How did the Hello Dolly Llama blog begin?For a while I was posting in internet political forums, and I found myself shooting down the same Republican lies and fallacies over and over and over. So I began writing down my responses, so I could just cut and paste the answers to these bogus assertions. Eventually I got bored with the forums, because as we know they are loaded with delusional rightwing loons with meagre debating skills (“You’re a poopy head!” “No, YOU’RE a poopyhead!”) and muumuu-clad Parliament-smoking moderators who read and think on a second-grade level. And thus the blog was born.
But I kept my old stuff. So here is your handy-dandy kit for exploding the most popular GOP whoppers.
Obama had no executive experience like Palin!....Wrong! From scratch he assembled a brilliant, innovative campaign involving almost a billion dollars and 13 million people, leading and winning two underdog insurgencies against the “invincible” Hillary and then the war hero. Palin, meanwhile was making hash of a gubernatorial position which only involved doling out federal pork and oil money to 600,000 people. The funny part is that when Rudy Giuliani was screeching in September that Obama had no executive experience, he was using exactly the same pitch he had used against McCain in the primaries only a few months before – he figured no one would catch him doing it. Nice try!
Obama is a socialist!...Nope. Socialism means government ownership of the means of economic production. It does not mean any government action that Rush Limbaugh doesn’t approve of. I think we should charge these guys a dollar every time they misuse the word “socialist”. Obama is a centrist. He voted with Bush half the time and has conservative views on taxes, FISA, the Patriot Act, ramping up in Afghanistan and hunting bin Laden, free-market economics, merit pay to root out bad teachers, nuclear power, faith-based programs and evangelical outreach, cutting government waste, Israel, Iran, guns, and the death penalty. He listens to Scowcroft, Rubin, Geithner, Emanuel, Clinton and Gates.
Obama is a Muslim!...Um, yeah. The only name in presidential politics with an issue like this is actually a Republican, Piyush Jindal, who was a Hindu until he was a teenager. And the GOP team has a couple of Mormons too. Somehow the Republicans don’t care about any of that.
Obama’s not loyal to the US!...The only people in the last campaign who have any suspicions of disloyalty were Palin, who supports an Alaskan secessionist party, and McCain, who was born in another country and recorded anti-American propaganda while in Hanoi. And we can add Rick “Secession” Perry too.
Obama’s birth certificate – yeah, and the conspiracy is so enormous that it includes the Republican governor of Hawaii who certified that he is a citizen, the Republican members of Congress who certified his election victory, the Republican vice president who ratified that vote, the Republican President who handed the White House to him, the Republican-dominated Supreme Court which repeatedly rejected challenges to his eligibility for the White House, and the Republican Chief Justice who swore him in. Twice.
Obama promised change, but he is hiring people who worked for Clinton!....Nice try. Obama promised change from the crimes and follies of the Bush gang. He didn’t promise to ostracize anyone who had ever been inside the beltway. Just about every competent Democrat over the age of 40 worked with Clinton at some point – Obama wasn’t going to reject them all. And why should he? They performed superbly on a hundred fronts.
Obama was just a community organizer when Palin was an executive!....Wrong. Obama was an organizer when he was a kid, before even going to law school. At that time Palin was busy flunking out of one of her five cow colleges.
Obama, by closing Guantanamo, will put terrorists on our streets!...Nope. Bush’s Pentagon claimed that, but it has already been debunked. And we can’t keep grabbing people off the street and holding them forever without trial, particularly since there is no evidence against some of them, and for others there is evidence that they are innocent – evidence which Bush tried to conceal. If the Republicans claim they are terrorists, let them prove it.
Obama will take your guns!...Nope. He and his Attorney General both said exactly the opposite.
Obama will try to silence Rush with the Fairness Doctrine!...Nope. The Democrats said repeatedly that they want no such thing.
