LIES, LIES, AND MORE LIES: A LOOK AT THE 2016 REPUBLICAN PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATES

There was a time, not too many decades ago, when the Republican party was a respectable institution in American life, when conservatism meant to conserve, and when advocating for a smaller government that did not intrude on people’s private lives was a noble cause.  Unfortunately, due to the rise of the Christian Right wing in recent decades, the Republican party has been transformed into a political entity that is nothing more than a mouthpiece for the most extreme Christian fundamentalist organizations.  These groups seek nothing less than complete control over the American political system; they have already taken over the Republican party.  In order to sell their brand of religious conservatism, these New Age Republicans will deny facts, distort reality and when all else fails, lie unashamedly if they think it will advance their cause.  And  they do all this in the name of Christianity and moral righteousness.  To see how their dishonesty has affected the Republican party, all we need to do is to examine the record and the statements of the 2016 presidential hopefuls.

Donald Trump has been the frontrunner for most of the campaign.  According to Fortune:  “More than almost any other 2016 candidate, he is prone to telling flat-out lies, making up facts, and distorting the truth to a prodigious extent.”

If nothing else, Trump has proven himself to be a rather comical figure, unintentionally, of course.  For example, he claimed that he would deport all undocumented immigrants within the first two years of his presidency.  Trying to visualize the actual deportation of 16,500  illegals each day is, if nothing else, amusing.  One can only wonder how this could possibly be accomplished without creating a virtual fascist state.  While this statement does not constitute a lie, it does demonstrate Trump’s willingness to say the most outrageous things if he thinks it will earn him brownie points for the nomination.  And some of his ideas are so far out as to be downright laughable.  One of his policies, closely related to the foregoing, would be to make Mexico pay $100,000 for every illegal immigrant coming into this country.  The image of Mexico’s leaders laughing themselves silly over this nonsense is precious.

Some examples of Trump’s lies:

** One of the most famous lies perpetrated by Trump is that, during 9/11: “I watched in Jersey City, New Jersey, where thousands and thousands of people were cheering as that building was coming down.”  Trump claims to have seen archival footage of this cheering.  This claim has been refuted many times, by such reporters as Glenn Kessler from The Post and Lauren Carroll from PolitiFact.  There is no contemporaneous account of “thousands and thousands” of (presumably) Muslims cheering while this was going on.  And, not surprisingly, Trump refuses to disclose where he saw this footage that nobody else seems aware of.

** “Our president wants to take in 250,000 from Syria.”  The actual number of refugees Obama was planning on taking in was 25,000.  No one disputes the actual number except Trump.

** On the same topic, Trump said: “Refugees are pouring into our great country from Syria.  We don’t even know who they are.  They could be ISIS.  They could be anybody.”  This is fear mongering at its most disgusting.  It is also factually ridiculous.  Since the civil war started in Syria in 2011, the United States has taken in only four thousand refugees.  Five hundred refugees a year hardly constitutes their “pouring in.”  Even worse is his statement that: “we don’t even know who they are.”  Of course we do; the vetting process requires that any refugee entering this country must wait up to eighteen months and must pass what must seem to them like an endless amount of background and health checks.

** Speaking of Vladimir Putin, Trump said: “I got to know him very well because we were both on 60 Minutes, we were stablemates and we did very well that night.”  In fact, Trump never met the man: the two did make joint appearances on a single episode, but they were taped separately, Trump in his New York office, and Putin in Moscow.  Apparently, Trump was trying to show that he has some kind of foreign policy experience, and the only way to do so was to lie—standard operating procedure for the 2016 presidential candidates.

** Speaking of the Trans-Pacific Trade Partnership, Trump noted in one of the Republican candidates debates that the trade deal: “was designed for China to come in, as they always do, through the back door and totally take advantage of everyone.”  Here, he was corrected by Rand Paul to told him that China is not a party to TPP.

It is amusing that Trump has the audacity to claim Hilary Clinton has told lies about him and that he wants her to apologize.  If Trump were to apologize for each and every lie he as told, there would be no time for discussing any other issues.  Politicus USA sums it all up by noting: “Donald Trump is a con man who is trying to fast talk his way to the White House.”

