True or false for Dummies

     It seems that pointing out lies of the right has become a never ending task. Of course the bulk of them are aimed at POTUS because he's, well, you know....."tall."  A recent sampling includes:

The mystery executive order decisions

     From RNC national Communications Director, Sean Spicer on July 6, 2014: "In the last three years alone, 13 times, the Supreme Court, unanimously, 9-0, including all of the president's liberal picks, have struck down the president's executive orders."

     The truth: This would be less troubling if it had even a ring of truth to it. Not only has President Obama signed fewer executive orders than G.W. Bush, Clinton, Reagan, Carter and Nixon , but 14 of the executive orders claimed by the Republicans to be the most heinous, were actually signed by JFK, LBJ, and Ford!

     It is worthy of note that these wildly false claims come from a chain e-mail of several years ago, since debunked by everyone, except, apparently the communications office of the RNC. If I were a Republican, I'd be very concerned that the person being paid to provide factual communications to party members apparently gets their data from such discredited sources.

     Regarding the SCOTUS rulings:  To begin with,  nine of the 13 cases actually originated when President George W. Bush was in office. Bush’s Justice Department handled the initial court proceedings in most of those instances. Only one of the 13 cases actually had to do directly with Obama’s overreach: National Labor Relations Board vs. Noel Canning. In that case, decided in June, the Supreme Court said unanimously that Obama went too far when he appointed members to the National Labor Relations Board when the Senate wasn’t technically in session. But even that case had nothing to do with what Spicer said last weekend on CNN. Spicer claimed that the court has unanimously rejected "the president's executive orders" 13 times in three years.  None of these  cases actually has to do with executive orders issued by Obama. More wrong than this is impossible!

     Summary: Most of the litigation cited by Spicer as SCOTUS refutations of Obama actually came in response to actions under the Bush administration. In the few cases initiated during Obama’s two terms, the court wasn't even ruling on challenges to  executive orders. Spicer took an already debunked argument and made another mistake in repeating it, so it was even more incorrect. In other words, he's a liar.

Who released whom and when?

     Another tried and true far right smear tool is blaming virtually everything that went wrong in Iraq on POTUS. In my opinion, that is correct; what's wrong is that it's the PPOTUS (previous Potus!)

      On June 14, as the forces of ISIS were engaged in the genocide between Islamic sects which we have gotten far too used to,  Jeanine Pirro, Faux News talking head said: "The head of this band of savages is a man named Abu Bakr al Baghdadi, the new Osama Bin Laden," Pirro said. "A man released by Obama in 2009, who started ISIS a year later. And when Baghdadi left Camp Bucca, where the worst of the worst were held in Iraq, he threatened his American jailers saying, ‘I’ll see you in New York. "  Wow! "Why did President free the bad man, daddy?" Well, Bobby, it turns out he didn't.

The pentagon confirms , "Ibrahim Awad Ibrahim Al Badry, also known as ‘Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’ was held as a ‘civilian internee’ by U.S. Forces-Iraq from early February 2004 until early December 2004, when he was released," the Pentagon said in a statement. "He was held at Camp Bucca. A Combined Review and Release Board recommended ‘unconditional release’ of this detainee and he was released from U.S. custody shortly thereafter. We have no record of him being held at any other time."  In short, according to the Defense Department, the man who heads ISIS was released in 2004, long before Obama took office, and was not recaptured! Apparently according to a former commander of Camp Bucca,  He  "looked familiar." The colonel who said this has refused further comment after it became obvious his recollection might be flawed.

      As in most of these fabrications, there are multiple levels of deception and chicanery.  Toward the end of Bush’s second term in 2008, American and Iraqi negotiators moved toward getting the United States out of the business of holding large numbers of Iraqis. Neither side wanted to see the network of detention centers continue.  Its demise reflected a "deliberate policy choice by the United States and Iraq to phase out that system and to rely instead on the Iraqi criminal justice system as the sole mechanism for detention going forward."

      That goal became part of the U.S.-Iraq Status of Forces Agreement, signed in November 2008. It should be noted that this Bush agreement was being followed by POTUS in pulling troops from Iraq per the agreement. Events subsequent may reflect flawed policy, but not the current administration's policy.   Under that agreement the United States agreed to "turn over custody of such wanted detainees to Iraqi authorities pursuant to a valid Iraqi arrest warrant and shall release all the remaining detainees in a safe and orderly manner."

    The United States continued to hold about 200 prisoners judged to pose the greatest risk. They were what remained from a group that numbered about 14,000 at the start of 2009.

      Other  from the ‘Deck of Cards’ detainees held at Camp Cropper (the top leaders in Saddam’s government), it’s hard to imagine how anyone in Washington would have any interest in who we held or released,  By the end of 2009, it’s hard to imagine how we could have continued to hold anyone if the Iraqis themselves didn’t decide to detain them.

Summary:  The legal contract between the United States and Iraq that guaranteed that the United States would give up custody of virtually every detainee was signed during the Bush administration. It would have required an extraordinary effort to have held on to Baghdadi ( or "Puff Baghdadi" as he now wants to be known), (sorry)and there is no evidence that he was on anyone’s radar screen, even assuming that he was in custody at all in 2009. The U.S.-Iraq agreement drove the release of thousands of detainees in 2009, but President Obama had nothing to do with that.

Jeanine Pirro is a liar

"Let's pile on the ACA"

One of my favorite names, if I had a favorite rad right name would have to be  "Reince Priebus."  Sounds like a problem for a  urologist, doesn't it? Actually it the name of the Republican  National Committee chairman. He was an unsuccessful Wisconsin state Senate candidate in 2004. He  also worked  as general counsel to the Republican National Committee. Apparently his reward for losing the state senate seat. His record of truth telling is horrid. More than half of every statement he has publically made in criticism of the current administration has been false , really false, or arrant bullshit!