Obama underperformed in the election!...Garbage. Again, he showed his executive leadership in assembling a 13-million-man-army led by one of the best no-drama, no-leak campaign teams in history: he built a Democratic machine unprecedented in history, with groundbreaking innovations in fundraising and the exploitation of the internet; he was the first Democrat in memory to outspend his opponent. Obama’s popular-vote total was the highest in history – even more than Reagan in 1984. Obama won by 9 million votes and by 7 percent, better than any Republican has done in two decades; his 9-million vote margin is the largest ever for a non-incumbent. He got more electoral votes than any Republican has done in two decades. His share of the popular vote was better than Reagan did against Carter. Obama won the men’s vote, the first time a Democrat has done that in a long time. Obama won voters making over $200,000 despite promising to increase their taxes. He won every education group. He won the largest share of white support of any Democrat in a two-man race since 1976. Obama competed in red states that haven’t even seen a Democrat in years -- the black guy. He beat McCain by 10 points among young white voters, which means that in the years down the road as these kids get older, Democratic candidates will be able to win both whites and blacks.
Obama should have won by 20 points – he choked!...Hogwash. Where does this nonsense come from? Or more specifically, how often does a presidential candidate win by 10 (let alone 20), unless he's an incumbent, or his opponents split into factions, or something? Three times in the 19th century, then the two Roosevelts, Harding and Hoover (and look how swell Harding and Hoover turned out – they caused the Depression). That’s it, for more than two centuries. And that’s ten-point victories, let alone twenty.
Obama should have won by a mile, since Bush was so unpopular!....Wrong. Bush 41 was unpopular but Clinton only won by 5. Carter was unpopular but Reagan only won by 9. Nixon and Ford were incredibly unpopular but Carter only won by an inch. LBJ, unpopular -- Nixon won by less than a point. Truman, all-time unpopular -- Ike only won by 10, and he had just finished conquering the world and sending the Nazis to the gallows. You have to go all the way back to Hoover to see the incumbent team lose by even 18, not even 20, and that was because of the Depression.
Obama doesn’t have a mandate to lead!....Nonsense. The Constitution doesn't say a damn thing about a mandate; if you get 51 percent of the electoral college, you get 100 percent of the White House. Truman jumped into Korea less of a mandate than Obama will have. Bush had a mandate consisting of one Supreme Court justice, and he proceeded to reign with all of the hyper-partisan l’etat-c’est-moi arrogance of a guy with a 45-state blowout. Obama's win was much larger than Bush's, but he's going to go into the gig with significantly more humility.
The media had a liberal bias!....Nope. They have a bias against lies, not against Republicans (although it is understandably easy to confuse the two). In fact, the media has been run by Republicans and corporations for a century. They cranked up popular opinion to attack Spain in 1898, they fought FDR bitterly, they aided and abetted McCarthy, the endorsed Nixon 3 to 1 even while Agnew was whining about the liberal media, they ran away from Watergate for almost a year, they gave Reagan a free pass in a way they never did for Clinton, and they were Bush’s cheerleaders in the War On Terror. And that’s the real media, before you add all the new crazy stuff like Fox, the Washington Times, Rush, Drudge etc.
The media gave Obama a free pass!....Nope. It was McCain who got a free pass regarding his crooked deals with Paxson and Ruskin, the Boeing mess, the Keating mess, the earmarks, the lies, the flipflops. And there is a whole lot that Palin wasn’t asked about, regarding her shenanigans in Alaska.
And let’s look at what Obama had to overcome, to do all this.
Obama overcame the brutal beating from the allegedly invincible machine, which seemingly had the race so locked up that everyone thought he was crazy to try; he devised a strategy that destroyed in a matter of weeks.
He overcame his inexperience and outsmarted McCain, a war hero representing the incumbent party fighting a war from the White House, a guy who had months to set up his general election campaign while Obama was battling Hillary. He blew away the “experience” argument by making McCain look foolish on foreign policy, setting the example on policy which even Bush followed, and on domestic policy, staying cool while McCain hopped around like a donkey with a bee up its butt during the early days of the fiscal crisis. He overcame McCain without attacking him on all his crooked deals, his flipflops, his many medical and psychological problems, the way McCain would have, if their positions had been reversed…He didn’t just beat McCain, he made him irrelevant. He overcame politics as usual by ignoring all the attacks and McCain’s “double dog dares” on everything from town meetings to denouncing pastors; Obama simply addressed the needs of the people and they responded.
