The RNC’s mendacity knows no bounds

April 15, 2006

I can appreciate the fact that [tag]Republicans[/tag] are nervous about [tag]immigration[/tag]. The far-right is angry that the party hasn’t rammed a draconian bill through Congress that’s focused on harsh penalties and a giant wall. Immigrants and their allies are angry that far too many Republicans think this right-wing approach has real merit. [tag]Bush[/tag] is scared to get involved, congressional leaders are vacillating and confused, and the rank-and-file don’t know what to do. It’s hardly a great place for the party to be on an issue it put at the top of the domestic agenda.

Nervous or not, however, there’s no excuse for blatant [tag]lies[/tag]. (via C&L)

[tag]Ads[/tag] criticizing Sen. Minority Leader [tag]Harry Reid[/tag] for “playing politics” with immigration reform legislation are scheduled to air on [tag]Spanish[/tag]-language [tag]radio[/tag] stations in four Western cities with large Hispanic populations next week.

The ad campaign targeting the Nevada Democrat is funded by the Republican National Committee and will air in Las Vegas, Reno, Tucson and Phoenix, GOP officials said Thursday.

The 60-second spot says — in Spanish — that Reid “blocked our leaders from working together” and blames [tag]Democrats[/tag] for legislation that passed the Republican-controlled House that would make illegal immigrants subject to felony charges. “Reid’s Democrat allies voted to treat millions of hardworking immigrants as felons,” the ad says, “while President Bush and Republican leaders work for legislation that will protect our borders and honor our immigrants.”

I initially thought this was just some kind of bad joke. Even the RNC couldn’t stoop this low and [tag]lie[/tag] so blatantly to so many people in such a public way.

But, alas, it’s real and the RNC can stoop this low. Rep. James [tag]Sensenbrenner[/tag], the Republican chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, crafted the legislation that would make undocumented immigrants felons. Republicans embraced the bill, while Democrats voted against it. The RNC now wants Hispanic Americans to believe the exact opposite.

Up is down, black is white.

Simon Rosenberg’s perspective (via Digby) was particularly compelling.

This angry, arrogent political machine, so long on rhetoric and marketing and so short on governing competance, starts running ads in Spanish – the first ads run by the RNC since the 2004 elections – saying it is the Democrats who are ensuring all of you are felons and are kicked out of the country. UNBELIEVABLE!

Is this what we’ve come to as a nation? Is the kind of leadership we come to accept? Have we defined leadership down to the point where this kind of stuff is normal, expected? These ads are extraordinary lies. They are beyond politics as usual. They are shameful and disgraceful, like swiftboat, like our fiscal policy, like our hunger to torture, like our response to Katrina, like our ignorning of big challenges like global climate change, health care, rising energy costs, like our Administration.

Indeed.

Update: And one more thing. Liberals can’t seem to buy air time with accurate ads, but the RNC has no trouble getting this nonsense on four radio stations. Typical.

Actually, this kind of lie is worse than all those that Rosenberg listed.

With the others, you can twist the numbers one way or another (global climate change, health care, fiscal policy) or find some evidence that makes the story more awful than mendacious (torture), or blame it on bureaucracy and lack of accountability (katrina), or lack of short-term solutions (energy) or find shreds of facts which make part of the story open to debate or interpretation (swiftboat). Not that that makes any of the spin they’ve put on these issues legitimate, but it at least takes these issues from the land of being technically illegal, to some grey area of just being incredibly unethical .

These new ads, however, are a step beyond that. Frankly, I dont think they’ll be able to get away with them for long, but they will do it long enough to make the impact they want, and plant the seed in the people’s mind.

If Mehlman is behind this, I think it’s high time to start investigating this creep a little harder. His connection to NH voter fraud most certainly needs to be looked into. But this is further evidence of his character. I think anyone who has seen him speak on any of the Sunday talk shows knows how his special method of twisting the truth and just managing to avoid complete falsehoods. But this time, I think the facts say they have gone too far.

  • After watching last weekend’s and Monday’s demonstrations across the country – organized completely over the internet, at the last moment, without any “leaders” or party apparatus or funding or connections – I’d advise the GOP to think a little before shooting. They may only succeed in hitting themselves (and their leaders) in the foot.

    Come to think of it, no I wouldn’t advise them thus. The more they hurt themselves in public the better. And if the GOP thinks the Hispanics are not intelligent or are easily led by ads like these, they’ve got another shock coming.