There are so many amusing/alarming/dangerous things this man has said and done that detailing them all would require a huge book—or series of books.  He flip-flops on virtually everything: First he was a Democrat, then a Republican.  He’s for a woman’s right to choose abortion, then he’s against it.  Contradictory stances on taxes, health care, trade and other issues are also well documented.  And yet he has supporters who like him because he “tells the truth” and “speaks his mind.”  No, he’s just a self-indulgent crackpot who doesn’t possess anything even remotely resembling a consistent and coherent political philosophy.

Huckabee has based his entire campaign on one simple issue, namely what he sees as an attack on Christianity and Christian “values” in this country.  He promises to return America to its supposed Christian roots.  The premise is absurd: Churches of all kinds dot the countryside and the Christian Right virtually owns the Republican party.  And none of the founding fathers were fundamentalist Christians; all of our founding documents reflect the thinking of the Enlightenment, not of narrow theological beliefs.  The key point here is that when Huckabee and others refer to “Christians” being under attack, they don’t mean all Christians: what they mean is the most extreme far-right Christians like themselves.  None of the Republican candidates in this election are religious moderates, but Huckabee is the most upfront about his intention of turning the United States into a fundamentalist Christian nation, the Constitution be damned.  Like virtually all Christian fundamentalists, Huckabee is such an inveterate liar that it is hard to know where to begin.

Huckabee has twice made the statement that President Obama grew up in Kenya.  When the inevitable uproar occurred, Huckabee attempted to play the victim card, claiming that he “misspoke.”  Later, interviewed on The O’Reilly Factor, he claimed that he had actually said he had “misquoted” his own book and that the president had grown up in Indonesia. (?) And of course, the uproar was due to the bias of the “liberal media.”  Is Huckabee really saying that Fox News and theO’Reilly Factor are part of this “liberal” cabal bent on destroying him?  At any rate, this whole issue was another lie; Huckabee’s book nowhere mentions anything about Obama’s growing up in Indonesia.  Obviously, Huckabee is even willing to lie about himself.

Huckabee is so dishonest that, while governor, the Arkansas Ethics Commission investigated his antics not once, butsixteen times, and cited him five times for violations of ethical rules.  He was sued by a former administrator at the Governor’s Mansion who claimed Huckabee had used state funds for personal use.  Huckabee settled out of court.

Huckabee sometimes lies to cover up some of the really atrocious things he has done.  For example, he tried to get his son David off the hook for torturing and killing a dog by saying: “There was a dog that apparently had mange and was, I guess, emaciated.”  So that justified the dog being tortured?  Even worse was the fact that while governor he led the charge in convincing the Arkansas Parole Board to free convicted rapist Wayne Dumond.  Dumond then showed his gratitude by raping and killing two women in Missouri.  To this day Huckabee denies that he bears any responsibility for this.  In fact, when one of Dumond’s victims stood directly in front of him and told him Dumont had raped her, Huckabee was unmoved and said that Dumont had gotten “a raw deal.”  Huckabee’s real reason for his unthinkably evil actions: Dumont had become a born-again Christian in jail, and this fact alone convinced Huckabee to push for his release.  While governor, Huckabee paroled over 669 prisoners, 12 of them convicted murderers, which is ten times the amount Bill Clinton paroled in eight years.  His criteria for parole was that the prisoners must either be born again Christians, play in a band (!) or to have worked in his office.  Given all this, how can Republicans still claim that Democrats are soft on crime?  To this day Huckabee refuses to release the government’s office records on the Dumont case.  If he had no role, and if he were honest, he would have released the documents.    As further proof of his moral depravity Huckabee, after he left office, spent every cent of his office’s emergency budget, which is reserved for natural disasters and emergencies, destroying all the hard drives of his office’s computers.  Shades of Watergate.

Clearly, Mike Huckabee is a lying, corrupt hypocrite unfit to hold any office, much less the highest in the land.