Recent statements include but are not limited to:

"Thanks to ObamaCare, average E.R. wait in California is 5 hours."   A brief summary of reality shows :  The statement and statistic  was based on data from 2012 -- two years before the provisions of the ACA could have had any impact. Meanwhile, the five-hour figure is just one of three measurements of E.R. wait times -- and not even necessarily the best one. If you count from the time of a patient's arrival to being seen by a health care professional, the wait time was actually 31 minutes in California. A far cry from 5 hours!

Another claim: On the Today show in 2011, a low point of the current recession, Priebus claimed, "We’ve lost 26 million jobs, since he’s (Obama) been president. He promised under an $850 billion stimulus program that we’d be on a path to recovery. We’ll none of that has come true. … I think that pointing out a snail’s pace in the job (growth) numbers is not going to be enough to undo 26 million jobs that are lost."

Without going into why he's an idiot, the number is wildly inaccurate, off  by at more than a factor of 10! Even if true, that was 2011, and totally inaccurate today.

Reince Priebus is a liar.

I was going to quit with Reince Priebus, because I want the reader to be as unable as I in trying to get that weird name out of their heads, but I stumbled across one last liar who needs to be revealed for what he is and what he tried to do.

Playing the Veteran card

    Bill Cassidy is a Republican Congressman from Louisiana, that bastion of honest politics, who wants to be a Senator more than anything.

     On July 5, 2014, he said. "Only after news broke that our veterans are dying because of inadequate health care did Harry Reid and Senate Democrats take action." By extension , of course, this lays the blame for what are, in fact, truly egregious conditions in some VA facilities on Senate Democrats. Only in Cassidy's world is this a reality; examination of the truth reveals a different set of facts.

 The bill Cassidy refered to was  H.R. 3251, the Department of Veterans Affairs Major Medical Facility Lease Authorization Act of 2013. The bill, authored by Rep. Jeff Miller, R-Fla., authorized the funding of 27 new Veterans Affairs health facilities around the country. On Dec. 10, 2013, the House passed the bill almost unanimously with a vote of 346 to 1. (Rep. Jeff Duncan, R-S.C., was the lone "no" vote.)

The bill stalled in the Senate. In fact, it never made it out of the Veterans' Affairs committee. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., introduced S. 1950, the Comprehensive Veterans Health and Benefits and Military Retirement Pay Restoration Act of 2014, on Jan. 16. The bill was much broader than just funding 27 new VA health clinics. For example, it also included an expansion of physical and mental health benefits for some veterans and their families. Republicans objected to several components of Sanders’ bill, including its funding mechanism. Sanders would pay for his bill with money that would have gone toward the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.  Republicans  made support for the bill contingent on the inclusion of sanctions against Iran. Democrats tried to bring Sanders’ bill up for a vote on Feb. 27. Republicans made a parliamentary maneuver that imposed a 60-vote threshold to bring it to the floor. With just 56 Senators voting "yea" — including only two Republicans — the bill failed to advance.

     Understand;  this meant that a bill which would have addressed  many VA problems was stifled by the Republicans in the Senate. In a press release, the American Legion lamented the bill’s failure."There was a right way to vote and a wrong way to vote today, and 41 senators chose the wrong way," American Legion National Commander Daniel Dellinger said. "That’s inexcusable."  The votes in question were those of all save two Republican Senators. Once again Republicans blocked needed legislation and then blamed the administration for inactivity.

Bill Cassidy is a liar

                                          Truthiness

In truth, writing these is almost too easy, since the avalanche of lies is almost overwhelming and easy to show. So let's finish with some "truthiness"  (with all due acknowledgement to Steven Colbert for the term)

Poor John gets confused!

     A critical voice raised against the administration regarding the ransoming of Bowe Bergdahl comes from none other than tjhat old warhorse, Senator John  (I'm really too old for this shit") McCain. Among other soundbites he has said, "It is a mistake and it is putting the lives of American servicemen and women at risk and that to me is unacceptable," (Republican news conference June 3) On CNN on June 8, McCain affirmed he would never have released the five Taliban officials. "What we're doing here is reconstituting the Taliban government, the same guys that are mass murderers," McCain said.  

If this were consistent with McCain's track record on prisoner swaps, there would be no issue here. Unfortunately, it is inconsistent.  In an interview with CNN's Anderson Cooper 2 months earlier, McCain sang another tune:

 Here is the exchange between Cooper and McCain:

COOPER: "Would you oppose the idea of some form of negotiations or prisoner exchange? I know back in 2012 you called the idea of even negotiating with the Taliban bizarre, highly questionable."

MCCAIN: "Well, at that time the proposal was that they would release -- Taliban, some of them really hard-core, particularly five really hard-core Taliban leaders, as a confidence-building measure. Now this idea is for an exchange of prisoners for our American fighting man. "I would be inclined to support such a thing depending on a lot of the details." Whaaat?

COOPER: "So if there was some -- the possibility of some sort of exchange, that's something you would support?"

MCCAIN: "I would support. Obviously I'd have to know the details, but I would support ways of bringing him home and if exchange was one of them I think that would be something I think we should seriously consider."

Oh, I know what you're thinking, he didn't know we'd release bad guys for this deserter (which is what, it turns out he is/was). The problem is that he actually did know who four of the five Taliban were! McCain sits on the Senate Armed Services and Foreign Relations committees and was familiar with who was in play when he spoke to Cooper, calling them "five really hard-core Taliban leaders."

I won't call McCain a liar in this instance, out of deference for his age and his service;  let's just call him....... confused!? By the way, Rachel Maddow broke  this story, which is true, but then, Rachel Maddow isn't a Republican liar, is she?