  • I’m telling ya, they are ALL Lying.Fucking.Bastards.

    And Dumbya is THE Lying.Fucking.Dangerous.Bastard-in-Chief.

    Republicans Cheat and Lie…. Had Enough? Vote the Democratic Party!!

  • But … but …. but …. lying has worked so well for Republicans. And it’s not like anyone has objected so far. Well, except maybe a few democrats and other people who hate America, and surely they don’t count.

    More seriously, I’d guess that the vast majority of Republican voters consider themselves moral and upstanding citizens. What does it take to get these people pissed off at endemic Republican lies and corruption?

  • The RNC is firing shots in the dark. Illegal immigration, Iran’s nuclear program, anything to change the subject from lies about WMDs in Iraq to leaky white house, Bush ordered lies. Immigration is a non issue that no one really cares about except the illegals themeselves and those that employ them, mostly Republicans. It’s like abortion, they’re for it but pretend it’s the Democrats that are behind it.

    Abortion became legal during the Viet Nam war when Republicans had captured the entire government. Nixon had a Republican majority in both houses and Earl Warren, former Republican governor was chief justice. It was all about the usual for Republicans, taxes. All those unwanted, fatherless babies by unwed mothers were soaking up the welfare dollars. People are so dumb. Why do you nthink every Republican administration since has pushed it but never done anything about it, abortion that is. Those bleading heart liuberals are the ones most likely to stop wholesale abortion and cough up the money to feed the babies.

    Of course the liberal plan calls for preventing most unwanted pregnancies with education and birth control help. That’s so immoral according to the GOP who have another set of dummies supporting them, the evangelicals which their firm stand on abortion won them. Of course lying about WMDs in Iraq to justify the war is moral. Obvious conclusion, lies that cause people to believe, have faith are moral.

  • Further proof if proof was necessary that my great-uncle Jim McKelvey, Harry Truman’s “grey eminence” in Kansas City street politics, was dead-on right 50 years ago when he taught me that “the only ‘good Republicans’ are pushing up daisies.”

    They are ALL scum. There are no “good Republicans” – not anymore.

  • Hate to tell you Bill, but your generation is still “history challenged.” Nixon never had a Republican majority in both houses. Bush’s consolidation of White House and both houses of Congress under the Republicans is the first time this has happened for the Republicans since back in the 1920s.

    The Republicans also had nothing to do with the legalization of abortion, which happened as a result of a Supreme Court decision, not a party political decision (though Reagan did sign a liberalization of abortion for the health of the mother here in California in 1967.

    As to Earl Warren, the Republicans started regretting his nomination to the court back in 1954.

    Now, don’t take this as me telling you you’re stupid or something, since I’m not, but you have to have the facts right if you’re going to understand what was going on then and how it affects what’s going on now.

    This message brought to you by the Association of History Majors for Actually Understanding the Facts

  • Now wait a minute. This is clearly about Sensenbrenner’s attempt to remove the provision from his own bill that made illegal immigrants felons. Democrats blocked the removal in order to preserve the provision as a poison pill for the entire legislation.

    However, before the House approved the legislation, Sensenbrenner offered an amendment that would have reduced the infraction from a felony to a misdemeanor. At the time he said he was making the change at the request of the Bush administration to ease court procedures: A felony would require a grand jury indictment, a jury trial and give the defendant the right to a public defender, but a misdemeanor would not.

    The amendment failed, with 164 votes supporting it and 257 opposed. Of those voting against it, 191 were Democrats and 65 were Republicans.
    …

    Democrats said they voted against the Sensenbrenner amendment for strategic reasons.

    “From a strategic point of view, Democrats were not going to help Republicans pass the bad Sensenbrenner bill,” said Jennifer Crider, spokeswoman for House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco). “With the felony provision in there, it is a poison pill, as we’ve seen from all the rallies around the country.”

    So technically it is true that Democrats voted for legislation that would make illegal immigrants felons. Or at least, it’s true enough to give the Republicans enough of a fig leaf that the news media won’t call them on this.

  • morinaro,

    It seems to me that you are spinning for the Rethugs. The proposed amendment offerred by Tex (i.e., Sensenbrenner) would STILL have made these immigrants “criminals” — as in, they would be guilty of a CRIMINAL misdemeanor instead of a CRIMINAL felony. The point is, even if Tex’s amendment had gone through, the Rethugs would still make these people guilty of a crime instead of leaving the entire matter as a civil law issue as is the situation now.