Although he left the race fairly early, the mere fact that such an incompetent and dangerous religious fundamentalist as Bobby Jindal could even be considered presidential material staggers the imagination.  But the same could be said for most of the other candidates.  Fortunately for the country, Jindal dropped out before he could destroy the country in the same way he destroyed Louisiana, where he served as governor.

Like the others, Jindal has no shame about lying.  He even lied to his parents back in October, 2015, assuring them that he was certain to win the presidency: “Now, I don’t officially become president until I win the general election, but I’m just one step away.”  Not long after this, he dropped out of the race.  His parents’ reaction is unrecorded.

Other lies from Jindal:

** Speaking of his tenure as Louisiana governor, Jindal told Fox News: “We have balanced our budget eight years in a row without raising taxes.  Largest tax cut in our state’s history.  Income tax cut.  Secondly, we have cut our state budget 26 percent, $9 billion.”  Sounds good, but unfortunately, it’s a typical Jindal lie.  He did actually cut income taxes on middle-income and higher-income individuals during his first year as governor, but failed to mention is that those cuts, according to Salon: “Blew an annual $800 million hole in the state’s budget.  During almost every other year of Jindal’s two terms, the state has careened from one fiscal crisis to another.”  During Louisiana’s 2015 legislative session, Jindal, in order to close a $1.6 billion revenue shortfall, agreed to increase a variety of taxes by about $720 million.  Yet he dishonestly continues to claim that he never raised taxes.

** “It’s no secret that we had a number of Republicans damage our brand this year with offensive, bizarre comments—enough of that.  It’s not going to be the last time anyone says something stupid within our party, but it can’t be tolerated within our party.”  As Bustle noted: “Oh, the irony.”

** “The left wants: The government to explode; to pay everyone; to hire everyone; they believe that money grows on trees; the earth is flat; the industrial age, factory-style government is a cool new thing; debts don’t have to be repaid; people of faith are ignorant and uneducated; unborn babies don’t matter; pornography is fine; traditional marriage is discriminatory…”  The documentation for any of these claims?  Non-existent.  Bustle summed up this June 2013 tirade by noting: “It’s the kind of rant you’d expect some super-stoned 21 year old to scribble in a spiral notebook in his parents’ basement at 3 a.m.”

Bobby Jindal is as extreme a religious fundamentalist as any other candidate.  Despite his constant harping on the fact that he was a Rhodes scholar, he signed the Louisiana Science Education Act (LSEA) in 2008.  Despite its positive-sounding name, the act allows public school teachers to undermine science by lying to students about science in general, and evolutionary biology in particular.  The spawn of a creationist think tank in Seattle, its real purpose is to promote Christian Dominionism.  This and similar laws foster a climate of bigotry and religious intolerance as it allows teachers to proselytize to students.  The results can be devastating.  For example, an 11 year old Buddhist student was subjected to humiliation and bullying because he wasn’t a Christian.  His science teacher told her class that Buddhism and evolution were stupid, and penalized the boy’s science tests when he failed to praise the “lord.”  Things like this are of no concern to Jindal, of course; discrimination is always okay as long as it is Republicans doing the discriminating.  But when somebody dares to protest, the cry from the right wing is always about how their “ religious freedom” is being denied.  In their Orwellian world view, religious freedom means being free to discriminate against others.

Jindal makes so many ridiculous statements that it’s impossible to take him seriously.  He has called Obama’s administration “science deniers” which is ironically comical considering his creationist views.  Jindal’s economic record while governor of Louisiana speaks for itself.  Like all the other Republicans in this election, Jindal is absolutely clueless about what really ails America and the “solutions” he offers are solutions to problems that only exist in the furtive imaginations of paranoid Christian fundamentalists.

Rick Perry is another politician in the Mike Huckabee mold who wants to return the United States to the pre-rational Christian Dark Ages.  To listen to him and the other candidates talk, one would get the impression that Christians are being attacked right and left in this country.  The right-wing media, exemplified by Fox News, bolsters this nonsense and the gullible public buys into it.

