Lies, Confusion, and Then More Lies

When I first posted the note from over at Josh Marshall’s Talking Points Memo (TPM) about the rather ridiculous, nearly hysterical outburst by rabid rightie talk show host, Michael Medved, some of you might have said, “Yeah? So what? Where’s the novelty in a right-wing radio host getting it wrong and calling someone a liar?”

True enough, this isn’t new. But here’s why it’s becoming clearer and clear, at least to me, why this situation does matter.

The situation with Medved, as you may recall, had to do with a guest who said that Bush and others in Congress were pushing a plan to privatize Social Security accounts. Medved went ballistic, saying that was NOT true. Then he challenged the guest to name at least ONE person who had ever said, “let’s privatize” so the guest named Chris Cholola, who started talking about privatization back in 2000, long before Bush grabbed the third rail and declared it his own. Medved, ever more hysterical, began to insist that this JUST WASN’T TRUE and called the guest a liar, saying he had made up the name Chocola (aka The Count, but yes, a real House Reprehensible). To learn more, read TPM here, Media Matters here, and Rock the Vote there.

Sure enough, the Bushies keep changing the terminology of their gutting of Social Security. One week it’s “private accounts”, another it’s “privatization”, the next it’s “ownership accounts”. Strangely, however, each time they coin a new phrase, they pretend that the other phrases THEY used never existed and accuse the press and others of lying about them to make them sound bad. This has happened time and time again for the last few months.

But the only lies being told here are that

a) SS is in some big new crisis (it’s not)

b) SS is in need of reform (instead, it needs an order of protection (aka restraining order) to keep the GOP and Bushies from looting its trust fund as they’ve done)

c) FDR and the Social Security founders did not anticipate a time when people would live so long (wrong again – go back and look and you’ll see how very close the original SS formula comes to today’s life expectancy)

d) Bush is trying to “help SS” when all he wants is to kill it and the rest of the New Deal

e) That everyone but the Bushies are lying even when people are merely using the Bushies’ own terms that keep changing

The Bushies depend on the confusion to fool people into believing there is a crisis and Bush’s plan “fixes” the crisis. Like I’ve said before, you can call the shade of lipstick on a pig anything you like, but it’s still porcine cosmetic application.

So we – all of us – need to challenge these assertions, especially with the Koolaid Quotient like Medved get hysterical when confronted with their own lies.