They Can't Help Themselves

You can't watch any cable news television nowadays without coming across a lying Republican. They just can't help themselves. It seems to be in their DNA. Whether they're talking about death panels, or a government takeover of health care, or wanting to protect Medicare in a sudden reversal of the GOP agenda to kill Medicare before health care reform was in the forefront. But the latest egregiousness really takes the cake.

America's Mayor, Rudy Giuliani was on Good Morning America today and since the GOP blue plate special has been to attack President Obama and blame him for the failed terrorist attempt of Taintman™ on Northwest Airlines flight 253 landing in Detroit, Rudy thought he'd up the stakes.



Giuliani: "What [Obama] should be doing is following the right things that Bush did -- one of the right things he did was treat this as a war on terror. We had no domestic attacks under Bush. We've had one under Obama."

I suppose Rudy forgot about 9/11, although I don't know how that's possible since "9/11" was his middle name during his pathetic presidential campaign. But to give Rudy the benefit of the doubt, maybe he's blocked the trauma. Maybe he doesn't remember running through the streets of lower Manhattan, away from the Emergency Command Center that he decided to move to the same location that was attacked in 1993. I guess he equated terrorist strikes with lightning strikes; Rudy probably thought they never strike twice in the same place.

But even if you forgive Giuliani his little slip and assume he meant to say that we had no domestic attacks under Bush post 9/11, which is now what a spokesperson for America's Mayor is saying in an attempt to pull Rudy's foot out of his big, fat mouth, it's still not true.

Does Rudy not remember the anthrax attacks in the weeks after 9/11 that killed five people? Does Rudy not remember the DC Sniper who killed ten people in October of 2002? Does he not remember Richard Reid, the failed shoe bomber in December, 2001? I certainly do every time I have to remove my shoes at the airport. Oh wait, my mistake. Rudy does remember the shoe bomber, but says that attack happened before 9/11. Just another lie by another Republican. Just like the lie Rudy told that President Obama waited 10 days before addressing the failed attack when it was three. But it's so easy for them to lie. It's in their DNA.

Does Rudy not remember the attack at Los Angeles International Airport in March of 2006 when two people were shot to death at the El Al ticket counter by an extremist in an incident that was deemed an act of international terrorism?

Of course he does. Rudy remembers all of these attacks, but he decides to deny them. He decides to remain with the Republican meme that Democrats are weak on national security although all signs point to the contrary in terms of actual attacks. Because it's easy for them to lie. It's in their DNA.

This follows on the heels of former Bushie Press Secretary Dana Perino and resident Wicked Witch of the GOP Mary Matalin pushing the same lie; that the Bush administration kept us safe from attacks... pay no attention to those fallen towers behind the curtain. And that doesn't even begin to address the daily Dick Cheney report from Politico or whatever Sunday talk show is scheduled to kiss his ass that particular week.

You can't say that the US wasn't attacked under the Bush administration while discounting the worst terrorist attack in US history. And even if you dismiss 9/11, yes, we were attacked... multiple times. And shame on the mainstream media for letting the lies go unchallenged. George Stephanopoulos has since admitted he should have followed up on the Giuliani lie, but too little too late, George.

I know that the GOP got used to creating it's own reality during those very long Bush years, but do they actually think that revisionist history is going to work on such a traumatic event as the deaths of 3,000 people in one day on their watch? And the GOP making political hay out of this and using the failed Underpants Bomber attack as an opening to malign President Obama and his administration for partisan advantage diminishes the importance of those deaths.

But then again, they just can't help themselves. Being lying jackasses seems to be in their DNA.

The Right Wing Noise Machine Continues

So not only is the push for the situation we're in being characterized as the "Obama Recession," now we have wingnuts like Mary Matalin claiming that the Reagan 1981 recession was worse and for that matter, so was the Bush 2001 recession.

MATALIN: I don’t want to say I’m panic-free... but I do have the perspective we’ve been through worse. Reagan had a worse recession, and arguably George W. Bush, I was there in that pre-9/11. We inherited a recession. We acted quickly, and the recession, in combination with 9/11, was shallow and short, and we went on to have 52 months of consecutive growth. I’m not doing talking points here.

Nice qualifier, huh? "I'm not doing talking points here." Except for the "we inherited a recession" part and the "52 months of consecutive job growth" part.

Well, Matalin must have not seen February's 651,000 job losses which officially puts us at a deeper loss than the '81-'82 recession. And do I need to remind anyone that we weren't in a 18 month nose dive when Bush took office, nor was 9/11 to blame for the mild (in comparison) recession Bush oversaw which started in March of 2001?

(Chart from TIME Online)

That brown line, which only shows losses through December 2007, is the current recession as opposed to the Bush recession shown by the orange line. In fact, this chart also shows that every other recession was deeper and recovered faster than that of Bush's two term clusterfuck.

Oh, to be a fly on the wall in the Mary Matalin/James Carville household.

(H/T Think Progress)