A few of Rick Perry’s nonsensical statements:

** “Thomas Paine wrote that: ‘the duty of a patriot is to protect his country from his government.’  How ironic to hear Rick Perry quoting from Thomas Paine, the secular deist who wrote: “The Age Of Reason.”  One little problem with Perry’s quote is that it wasn’t Paine who said it; it was Edward Abbey.

** Regarding the recent increase of non-Mexicans being captured at the US border: “These are people that are coming from states like Syria that have substantial connections back to terrorist regimes and terrorist operations.”  False once again; almost none of these come from countries engaged in terrorism.

** “Every engine manufacturer in the United States is now in the state of Texas.”  Documentation, please?

** “Abortion is the second-most conducted surgical procedure in this country.”  Again, Perry has offered no evidence whatever for this claim.

** “Kids can’t openly celebrate Christmas or pray in school.”  So Fox News would have you believe.  The “war on Christmas” is totally the creation of Bill O’Reilly.  It is true that teacher-let prayer has been outlawed, but how is this a “war on Christmas?”  Anyone wanting to see real discrimination needs only watch what happens if a student dares to declare him/herself an atheist.  Then you will see what Christian fundamentalism can do to children.

** “The federal government has not engaged in (border security) at all.”  At the time Perry made this statement, the government had more agents patrolling the border than at any previous time.

** Perry blames the federal government for telling us: “How much salt we can put on our food.”  This one is so ridiculous it needs no further comment.

** “The reason that we fought the (American) Revolution in the 16th century—was to get away from that kind of onerous crown, if you will.”  True, except that he’s off by two centuries.

Rick Perry is more than just a mouthpiece for the Radical Religious Right: He is a demagogue seeking to destroy the Constitution of the United States and replace it with biblical law.

Rick Santorum is a classic twenty-first century Republican in that all his views and all his key issues revolve around his version of Christianity.  He is against gay marriage,  a stand of which the only justifications are bible-based.  He opposes contraception in any form.  He is against evolutionary biology.  He wants to return prayer to our schools.  He supports school vouchers, which only destroy public education, opening the way for more religious-based school funding.  And he is totally against women playing any other role other than the “traditional” one where they stay home, have babies, and “keep the home fires burning” while the husband brings home the bacon.

Here’s a few lies from Santorum:

** “Sixteen years ago this country was tremendously inspired by a young woman who faced a gunman in Columbine and was challenged about her faith and she refused to deny god.  We saw her as a hero.”  Here, Santorum is voicing one of the many myths Christian fundamentalists love to use.  Unfortunately for them, it’s not at all true.  Yes, Cassie Bernall was killed at Columbine High School.  But neither of the killers asked her if she believed in god.  Christians love to perpetrate this myth however, and they are going to stick with it, no matter how many times it is refuted.  What does that tell you about their concern for truth?

** The Associated Press quoted Santorum as saying: “If the Supreme Court says that you have the right to consensual sex within your home, then you have the right to bigamy, you have the right to polygamy, you have the right to incest, you have the right to adultery.  You have the right to do anything.”  No one except Santorum and his fellow Christian fundies believes anything of the sort.  This is a classic slippery-slope argument.

** Santorum is quoted in Caffeinated thoughts.com on October 18, 2011 as saying: “Many of the Christian faith have said, well, that’s okay, contraception is okay.  It’s not okay.  It’s a license to do things in a sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be.”  Perhaps in Santorum’s first-century-based world view, that is true.  However, there is no secular justification for eliminating contraceptive devices.  Once again, Santorum is utterly incapable of disassociating his political views from his religious ones.  No doubt Santorum and most of his right-wing associates and followers would have no problem at all having the condom police invade everyone’s bedroom to enforce conformity.  Isn’t it interesting how the same Republicans who scream about the necessity of getting government “off people’s backs” are the first ones to extend its role in their private lives?

** Santorum naturally has his own interpretations of history: “The idea that the Crusades and the fight of Christendom against Islam is somehow an aggression on our part is absolutely anti-historical.”  Is it anti-historical to point out that it was Pope Urban II who instigated the First Crusade in 1095?  Is it anti-Christian to point out that the Crusading forces murdered thousands of Jews as they moved toward re-capturing Jerusalem?  And what exactly are Santorum’s historical credentials?

