Gene Lyons: How the GOP Gets Away With It

[flpoljunkie]

How the GOP gets away with it
It's pretty simple: They repeat the same thing over and over until everyone gets tired of correcting them

BY GENE LYONS


AP/Salon
Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky.

Has the Republican Party gone completely off into Cloud-Cuckoo-Land, or have its leading spokesmen simply decided to mimic the party's entertainment wing: trusting its loyal audience to believe even the most brazen falsehoods, and, equally important, to remember nothing?

Does unwillingness to engage reality signal an acceptance of minority status, or merely disdain for the GOP base?

After all, you can trick a cow with an empty feed bucket once or twice. By the third try, it won't even look at you.

GOP savants act as if Republican voters are more easily guided.

Consider Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky. For weeks, McConnell has been trying to prevent action on pending financial-reform legislation by claiming that it would lead to "endless taxpayer bailouts of Wall Street banks."

In reality, the proposed law would do exactly the opposite: liquidating failed investment firms' assets through a process like the one used by the FDIC to shut down insolvent savings banks. Management would be fired and shareholders given nothing until creditors had been paid. Wall Street firms would be required to pay into a fund underwriting the arrangement. Taxpayer dollars wouldn't be used.

Even Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., who helped draft the legislation, has pointedly contradicted McConnell's mischaracterization. New York Times columnist Paul Krugman has characterized it as "possibly the most dishonest argument ever made in the history of politics."

(Really, professor? More dishonest than Hitler's "stab in the back" charge that Jews and Socialists conspired to make Germany lose World War I? More dishonest than the Tonkin Gulf resolution that dragged the United States into Vietnam?)

Even so, Krugman's hyperbole is understandable. Say what you will about academia, in professorial debate so blatant a misrepresentation would be seen as a shameful confession of weakness. Somebody who can't win an argument without resorting to a simple "black is white" lie gets as little respect as he deserves.

more...

http://www.salon.com/news/bank_reform/index.html?story=/opinion/feature/2010/04/28/how_gop_gets_away_with_it