    So, if the Lying.Fucking.Bastards hadn’t attempted to brand all these 11+ million as CRIMINALS, the issue never would have arisen. The Dems blocked making these folks CRIMINALS. Saying that you only wanted to make them CRIMINAL misdemeanants rather than CRIMINAL felons is like saying that you still want the baby chopped in two, but are willing to accept the smaller piece. It still makes the action repugnant to our American values…

  • Yes, I know that political speech enjoys (rightfully) the very highest 1st Amendment protection. And yes, I know, Congress – acting within its power – eliminated the Fairness Doctrine. So legal challenges to anything mentioned in CB’s post are longshots at best.

    Still (and perhaps this is the bias of a litigator whose ingrained response is to look for a way to sue) it would be interesting to ask a judge whether some level of basic truth isn’t required for the speech to be protected (for commercial speech, for example, even under the 1st Amendment there is a requirement that the speech be “non-misleading”). And it would be interesting to ask a judge, even in the absence of the Fairness Doctrine, how much an entity using the “public sprectum” can blatently slant the debate by acceptign ads only from one side of the political landscape.

  • Steve:

    What are the stations running the RNC ad? It may be time to give them the Sinclair treatment. Find out who are their advertisers. Then let local progressive groups organize boycotts.

    As Joe Kennedy told young Jack Kennedy, “Don’t get mad, get even.”

  • Analytical Liberal,

    Actually, the reason Republicans wanted to downgrade the crime from a felony to a misdemeanor is that only felons automatically get assigned a public defender and they thought immigrants would be more likely to plead to a crime if they didn’t have a lawyer. So they were trying to strongarm disadvantaged immigrants into accepting a deal without legal representation and Democrats rightly called them on it.

    But that doesn’t change the fact that Democrats were responsible for preserving the language that would charge illegal immigrants as felons. It’s a technical truth that gives the news media their excuse to ignore the larger mendacity.

  • Sensenbrenner wrote a piece of hate-crap, and presented it as a Bill, with the intention of having ib become a Law.

    Sensenbrenner, after seeing how this thing was going to blow up in the collective faces of the Republikanner bundists, tried to dilute the full force of his hate—by shifting it from “felony” to “misdemeanor” status.

    The Democratic forces sought to require a straight-shot, up-or-down, let’s get-it-all-on-the-official-record, vote on the original package. They didn’t vote FOR “Senseless”-brenners garbage; rather, they sought to force every member to stand up and openly declare his/her opinion on the original bill, exactly as it was written. Vote for it, or vote against it.

    Didn’t anyone pay attention to just how many Republikanner amendments there were to this Bill? They tried to bury it under a ton of junk, much of which had little or nothing to do with the original concept of “immigration reform.”

  • But the democrats do not hit back They allow this sh** to happen over and over again. All the DNC needs to do buy some ads and tell the truth about Sensenbrenner’s bill to rebut. The time for the dems to roll over and die is long past. They have to fight fire with fire. If they had in 2004, we would not be in the tank the way we are now.

  • G.O.P = Gringo Odioso Pendejos

    This is going to backfire on them bigtime. The target audience for these ads – urban, spanish-speaking Mexican American voters – has already been following this story closely via spanish language media. As such, they know damn well who was behind the effort to turn undocumented workers into felons. I’ve heard the name “Sensenbrenner” pop up in a lot of sound bytes from radio programs and rallies.
    I don’t speak fluent espanol myself, so I’m not exactly sure what they were saying about him, but from the tone of the speakers’ voices, I’m prety sure it wasn’t flattering. I doubt these folks will appreciate the Republican Party’s efforts to play them for suckers.

  • Sensenbrenner is an ass and if he didn’t want the immigrants to be guilty of a felony then he shouldn’t have written the bill that way. These men are dangerous and think that no one can remember what they said or did. Bush and Cheney seem to forget that with the internet one can pull up any speach and compare it to what they are saying right now. WE ARE NOT STUPID…..

  • The GOP is assuming that Spanish speaking people do not know what is going on. As well organized as the marches have been, however, I suspect that these folks are engaged and know the issues. The ads, then, may insult more people than they misinform.

  • Any truth to the rumor that the RNC plans to follow up these ads with ones claiming Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia?

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