He overcame the deep-pocketed GOP fundraisers, the GOP culture warriors and white power people.
He made fools out of the neocons who warned of a “surrender” in when he said we must talk to our enemies, even Bush agreed. He overcame the fiscal conservatives who lied about his tax plan and claimed that deficit spending and deregulation were the secret to prosperity.
He overcame the dirtiest Karl Rove kitchen-sink campaign in the history of politics, dishonest smear ads, hundreds of speeches dishonestly smearing him, robo-call smears, daily internet smears, illegal vote suppression, fake emails, fake phone calls, fake flyers, Wright and Rezko and Ayers and taxation and “socialism”, all lying to voters to get them to stay home.
He overcame the wave of Palin-mania, staying cool when the hysteria temporarily looked like it would sweep him away.
He overcame two centuries of racism, hate, and fear; he made his bones in ultra-white and actually went south to capture new territory for his party. A guy with Hussein as his middle name won during a global war on…guys with names like Hussein.
And for the next two elections:
2008 was a fluke, because of Obama, because of Palin, because Bush and McCain strayed from the party line!...Nope. Neither Obama, nor Palin, nor McCain was running for national office in 2006, when the Democrats crushed the GOP and took both houses of Congress. In fact, the Republicans have failed to get more than 285 electoral votes in 20 years – the last five elections consisted of two illegal Bush squeakers and three Democratic blowouts – with a fourth Dem win to come in 2012, since Obama will be running as a successful incumbent rather than as the scary Muslim Marxist guy.
America is still a center-right country which wants the GOP platform!...Um, no. America’s “center” went for Obama by a staggering 20 points: they like the Democrats on almost all issues and values. Obama, like Clinton, is centrist; the GOP is extremist. By moving to the center while the GOP is abandoning the center, Obama will nail down the moderates and centrists who pick all the presidents, and he will win comfortably next time.
The GOP came back from Watergate!....Only because you had Reagan, the greatest con artist in history. He’s dead now.
The GOP came back in 1994!...Only because Clinton was clumsy and didn’t have the stomach for a fight. Neither of which applies to Obama.
We’ll be back in 2010 and 2012!...Will you, now? In many house districts the Republicans couldn’t even field a competitive candidate, and they are already having trouble recruiting candidates for 2010 and 2012. Their evangelical base is falling apart. They lost Hispanics with the immigration issue. And in 2016 they won’t even have the advantage of running against a scary black socialist – it will be some good ol’ white boy like Mark Warner or Schweitzer. So goodbye, South. The GOP is being driven into a political enclave consisting of old white people in the rural south and west. In other words, the GOP, which planned a few short years ago to establish a permanent, dominant majority (or perhaps a thousand-year Reich), has shrunk to….the cast of Hee Haw. The GOP, population 42. Saaaaaa-lute!
We’ll campaign against the Democratic Congress, which has a low rating!....Nope. Because it ain’t a “Democratic” Congress. It’s half Republican, and it’s the GOP half that is causing all the trouble. The Republicans set an all-time record for actual and threatened vetoes and filibusters, all with the aim of making the Democrats look bad. They felt it was more important to attack America’s Democrats, than to attack America’s problems. Guys like McConnell and LaHood openly admitted what they were doing.
Here’s a moldy oldy:
Bill Clinton ignored the terrorism problem!....Nope. He repeatedly ordered his generals to come up with an op plan to attack al-Qa’ida. After a number of refusals they finally gave in. In the resultant air strike, Clinton came closer to nailing bin Laden than Bush ever did.
Democrats are the party of racism!...Nope. That might have been true half a century ago, but when LBJ committed the Democratic party to civil rights, the southern racists quit the Democratic party and joined the GOP. They are now the GOP base, in fact.
Global warming is a hoax!...Nope. If it is a hoax, then known leftists like Bush, Schwarzenegger, Exxon and Fox are part of the evil plot, because they all admitted Gore had been right all along. And if the warming isn’t bad enough, air pollution kills two million people prematurely each year, around the world.
We should leave health care alone because we have the best system in the world!...Not even close. Our system is inefficient, costs twice as much per capita, and doesn’t cover 40-50 million people. The market had its chance and failed; the only reason we haven’t fixed it yet is the illegal insurance oligopoly, their lobbyists, and their paid hoors on Capitol Hill. But this time they won’t have businesses on their side.