** “All the people who live in the West Bank are Israelis, they’re not Palestinians.  There is no ‘Palestinian.’  This is Israeli land.”  This little gem from a November 18, 2011 campaign stop is even more extreme than the position taken by the Israeli government.

** “President Obama wants everybody in America to go to college.  What a snob!”  Naturally, Santorum would be opposed to higher education; people who have higher educations can easily see through his nonsense.  Of course, this is no guarantee that they won’t vote for him anyway.

There is little to be said in mitigation.  No doubt Santorum, like his fellow Republicans, will continue to come up with ludicrous statements like those discussed above.  And his sheep-like followers will gobble up every word of it.

The March 23 2015 issue of The Nation ran an article entitled “Ted Cruz’s biggest liability is probably his constant lying.”  The facts speak for themselves.  Ted Cruz was the man who led the charge in shutting down the government due to its support of Planned Parenthood.  This is not the first time he has done this, and even his fellow Republican senators are fed up with his tactics.  Despite the utterly irrefutable evidence to the contrary, Cruz later denied that he had ever said he wanted to shut down the government.  By any stretch of the imagination, that proves him to be a liar as well as an extremist who is totally out of touch not only with his own party but with the American people as well; a poll taken at Quinnipiac University found that 56 percent of Republicans opposed shutting down the government over the Planned Parenthood issue.

Cruz told a Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) that Democrats constitute a grave threat to Catholicism by claiming they (the Democrats) told the church “change your religious beliefs or we’ll use our power in the federal government to shut down your charities and your hospitals.”  Of course, no Democrat has ever said such a thing, and Poltifact, a project launched by the Tampa Bay Times that checks up and reports various statements made by political leaders of both parties, called this statement “both incorrect and ridiculous.”  Poltifact has researched 36 controversial statements made by Cruz and found only one (a comment about toilet seats!) to be accurate.  No wonder Cruz has said he is “not a fan” of Poltifact; Republicans hate to be exposed when they lie.

A few other lies from Cruz’s furtive imagination, none of which he has ever offered any documentation for:

** He reported that ISIS is “right now crucifying Christians in Iraq, literally nailing Christians to trees.”  And his proof of these crucifixions?  Cruz has conveniently failed to provide it.

** “The jurisdictions with the strictest gun control laws, almost without exception…have the highest crime rates and the highest murder rates.”  This is demonstrably false.

** “There are 110,000 agents at the IRS.  We need to put a padlock on that building and take every one of those 110,000 agents and put them on our southern border.”  Exactly what building in these United States houses 110,000 people?  The actual number is around 14,000.  Incidentally, what is the connection between an accountant’s job at the IRS and policing our borders?

**”You know I’ll tell you, in my house, if my daughter Cather, the five-year-old, says something she knows to be false, she gets a spanking.”  But daddy can say whatever he wants?  Who’s going to spank Ted Cruz for his much more blatant and dangerous lies?

**Finally, there is the obligatory Republican scandal: After claiming that he and his wife had “liquidated our entire net worth” in order to support his run for public office, it turns out that Cruz somehow failed to disclose a half million dollar loan from Goldman Sachs, an investment bank where his wife works.   Cruz failed to report this with the Federal Elections Commission.  This is illegal, as the FEC requires anyone obtaining a loan for campaign financing to report the original source of the loan.  Although Cruz reported the loans to the Senate at a later date, this does not obviate his original failure to make a financial report to the FEC.  It is interesting to think of Cruz, the rabid tea-party enthusiast who screamed so loudly against the Wall Street bailout going out of his way to avoid telling the public that he had borrowed money from the same entities he had previously attacked.

Cruz’s plan for America’s future should terrify any thinking American.  If he had his way, he would destroy the Commerce department, thus eliminating any kind of governmental assistance to small business owners.  Large corporations, of course, would continue to receive huge governmental subsidies.  Cruz would also abolish the Department of Education, and leave education entirely up to the states.  He would also eliminate the Departments of Energy and HUD.

