggest liars in a pack of really big liars, to tweet @RepMTG that “We have been investigating the Biden Family since Day 1 of the Republican House majority. Thanks to a courageous whistleblower, we now have evidence tying Joe Biden himself directly to a pay-for-play crime scheme with foreign nationals.”
Sen. Ted (I’m in Cancun) Cruz, R-Texas, felt equally empowered to tweet @tedcruz, “We have learned of credible evidence that Joe Biden received a $5 million bribe from Burisma, the Ukrainian natural gas company. Now we’re told there is evidence of that on audio tapes. These are allegations of serious misconduct.”
Margot Cleveland, senior legal correspondent for the right wing, Federalist, used the alleged FBI document as a basis to write that Burisma official Mykola Zlochevksy “bribed the Bidens to influence policy decisions.”
“The claims that Zlochevsky possessed recordings — not just of Hunter Biden, but also of ‘the Big Guy’ — suggests we face a serious national security risk, with a compromised president potentially beholden to a blackmailer,” Cleveland writes.
Greg Price, communications director for the right wing, State Freedom Caucus network, also refused to let any facts get in the way when he said, “Realize how much of a farce the first Trump impeachment was now that we know Joe and Hunter each took $5 million in bribes from Burisma, the executive has 17 recordings discussing their deal, the DOJ hid them from the public (along with Hunter’s laptop), Biden was on tape bragging about firing the prosecutor investigating Burisma, and Pelosi impeached Trump because he simply asked Zelensky about this corruption.” The monster is alive.
As they should, House Democrats this week dismissed the Biden bribe allegations but the damage has already been done. It’s like the metaphor-challenge of trying to put the lies back in the toothpaste tube.
“I’ve seen a lot of allegations against President Biden by MAGA Republicans, but the truth is they’ve amounted to nothing. … I don’t think they have a lot of credibility. But, look, they can knock themselves out,” said Rep. Eric Swalwell, D-Calif.
Consider the comments of Grassley and others who have compared the charges lodged against trump with the Justice Department’s past decision not to charge either President Biden or Hillary Clinton. Trump pleaded not guilty while facing 37 criminal counts. A grand jury voted on the charges after a months-long investigation by Special Counsel Jack Smith, who was appointed by Biden Attorney General Merrick Garland.
Trump knowingly kept the secret records and stonewalled the Justice Department’s efforts to retrieve and review them.
A search of Biden’s office and home showed him to have much fewer confidential documents and he quickly turned them in while Clinton was investigated and exonerated for having confidential e-mails on her private phone.
Three completely different situations but not in the GOP world.
“Attorney General (Merrick) Garland signed off on prosecuting Trump for conduct similar to what Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton engaged in,” Grassley said. “Two standards of justice in this country will turn our constitutional republic upside down, thanks to the political infections within the Biden justice department and the FBI.”
Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley, the former governor of South Carolina, offered textbook examples of political lying and why fact checking remains important. The N.Y. Times followed Haley’s recent comments and found many were inaccurate or misleading about abortion, trans youth, foreign policy and domestic issues.
For example, Haley said, “Roe v. Wade came in and threw out 46 state laws and suddenly said abortion any time, anywhere, for any reason.” The Times found her comments misleading, at best. The fact checking showed that the 1973 Supreme Court decision ensured that states could not bar abortions before fetal viability, or when a fetus cannot survive outside the womb.
Here’s another comment Haley tossed out about transgender students.
“How are we supposed to get our girls used to the fact that biological boys are in their locker rooms? And then we wonder why a third of our teenage girls seriously contemplated suicide last year.”
Fact checkers determined that her comments lack evidence. In February, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported record levels of sadness and suicidal ideations among teen girls. And depression among teenagers, particularly girls, has been increasing for over a decade.
“The causes are debated, but experts said no research points to the presence of trans youth athletes in locker rooms, or increased awareness of L.G.B.T.Q. issues in general, as a causal or even contributing factor,” the fact checking found.
Haley had strong words about the U.S. treatment of immigrants when she said, that if she is elected, “We will stop giving the hundreds of billions of dollars of handouts to illegal immigrants.”
Haley neglected to mention that unauthorized immigrants are barred from benefiting from most federal social safety net programs like Medicaid and food stamps. She referred to benefits paid out to unauthorized immigrants, totaling around $2.2 billion,but nowhere near the “hundreds of billions” of dollars.