The Second Amendment asserts that anyone can have a gun!...Sorry. You need to read all the Constitution, including Article II, which states that a militia only includes people taking orders from the president. The Supreme Court recently ruled that that applies to anyone, rather than just the National Guard, but they have the power to do that under Amendment Nine, not Amendment Two. And since the recent ruling, other courts have still allowed restrictions on who can have a gun, and where.
It was the Republicans who created the boom in the 1990s!...Wrong. Clinton did it with a stimulus package which every Republican opposed.
Democrats caused the financial crash!...Nope. The crash was caused by 30 years of Republican deregulation, culminating in Bush’s effort to destroy the SEC, fire whistleblowers, kowtow to lobbyists. Even leading Republicans admitted it.
FDR botched the Depression!....Nope. Fox News and two college professors have been peddling this rubbish. But even Republicans like Greenspan and Milton Friedman admit FDR saved the country by saving the banks. When he cranked up the New Deal policies, unemployment dropped like a rock; conservatives pressured him to cool it, and unemployment went up again; he cranked up the policies again, and unemployment dropped again. More at...
http://hellodollyllama.blogspot.com/2009/04/gop-lies-about-fdr-and-government.html
Here are a few of my favourites about Bush:
There were no attacks on soil, on Bush’s watch!....Nice try! First of all, 911 counts, because he ignored warnings. Second, terror attacks killed thousands of soldiers and Iraqi civilians in Iraq, and many others in terror attacks around the world. The notion that only civilians inside the 50 states count, is absurd. It’s cherry picking.
Anyone who questions Bush’s actions is a traitor who doesn’t support the troops!...Wrong! Holding the president accountable isn’t just a right, it’s a responsibility. Especially an obvious crook like the last one. And any time Obama comes within a hundred yards of a military issue, the caterwauling starts again – Obama is disrespecting the troops!! More nonsense.
Bush didn’t do anything to warrant impeachment!...Wrong! He didn’t do anything as dreadful as, say, oral sex, but, even setting aside the innumerable violations of federal law such as the illegal exposure of Valerie Plame, Bush did violate the first three Articles of the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights. Read on:
Article I: violating Congress’s prerogatives by lying to them to get us into a war, blackmailing them into funding unnecessary troop deployments, defying subpoenas, using illegal signing statements and administrative actions.
Article II: perverting the executive branch into a partisan political weapon, illegally prosecuting Democratic politicians and firing Democratic attorneys, directing government offices to spread dishonest political propaganda, failing to uphold Article II responsibilities by keeping or financial system safe or enforcing product safety laws, sending thugs to disrupt officials from counting votes while screaming “don’t count the votes!”, and trying to convert the Vice Presidency into a fourth branch of government with no oversight.
Article III: violating the prerogatives of the courts by defying orders to preserve emails and concealing evidence.
Bill of Rights: the Big Ten don’t just apply to citizens. So that brings us to illegal spying and secret prisons and torture, and keeping innocent people behind bars indefinitely.
So much for Republican values.
Gays will disrupt the military!...Wrong! They’re already in – you just don’t know it. We heard this disruption argument when Truman integrated the army half a century ago, and it proved itself to be bogus, particularly after Colin Powell because CJCS. Right now the military has so much trouble recruiting and retaining, that they are putting guns in the hands of drug addicts, criminals and the mentally challenged – you really think that is less dangerous than recruiting gays who are actually qualified to serve?
Gays, by trying to join together in the institution of marriage like everyone else, are actually trying to destroy the institution of marriage!...Yeah, this one is so stupid that it pretty much refutes itself.
Government must stay out of the civil union issue!...Impossible. There are too many laws and regulations on the books, that depend on marital status. Benefits are the big issue, but there are also medical decisions, child care and custody, adoption, tax liability, bankruptcy, prenups and alimony, property, wills, condo laws, the works. Government is already involved whether you like it or not.
See more at...
http://hellodollyllama.blogspot.com/2009/04/gop-lie-and-run-strategy-continues.html
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