Yet another example of how dangerous and anti-American this man is was seen during the medical crisis in Michigan resulting in a desperate search for clean water.  The Daily Kos has noted that: “Ted Cruz has entered to do the Christian thing and donate—but only for those who work in ultra-right wing, fake pregnancy ‘crisis’ centers.”  This means that it is unlikely that any of his water donation will actually go to the children who need the water.  So, rather than donating to a worthy charity organization like the Red Cross, which offers real solutions to the water crisis, Cruz is playing politics with children’s lives.

What to make of all this?  As usual, religion enters into the equation: it should be remembered that Cruz has said he believes god called him into politics.  Does this mean that religion is the foundation for his dishonesty?  Did god tell him to deceive the voters in order to win the presidency?  Is Christianity an integral component of his lying, corruption, and hypocrisy?  In view of what he has said and done, the fact that he began his presidential run by releasing a video entitled “Time for Truth” is laughingly ridiculous.  Ted Cruz is living in a different universe.  Anybody who believes anything said by this man needs to have his/her head examined.

Carly Fiorina is another political/religious extremist who employs the usual tactics for success: lying, distortion, ad hominem attacks, accusations of “liberal media” bias, and denial, all cloaked in religious garb.

Her time at Hewlett-Packard has come under close scrutiny and revealed her to be a woman utterly without any kind of moral compass.  Her business tactics consisted of misrepresenting (or lying about) the company’s “future products, strategy and even history.”  She also invented a tall tale about Walt Disney having personally visited her.

Her antics over the Planned Parenthood issue have only highlighted her unethical principles.  The video allegedly showing how Planned Parenthood was selling off body parts of dead babies has been shown to be put together via careful editing to make it appear what the fundamentalist producers what the public to believe.  Of course, Fiorina wouldn’t admit she had lied: indeed, she elaborated on the lie, going even further by saying something even the video didn’t state: “Planned Parenthood is aborting fetuses alive to harvest their brains and other body parts.  That is a fact.”  No it isn’t; even the video never claimed the fetuses were aborted alive just for the purpose of harvesting their internal organs.  And when right-wing Republicans, determined to shut down Planned Parenthood, insisted on investigations, six states (Missouri, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Indiana, Massachusetts, and South Dakota) have found that there is no truth to the Republican lie.  But as with all such lies, the facts are of little or no concern; what counts is how they can be altered to fit their political agenda.  And of course the media, ever afraid of being tainted with the word “liberal,” lets these statements, however outlandish, go unchallenged.

Other Fiorina gems:

** She claimed that the US tax code is 73,000 pages long, whereas the number is closer to 5000 pages.

** Fiorina also claimed that 92 percent of the jobs lost during President Obama’s tenure were held by women, another false claim that was immediately exposed.  This same statistic was used by Mitt Romney when he ran for president in 2012.  When presented with the facts, Romney at least had the honesty to stop using that statistic.  Not Fiorina.  She sticks to her lies no matter what anyone says, no matter what the facts are.

** While CEO of Hewlett-Packard, Fiorina approved that company’s selling of millions of dollars in computer equipment in direct violation of the Iran embargo.  When questioned about this by FOX news host Chris Wallace, Fiorina stated: “In fact, the SEC investigation proved that neither I nor anyone else in management knew about it.”  One small problem: the SEC never conducted an investigation at all.

Carly Fiorina’s dishonesty is to blatant that she can look an interviewer right in the eye and lie through her teeth.  Clearly, this is a woman who has no ethical principles whatsoever.

Carson prides himself on his alleged rags-to-riches story wherein he says he pulled himself up from poverty and became a renowned neurosurgeon by perseverance and hard work.  In other words, an American success story.  This has led to some interesting statements, some of them quite comical.  In his memoir, Gifted Hands, Carson told of how while a student, he had once tried to stab a classmate.  Nobody investigating this interesting claim has been able to locate the would-be victim or any classmate who remembers this incident.  So Carson has wound up in the bizarre position of trying to defend his claim to having tried to stab another individual.

