Confronting Republican Lies

The Republicans claim to be the party of responsibility, family, ethics, patriotism and prosperity. All of these claims are lies.

The Republicans have put America's children $10 trillion in the hole - $5 trillion of this under Bush, whose irresponsible and unneeded tax cuts destroyed fiscal responsibility achieved painstakingly by Clinton Administration, did not create a single job, and ended their reign with an economic collapse.

The Republicans have lied aggressively for 30 years claiming that there was no global warming and aggressively denied reality until it became undeniable, preventing clean-energy solutions from being developed before the situation became critical.

The Republicans have used lies, fraud and corruption to force on America an unelected and disastrous regime that plundered the treasury, poisoned the planet, ran roughshod over the Constitution, instituted torture, and lied to get America into bloodshed.

They put this horrible burden upon the country as they claim to be its patriots - upon the children as they claim to practice family values - this vast corruption and fraud as they claim to be the party of ethics - this extreme irresponsibility as they claim to be the party of responsibilty - and this economic disaster as they claim to be the party of prosperity and economic sense.

All of Republicans' central claims have shown to be a fraud over the last ten years.

The Republicans claim to be the party of progress. And yet their insistence on clinging to outdated technologies has denied America progress in achieving clean energy, livable cities and suburbs, and one-hour instead of three-hour commutes. Instead they have caused America to lag behind the rest of the First World in technology innovation and to suppress instead of embrace real progress in developing and implementing advanced, sustainable and effective technologies. The funding cuts to the academia, forced by Republicans, have reduced the competitiveness of American science and resulted in significant reduction in Nobel prizes won by American scientists. The one industry that has achieved meaningful progress in the last three decades has been the computer industry, which is a vastly Democratic endeavor. Based on the personal computer, which was designed by a hippie, and situated in deeply Democratic San Francisco Bay Area, Washington State, and Democratic-voting areas of Northern Virginia, the computer industry has been the true engine of progress and innovation in America over the last three decades. The Republican-dominated industries, such as oil and insurance, have not only

failed to achieve meaningful progress, but instead have used deception and government lobbying to deny progress as they have been weighing down America and the world.

The Republicans claim to be the party of realism. And yet they have aggressively denied reality of global warming until it became the catastrophe that it is now. They have clung to the party line of supply-side economics even when it repeatedly produced vast deficits while failing to create the prosperity that they were promised to create. The high-tax Clinton economy produced vast economic growth and made America by far the wealthiest country of any size in the world, only behind tiny Luxembourg and Bermuda in per-capita terms. The low-tax Bush economy produced collapsing incomes, no new jobs, an economic collapse, and left America in tenth per-capita terms the tenth economy in the world, behind such countries as Ireland, Norway and United Arab Emirates. Republican operatives made such ridiculous statements as that human activity cannot affect the environment of the planet, that Reagan deficits were caused by the Democrats, that AIDS is God's way of controlling the homosexual population, that 9-11 happened because God took away his protective umbrella over America due to feminists and liberals in America, that there was an axis of evil between Iraq, Iran and North Korea, and that scientists and journalists are evil brainwashers - and people claiming such things are not.

The Republicans claim to be the party of prosperity. But America's greatest periods of prosperity - both its peacetime and wartime - have been under the Democratic administrations of, respectively, Bill Clinton and FDR. Instead the Republican leaderships created America's two worst economic crises - the Great Depression under Hoover and the recent crisis under Bush. The Clinton economy produced 23 million new jobs and broad-based economic growth, as well as the first balanced budget in three decades. The Bush economy failed on all counts, creating $5 trillion debt, collapsing family incomes, and at the end an economic collapse. The driving engine of the economy in recent decades has been the Democratic computer industry, as well as the Internet, a government project. As for the knowledge and research that has made possible the products that are sold by businesses, it comes from the academia, which is a vastly Democratic endeavor, with only 3% of scientists being Republicans and 90% of America's Nobel Prize winners being Democrats.

The Republicans claim to be the party of responsibility. And yet they, through their irresponsible denial of the reality of global warming, have caused the present climatic disaster, of which the Democrats have warned for decades. They as well, through their irresponsible tax cuts, put America $10 trillion in debt - $5 trillion of this under Bush. They, through their getting the government out of regulation of business, have allowed the corruption in financial sector that caused the current economic collapse. They, through gutting the educational system, have dumbened Americans to the point that many lack the basic knowledge necessary for making

knowledgeable and responsible decisions as citizens and fall for one con after another.

The Republicans claim to be the party of family. And here they have forced on their children a ruined planet and a $10 trillion debt, and many are hoping for an end of the world before the children being born now have learned how to read. They have forced on the schools unfunded mandates that make it impossible for them to educate children properly. They have corrupted the court system to not only ignore crimes against children, but to persecute the mothers for reporting them, using non-existent disorders such as Parental Alienation Syndrome to claim the children reporting sexual or physical abuse to be brainwashed by the mothers. There is no truth at all to Republican claims of being pro-family; what they really are, is pro-abuse. And anyone who truly values his family and acts accordingly has no use for their manipulations.

The Republicans claim to be the party of liberty. The history of Republican activities from McCarthy to Wyerich to Gingrich has been the history of waging war against one culture after another while fastening the noose tighter and tighter around everyone else's necks. From academia and media to single mothers, Latin immigrants, homosexuals, and coast cities, every culture that is not Republican has come under Republican extermination campaigns. In the Republican areas of America, meaningful liberty is extinct. There is one lifestyle, one belief, one party line, and zero tolerance for anything different. The social activities of Republican Party are concerned with extinguishing meaningful liberty where they dominate and then directing their constituents toward destroying meaningful liberty everywhere else - both inside America and outside of it.