There are powerful forces at play whose goal is to completely obliterate the concept of objective truths and to eliminate or discredit organizations that offer unacceptable truths and to wipe out fact checking completely. Those forces start with trump, filter down to the scores of politicians whose moorings to facts are gone and include the various media, starting with the Fox monster, whose commitment to facts is a farce.
Private, political activists and Republican lawmakers are working to attack universities, think tanks and private companies that study the spread of disinformation. The GOP claims that such enterprises are “colluding with the government to suppress conservative speech online.”
By attacking journalists, fact checkers and disinformation researchers, the GOP exposes its goal to destroy any means of discerning truth from lies.
In addition to chilling individuals and educational institutions, the assault has led to Twitter restoring accounts that had been suspended while YouTube announced that it would no longer ban videos that advanced “false claims that widespread fraud, errors or glitches occurred in the 2020 and other past U.S. presidential elections.”
“The ability to openly debate political ideas, even those that are controversial or based on disproven assumptions, is core to a functioning democratic society–especially in the midst of election season,” YouTube said in a statement.
The House Judiciary Committee has focused its efforts at suppression on the Election Integrity Partnership, which Stanford and the University of Washington formed before the 2020 election to identify attempts “to suppress voting, reduce participation, confuse voters or delegitimize election results without evidence.” The other, also organized by Stanford, was called the Virality Project and focused on the spread of disinformation about Covid-19 vaccines.
Particularly Orwellian are the efforts being led by Stephen Miller, a former trump advisor and architect of the worst aspects of trump’s anti-immigration policies. Miller, a doppleganger of the Nazi henchman, Heinrich Himmler, was a chief architect of trump’s Muslim travel ban, the administration’s reduction of refugees accepted to the United States and trump’s policy of separating migrant children from their parents.
Miller is president of an organization known as America First Legal. The vice president is Gene P. Hamilton, who served within the U.S. Department of Justice and Department of Homeland Security under trump.
“With your support, we will oppose the radical left’s anti-jobs, anti-freedom, anti-faith, anti-borders, anti-police, and anti-American crusade,” said an America First Legal statement. “The radical left is using its power inside and outside of the government to destroy our country. It is opening America’s borders, shutting down American energy, trying to take over American elections, and violating the fundamental civil rights of the American People.”
Last month, America First Legal filed a class-action lawsuit against Stanford, Clemson and New York Universities and the University of Washington; the Atlantic Council, the German Marshall Fund and the National Conference on Citizenship, all nonpartisan, nongovernmental organizations in Washington; the Wikimedia Foundation in San Francisco; and Graphika, a company that researches disinformation online.
Miller said the goal of the lawsuit is “striking at the heart of the censorship-industrial complex.”
A statement from America First Legal said that “America First principles are now under attack like never before. Our security, our liberty, our sovereignty, and our most fundamental rights and values are being systematically dismantled by an unholy alliance of corrupt special interests, big tech titans, the fake news media, and liberal Washington politicians.”
“With America First Legal, we are turning the legal tables on the radical activist left. We will wage a forceful defense of our rights, our country, and our cherished American way of life.”
One of the group’s efforts is the so-called “Woke Wagon,” a database that tracks While House staff, cabinet members and political appointees and encourages people to report on “woke” officials.
“While many Americans might recognize the most senior Biden Administration officials, the reality is that the behind-the-scenes political appointees who have been hired by the Biden Administration make the daily damage possible, and the American people deserve to know who they are,” a statement said.
The major fact checking efforts are being led by PolitiFact.com, Factcheck.org and the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN)
The non-profit, PolitiFact.com is operated by the Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg, Fla. It began in 2007 as a project of the Tampa Bay Times (then the St. Petersburg Times), with reporters and editors reporting on the accuracy of statements made by elected officials, candidates, their staffs, lobbyists, interest groups and others involved in U.S. politics. Journalists evaluate and then publish their findings on the PolitiFact.com website, where each statement receives a “Truth-O-Meter” rating. The ratings range from “True” for statements the journalists deem as accurate to “Pants on Fire” for claims the journalists deem as “not accurate and makes a ridiculous claim.”
Since 2009, PolitiFact.com has declared one political statement from each year to be the “Lie of the Year.” The 2022 Lie of the Year was Disinformation in the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine being propagated by Vladimir Putin.
FactCheck.org, owned by the Annenberg Public Policy Center, was launched in 2003. Most of its content consists of rebuttals on inaccurate, misleading, or false claims made by politicians. FactCheck.org has also targeted misinformation from various partisan groups.
The International Fact Checking Network at the Poynter Institute was launched in 2015 to bring together the growing community of fact-checkers around the world and advocates of factual information in the global fight against misinformation.