The Lies Keep Coming

I assume everyone knows, especially those for whom Fox "news" = actual news, that Barack Obama hates white people. Worse, he and Eric Holder have teamed up to let black people get away with any and all crimes. Something about Black Panthers...

Except, of course, it's not true. Completely devoid of fact. Almost, like, gee whiz, they do it on purpose. Lying, that is:

Conservative activist and former Voting Section Attorney J. Christian Adamsidentified United States Associate Attorney General Thomas J. Perrelli as the person who ordered the case dismissed, but he wasn't confirmed until March, three months after the case was downgraded. Adams also said that Deputy Assistant Attorney General Julie Fernandes declared, “Never bring another lawsuit against a black or other national minority, apparently no matter what they do.” But according to the Raben Group, a progressive PR firm Fernades worked for prior to the Justice Department, she didn't leave her job with them until June 22, 2009, more than six months after the criminal case against the NBPP members was dropped. Even if she did say that -- and none of my sources in the Voting Section ever heard her say anything of the sort -- it wouldn't have had any bearing on the NBPP case, because she wasn't there when it was dismissed.

All of which kind of puts a rather large wrinkle in the right-wing fantasy that the decision to pursue a civil rather than criminal case against The New Black Panther Party members was a racist decree handed down from the racist leadership of the Obama administration. None of the Obama administration's political appointees who have been attacked as having mandated this decision were even working at the Department of Justice at the time the case was downgraded!

Perez testified that the decision to pursue a civil case was a matter of "career people disagreeing with career people." The facts would seem to support that account.

I really think -- and I'm dead serious -- if you hear anything, ANYTHING AT ALL, on Fox "news," any claim by any of the RWS™, or a single utterance by any of the Republicans in Congress, that the assumption should be it's false -- DELIBERATELY FALSE -- until proven otherwise. In tough economic times, a predictable bet could make you some money; so, bet on it. And for some, like Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin and Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh and Michael Savage and Ann Coulter, I'd be damn suspicious if all they said was "hello."

Yet, despite their ubiquity on the airwaves, there's really only a few of them. We'll always have deceivers in the public square. It's the people who continue to believe them, give them credence despite their unending stream of demonstrable garbage, easily disproved, who are the real threat to our democracy. Which is why it's so clear, for the umpteenth time, that the Republican party has so aligned itself with those who believe -- and are forcing their teaching in our public schools -- that the earth is six thousand years old, that there's no such thing as anthropogenic climate change, that gay is a choice, and that Adam and Eve are as real as Jim and Tammy Faye. This is the perfect substrate: on it, teabaggers grow like Fuligo septica.

The lies keep coming, because people keep believing them. For a party with no useful ideas of its own, it's also perfect strategy.