Dick “Go F— Yourself” Cheney lies with such reckless audacity, it’s hard to catch them all, but this one’s a gem.
For months, the Bush campaign has repeated — ad nauseum — the ridiculous myth that John Kerry is the Senate’s #1 liberal, followed closely by John Edwards, who’s #4. It’s always been a twisted, misleading statistic with little resemblance to reality. The trick was to identify a single source’s measurement for a single year (2003) when Kerry and Edwards were on the campaign trail and not voting very often.
The truth, as Jon Stewart tried to explain to Rep. Henry Bonilla (R-Texas) last week, is that Edwards is to the right of the median Dem score in the Senate and Kerry, GOP rhetoric notwithstanding, is clearly to the right of liberal stalwarts such as Ted Kennedy.
But Cheney can’t let a little thing like facts ruin a good soundbite, so he’s decided to just make up charges he wishes were true and present them as facts.
Bob Somerby and Paul Waldman noticed that Cheney, while speaking to hand-picked supporters in Minnesota last week, told an unsuspecting audience:
“John Kerry is, by National Journal ratings, the most liberal member of the United States Senate. Ted Kennedy is the more conservative of the two senators from Massachusetts. It’s true. All you got to do is go look at the ratings systems. And that captures a lot, I think, in terms of somebody’s philosophy. And it’s not based on one vote, or one year, it’s based on 20 years of service in the United States Senate.”
It’s an obvious, blatant, and demonstrable lie. There’s just no other way to put it. Cheney must know better, but just not care.
Number of reporters in the mainstream press to report Cheney’s mendacity: Zero. It’s not as if he claimed to invent the Internet or something. Now that’s the kind of news that deserves tons of attention.