Forgive my obvious naïveté, but there’s something amazing to me about the Bush campaign’s capacity to state a falsehood, get caught, and then repeat it again anyway.
Usually, even among Republicans, once you’re caught saying something that isn’t true, you drop it from your rhetorical repertoire. In 1992, for example, the first President Bush accused Clinton of having raised taxes 128 times as governor of Arkansas. It was an absurd and baseless charge. Embarrassed after getting caught making a false claim, Bush pere had the good sense to drop the issue and focus his attacks elsewhere.
That, of course, is how the game is supposed to work. But as has been proven repeatedly, this White House plays by its own rules.
In March, Bush started accusing Kerry of having voted to raise taxes 350 times in his political career. Dick “Go F— Yourself” Cheney immediately started repeating the claim ad nauseum.
A few enterprising observers did their homework and discovered — surprise, surprise — the accusation is completely bogus. Michael Kinsley, for example, tore the Bush-Cheney argument to shreds.
The documentation on the GOP Web site about Kerry’s supposed 350 votes to increase taxes actually lists only 67 votes “for higher taxes.” Most of these are votes against a tax cut, not in favor of a tax increase. The 67 include nine votes listed twice, three listed three times, and two listed four times. The logic seems to be that if a bill contains more than one item (as almost all bills do), it counts as separate votes for or against each item. The Bush list also includes several series of sequentially numbered votes, which are procedural twists on the same bill. And there are votes on the identical issue in different years. The only actual tax increase on Bush’s list (counted twice, but hey … ) is Kerry’s support for Clinton’s 1993 deficit-reduction plan. That’s the one that raised rates in the top bracket and led to a decade of such fabulous prosperity that even its most affluent victims ended up better off.
Kinsley wasn’t alone. The Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania researched the claim and came to the same conclusion.
So, after having been caught making a false claim, the Bush campaign stopped repeating it? Of course not.
In fact, four months after the claim had been completely discredited, the attack is still a standard GOP attack. In fact, Cheney made the false charge at least twice this week.
As much as I resent this White House’s political agenda, ideology, and policy proposals, the one thing I wish Bush and Cheney had more than anything else is a sense of shame. People who lie, get caught, but repeat the lie anyway clearly are incapable of feeling any embarrassment whatsoever.
Those who are immune to shame, and reject the normal rules that apply to others, fear no consequences. It is, at its root, a scary worldview.
It’s also something that keeps happening. For nearly a year, Bush told audiences that he announced, during the 2000 campaign, that he’d only allow the budget to run deficits if there was a recession, a national emergency, or a war. He would joke that he didn’t know we’d hit a “trifecta” by having all three.
The New Republic discovered that Bush never said any such thing and exposed the “trifecta” story as a lie. Did the president drop it? Just the opposite — even after it had been exposed as a lie, Bush used the story 11 additional times in public speeches before his advisers finally got him to stop using the made up anecdote.
I have a hunch BC04 will continue to use the 350 tax increases myth without hesitation for the rest of the campaign. Kerry doesn’t want to denounce it too strongly because that only generates attention for the myth and alerts people to the claim they otherwise may not hear. And unless political reporters start hammering Cheney on this, he’ll have no incentive to start telling the truth.