Electricity In The Air

When I saw Bob Lutz, former GM chairman, on Bill Maher's show recently, I was surprised to see what a right-wing nutjob he is. Global warming denier, reflexive Obama hater, the usual. Obviously a smart guy, but brainless.

So this whole RWS™ thing about the Chevy Volt, Lutz' baby, is pretty weird. Or would be, if it weren't so typical: insane ranting, based completely on falsehood. There's a good opinion piece on it in the NYT:

For months, the conservative propaganda machine — including Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, and Neil Cavuto, the Fox News business editor — had been mocking the Volt, and linking it to President Obama, who has long touted the promise of electric cars...

What is the connection between President Obama and the Volt? There is none. The car was the brainchild of Bob Lutz, a legendary auto executive who is about as liberal as the Koch brothers. The tax credit — which is part of the reason conservatives hate the car — became law during the Bush administration.

“It’s nuts,” said Lutz, when I spoke to him earlier in the week. “This is a significant achievement in the auto industry. There are so many legitimate things to criticize Obama about. It is inexplicable that the right would feel the need to tell lies about the Volt to attack the president.”... Although he remains deeply conservative, Lutz told me that he has become disenchanted with the right’s willingness to spread lies to aid the cause.

So there's one guy, anyway, who finds his side's use of lies disturbing. Not quite a trend, but it does show it's possible. Now, if regular people (like PT and Seaspray?) could ever acknowledge it, I'd start to believe ("start" in the sense that a journey of a thousand miles...) that Republicans are capable of demanding better of their leaders. That the coming campaign would be a battle of actual ideas.

But that would mean that several impossibilities would have come to pass; that Rs would try to make a case that, against all evidence (including pretty damn recent stuff), tax cuts for the wealthy and deregulation of banks and corporations will finally make our economy tick; that they'd plainly state how they'd deal with the millions of Americans who'll be uninsured if they eliminate the ACA, showing their work behind their claim that using emergency rooms is a workable solution. And that they'd come up with a real plan for controlling health care costs; or that they'd show how "market forces" will suddenly apply to health care, when they never have.

It'd mean that they'd have specified what the government will look like if the Ryan budget becomes law; namely, that they'd address -- specifically, honestly, with real numbers -- the math that shows the devastated government left after their planned tax cuts, military spending increases, and why people should want it. And they'd tell us exactly which tax loopholes they plan to close and how far that will go to reduce deficits. Using, again, those pesky numbers.

And Mitt would have stopped lying about President Obama and would have begun to address his objections to his actual record, while proposing workable and actual alternatives. Then, voters would be in a position to choose between two very different, non-distorted, clearly-stated, and thoughtfully argued views of our future.

Wouldn't that be something? And, for Democrats, it oughta be like shooting fish in a duck.