The Bush Admin's Gone, But They're Still Lying Like Hell

Posted by Paul Rosenberg, Open Left at 9:56 AM on February 14, 2009.

Sort of adds an interesting little bit of sub-text to Obama's calling on Sam Stein, now doesn't it?

It also reminded me of the initial Bush Administration canard alleging that Clinton staffers had trashed the White House on their way out, most memorably, by removing the "W" key from keyboards. This was a similarly-timed GOP lie seeking to define the transition from one party's time in power to the others. Daniel highlighted the debunking of this in his mid-January diary "Zombie Lies: Clintonites Removed the 'W' Keys", and I chimed in with a comment discussing some of the surrounding detail of the phony "scandal" and the even more scandalous way the GOP promoted it, summarizing at one point:

So, the damage done--typical of your average situation, with no evidence of anything more than random pranks: $15,000.  The GOP investigation--a deliberate, partisan-fueled waste of taxpayer money in an attempt to score political points against an Administration no longer in office--cost an order of magnitude more: $100,000.

With a $100,000 price tag picked up by American people, that was a much more expensive lie.  But its purpose and logic were quite similar--a false story about a trivial topic used to try to demean and discredit a Democratic Administration, without getting anywhere near matters of substance.  Of course, the "office trashing" lie also distracted attention from election stealing that got Bush into office in the first place.

The GOP involves itself in countless lies of all sorts and sizes.  This is a natural outgrowth of (1) waging constant hegemonic struggle and (2) having nothing real to offer or say.  The natural result is an avalanche of lies from the trivial to the profound, in a never-ending effort to attain "full spectrum dominance".  And yet, in a way, it's the obsessions with truly trivial falsehoods that I believe are the most telling, the ones that are, at bottom, all sizzle and no steak, on top of being outright lies.  "Who would lie about that?" one would naturally think.  The answer: Republicans would.

So I'd like to invite each of you to nominate your favorite examples of what I've dubbed "GOP Mis-Sizzles".  There the sorts of things we don't tend to think about.  Usually, we just shrug them off, and move on.

But the GOP base obsesses over them, never lets them go.  So, in our own Open Left attempt to be more bipartisan, let's see how many of them we can think of.

Tagged as: barack obama, george w. bush, andrew card, gop lies

Paul Rosenberg is a regular blogger for Open Left