Second Republican Debate Filled With Lies
September 18, 2015Akira Watts Politics
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A second Republican presidential debate happened. Once again though, the debate was actually two debates — the night began with Governor Bobby Jindal, Senator Lindsey Graham, former Governor George Pataki, and former Senator Rick Santorum battling it out for the best Fox News time slot. The main event featured the usual crew, with the addition of Carly Fiorina, who’s gained in the polls since triumphing at the kiddie table last time around. And, according to such people who care about such things, Fiorina actually managed to win the debate, by making up a lot of things about Planned Parenthood.
But making **** up was the order of the evening. It may be hyperbolic to claim that every word emitted by a Republican that evening was a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the‘, but it is not a characterization that is terribly far from being accurate. Yes, Fiorina certainly lied about the Planned Parenthood videos, to the point where it became painfully obvious that she had never, you know, actually watched the things. But she wasn’t the only one. Senator Ted Cruz, a man who went to law school, where one is presumably taught about lawyering and stuff, had this to say about the videos:
“On these videos, Planned Parenthood also essentially confesses to multiple felonies. It is a felony with ten years’ jail term to sell the body parts of unborn children for profit. That’s what these videos show Planned Parenthood doing. Absolutely we shouldn’t be sending $500 million of taxpayer money to funding an ongoing criminal enterprise, and I’ll tell you, the fact that Republican leadership in both houses has begun this discussion by preemptively surrendering to Barack Obama and saying, ‘we’ll give in because Obama threatens a veto.'”
This is impressive. Cruz lies about the legal status of money changing hands in relation to fetal tissue. He lies about what Planned Parenthood is actually doing. He lies about government funding of Planned Parenthood. And he wraps it all up with a casual threat to John Boehner and Mitch McConnell. It is a statement of stunning idiocy.
Speaking of stunning idiocy, here is the force that is Donald Trump, on vaccination:
“I am totally in favor of vaccines. But I want smaller doses over a longer period of time. Because you take a baby in — and I’ve seen it — and I’ve seen it, and I had my children taken care of over a long period of time, over a two or three-year period of time. Same exact amount, but you take this little beautiful baby, and you pump — I mean, it looks just like it’s meant for a horse, not for a child, and we’ve had so many instances, people that work for me. Just the other day, two years old, two and a half years old, a child, a beautiful child went to have the vaccine, and came back, and a week later got a tremendous fever, got very, very sick, now is autistic.”
Good old Donald fucking Trump, perpetuating the dangerous nonsense about a “link” between vaccines and autism. Ben Carson, the only man in the room who is an actual doctor (no, Rand Paul doesn’t count), tried to correct Trump’s words in response to the autism claim, but still managed to get it wrong.
“But it is true that we are probably giving way too many in too short a period of time. And a lot of pediatricians now recognize that, and, I think, are cutting down on the number and the proximity in which those are done, and I think that’s appropriate.”
Well no, actually, it isn’t appropriate, which is why immunization experts recognize that spacing out vaccines and reducing their number is, in a word, stupid.
And then Jeb Bush, the man who truly believes that his idiot brother kept America safe, was asked who should replace Alexander Hamilton on the $10 bill.
“I would go with Ronald Reagan’s partner, Margaret Thatcher. Probably illegal, but what the heck? Since it’s not going to happen. A strong leader is what we need in the White House, and she certainly was a strong leader that restored the United Kingdom into greatness.”
That Bush could claim that Margaret Thatcher “restored the United Kingdom into greatness,” without immediately bursting into flames is troubling, considering that the Thatcher administration essentially beat the UK to death, leaving its corpse to be picked over by Tony Blair and dry-humped by David Cameron.
THE MEDIA MAY SAY THAT THIS DEBATE HAD WINNERS AND LOSERS. I SUBMIT THAT EVERYONE LOST.
Then there was Governor Scott Walker, whose campaign is utterly doomed. He managed to deliver the following:
“So, the best way to help people see their wages go up is to get them the education, the skill they need, to take on careers that pay more than minimum wage. And, it’s why we talk about it, it’s all about jobs. You want to help actually get jobs, it’s why on that last question we were trying to jump in on taxes. To me, it’s not just about taxes, cutting taxes. I’ve done it as much as anyone has. I’ve cut income taxes, I’ve cut property taxes. In fact, property taxes are lower today in my state than they were before we took office. The real issue’s about jobs. Ronald Reagan, our plan is based on the Ronald Reagan tax cuts of 1986. That brought about one of the longest sustained periods of economic growth in American history. All the things we should be talking about tonight are about how do we create jobs, helping people get the skills and the education qualifications they need to succeed. That’s the way you help people create jobs. It’s part of our large plan to reform the tax code, to cut taxes, to put in place an education system that gives people the skills and education that they need.”
Ah yes. Education is clearly the magic bullet. Enough education and everyone will be qualified for high paying jobs and menial labor can be done by benevolent robots or undocumented immigrants or something. So education must be a real concern for Walker, right? Uh yeah, about that:
“A day before jumping into the race for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination, Walker on Sunday signed a new state budget that, among other things: slashes $250 million from the University of Wisconsin, one of the country’s great public institutions of higher education, and ensures that most K-12 school districts will get less funding than they did last year; removes from state law tenure protections for University of Wisconsin professors, a move that educators say will seriously harm the school’s ability to retain and attract talented faculty; expands the state’s voucher program that uses public funds to pay for tuition at private schools, including religious schools — even though there is no evidence the program has helped improve student achievement in the past — and creates a new ‘special needs’ voucher law that cuts into protections for special needs students.”
If Walker believes education is a key to employment, he certainly has a funny way of demonstrating it.
For the final word, let’s go to former Governor Mike Huckabee, whose candidacy is also doomed, for a Utopian vision of a post-President Huckabee America:
“At the end of my presidency I would like to believe that the world would be a safe place, and there wouldn’t be the threats. not only to the U.S., but to Israel and our allies, because we would have the most incredible well-trained, well-equipped, well- prepared military in the history of mankind . . . . Domestically, we would be operating under a tax system that eliminated the IRS. People wouldn’t be punished for their work, and for what they produced. And life would be really deemed precious. Abortion would be no more. It would be as much of a scourge in our past as slavery is. And we would have a peaceful country, where people respected each other and people respected law enforcement. And we would focus on cures. And we would make this country not only safe from our enemies without, but safe from the enemies within. And it would be a good place to raise our kids and our grandkids.”
The catch, of course, is that this idyllic vision would be impossible to achieve under Huckabee’s policies, which one might expect him to be aware of. Or perhaps he’s simply planning to pray about it really hard.
Not that any of this matters. For all the lies and misstatements and simply stupidity, for all the sound and fury, for all the Fiorina-Trump smackdowns, we’re still left with Donald Trump, the damned fascist, with 36 percent of the Republican vote. Ah, Republicans. Lie to them all you like, so long as you tell them exactly what they want to hear. The media may say that this debate had winners and losers. I submit that everyone lost.
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