The Republicans claim to be the party of small government. And yet they created the most expensive, most invasive, and most oppressive government in the history of America. The Bush government, with its institution of torture, its anti-constitutitonal Patriot Act, its bloat of the government, its adding $5 trillion to federal debt after the Clinton government had painstakingly and expensively to itself created the first balanced budget in decades, has been the closest that America has ever come to totalitarianism. Not Woodrow Wilson, not FDR, not Nixon, not Carter and certainly not Clinton added this much bloat to the government or made it more invasive, unconstitutional, and destructive of people's rights.

The Republicans claim credit for America's military. And yet America's proudest military victories - in World War I and World War II - were under Democratic administrations. It was under FDR and Truman that America became the world's greatest military superpower. More recently, the Clinton administration's military actions succeeded; whereas those of the Bush administration have mired America in quagmires that are going on to this day.

The Republicans claim to be the party of honesty and integrity. And yet they have forced on America through fraud and corruption the most dishonest, most blatantly criminal, and most anti-constitutional government that America has ever had. The scale of the crimes of Bush administration - using corruption to get into power; lying to get America into a war; instituting torture; putting America $5 trillion in debt; and leaving America in the state that it left it - would make Nixon seem like a man of honor and Clinton like a saint. Not only Bush, but Republicans before Bush, lie as a matter of policy on matters of vital significance, from denying global warming to consistently denying the reality and the source of federal debt.

The Republicans claim to be the party of American patriotism, even to the point of claiming Democrats to be traitors. There is such a thing as principled patriotism, and there is such a thing as unprincipled patriotism; and the latter is sought only by those intent on violation of Constitutional principle. The principled patriotism seeks the well-being of one's country, but refuses to do evil in its name. The unprincipled patriotism that the Ann Coulter Republicans demand is entirely contradictory to America's founding principles. The only person or entity that would demand unconditional, unprincipled loyalty is either an evildoer or a tyrant. To demand that people forego intelligence, judgment, and principle and do what they know to be wrong in one's name, is something that would only be sought by those intent on tyranny or evildoing or both at once. Whether it be a gang, a pedophile ring, a corrupt small town, or a party that takes over the government through corruption and then leads America on a path to disaster, such an entity does not only not deserve the unqualified loyalty that it's seeking. Such an entity does not deserve any loyalty at all.

The Republicans claim to be the party of Abraham Lincoln. In fact, it is the Democrats that have continued and added to his legacy, while Republican Party has abandoned it. Abraham Lincoln fought for civil rights, to the point of going to war against the South that was intent on retaining its institution of slavery. Now, most of the South - as well as Christian Identity, skinhead, white supremacist, and similar racist constituencies - vote Republican. White conservative Southerners used to vote for Democrats for a long time as they identified Republican Party with Abraham Lincoln and their defeat in the Civil War. When the Democrats adopted civil rights platform and fought for and remained true to civil rights cause, this constituency shifted its loyalties to Republican Party. In recent elections, the South has been the most Republican-voting constituency in America. The Republicans of today are nothing like the party that they were under Lincoln, and most Lincoln voters would vote for Democrats if the election were held today - just as much as most of his enemies would now vote Republican.

The Republicans like to compare Democrats to Joseph Stalin and his abuses. And yet the constituency for Bush Republicans was exactly the same as the constituency for Stalinism in USSR. The military (though not all of it), the country people (though not all of them), the social conservatives - these are as reliably Republican in America as they were reliably hard-line Communist in the Soviet Union. The Democrats, whom American Right likes to equate with Stalinism, were made of the same constituencies as were the pro-democracy groups in the Soviet Union: The big cities, the highly educated, artists, intellectuals, and people with exposure to other places and ways of life. And just like the Soviet Union's hardliners aimed to portray these people as "Western imperialist" or "counter-revolutionary," so does American Right aim to equate Democrats with Stalinism, when in fact American Right has much more in common with actual Stalinists than it does with pro-Western forces in former Soviet Union, or than the American Democrats do with Communist hard-liners in former USSR.

The Republicans like to claim credit for America and all its achievements. In fact, most of America's achievements are due to the Democrats. It is Democrats that, as scientists, create knowledge and technology that gives business the products to sell. It is Democrats that, as the bulk of the management, workers, and business leaders of the computer industry, were the engine of prosperity of 1980s and 1990s. It is Democrats that, as the Clinton administration, gave America its greatest peace and prosperity, the first balanced budget in 30 years, drastic drop in violent crime and an overhaul of the government to make it efficient and user-friendly. It is Democrats that, as America's teachers, journalists, and social workers, do all the heavy lifting to educate workers and citizens and keep people productive and off of crime. Democrats gave America civil rights, womens' rights, the bulk of its technological and scientific achievement, and both its greatest peacetime prosperity (under Clinton) and its greatest wartime prosperity (under FDR). As for America's military, its proudest achievements were likewise under Democrats - winning the First World War under Woodrow Wilson and winning the Second World War under FDR and Harry Truman.

That the Republicans have gotten away with their lies is testimony mainly to the fact that they know how to shout the loudest and be the most bullying in their presentation. But it is not shouting the loudest or being a bully, but rather the truthfulness of one's claims, that make for rightful solutions. It is time that the Democrats address and confront all the lies that have come from American Right. This is one such endeavor from one registered Democrat.