There is a reason why Carson tells lies such as this.  Kevin Drum notes that, in order to appeal to fundamentalist Christians, a candidate must be able to tell tales of sin and redemption.  So Carson makes up these stories to show how much he has changed thanks to the “redeeming” nature of Jesus Christ.  And this is exactly what evangelical Christians want to hear, even though nobody else is buying into it.

Carson also lied when he claimed to have been a full scholarship to attend West Point.  Unfortunately for Carson, there is no such thing as a full scholarship to West Point.  At any rate, Carson went to Yale University, making this a most puzzling and pointless lie.

When these lies were pointed out, Carson said: “I do not remember this level of scrutiny for one President Barack Obama.”  This also flies in the face of the facts; in his obvious attempt to blame everything on the “liberal media,” Carson conveniently ignored the fact that, as Bill Moyers observed on April 25, 2008: “More than 3,000 news stories have been penned since early April about Jeremiah Wright and Barack Obama.”  All the media has done is to quote him, so if Carson wants to blame someone, all he needs to do is look in the mirror.

Carson is able to play the race card in a unique way.  Calling Obamacare “…slavery, in a way,” had it been uttered by a white candidate, would have been condemned as racist, and rightly so.

Some other Carson gems:

** In discussing the Constitution, Carson stated: “The president is required to carry out the laws of the land, the laws of the land come from the legislative branch.  So if the legislative branch creates a law or changes a law, the executive branch has a responsibility to carry it out.  It doesn’t say they have the responsibility to carry out a judicial law.”  So Carson is claiming that the president doesn’t have to follow either the Constitution or the rulings of the Supreme Court.  In other words, the president of the United States is a law unto him/herself.  This is how a dictatorship works, not the US Constitution.  Apparently, Carson is unfamiliar with such basic Constitutional issues as checks and balances.  Either he is completely ignorant of the laws of the land, or else he wants to be a virtual dictator, or both.  This statement alone disqualifies him to hold the office of president.

** “A lot of people who go into prison straight, and when they come out they’re gay.”  Ignoring the bad grammar, one can only ask how a highly-renowned doctor could make such a statement.  It’s not only insulting, but also blatantly untrue.  So, in addition to his not being competent enough to serve as president, we have to wonder just how competent he was as a doctor.

** “My own personal theory is that Joseph built the pyramids to store grain.”  So much for the conclusions of all the leading archaeologists who recognize that the pyramids were built as tombs for the pharaohs.  As for the mummified bodies of the pharaohs, Carson ignores this discomforting little fact.

** “The pledge of allegiance to our flag says we are one nation under God.  Many courtrooms in the land on the wall it says ‘In God We Trust.  Every coin in our pocket, every bill in our wallet says: ’In God We Trust.’  So if it’s in our founding documents, it’s in our pledges, in our courts, and it’s on our money, but we’re not supposed to talk about it, what in the world is that?”  Despite what he says, none of Carson’s examples have anything to do with our founding documents.  For example, the phrase “under God” was not on any coin or bill until 1864, and then only on the much-hated and short-lived two cent piece.  “One Nation Under God” wasn’t in the pledge until 1954.  Again, Carson is proving himself to be either woefully ignorant, or blatantly dishonest.  It is obvious that, once again, he is shamelessly pandering to the fundamentalist Christian vote.

** “Every signer of the Declaration of Independence had no elected office experience.”  Another historical lie; virtually all the signers had held political office or some other kind of political experience.  And…grammar?  For an educated man, Carson has some weird ideas about grammar.

** Speaking on gun control, Carson again voiced his own version of history by stating that the Nazis rise to power “would have been greatly diminished” if citizens had been armed.  In fact, the Nazis liberalized gun laws, except for the Jews, of course.

All this proves that Ben Carson is much more than a mere fabricator of facts and inveterate liar.  He also has no hesitation in using racism if he thinks it will help his cause; his claim that Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger was “not particularly enamored with black people” is not only false, but a cheap effort to paint the entire issue of birth control as being immoral and even racist.  This man is a dishonest fraud who has no business in politics.

Christie is yet another inveterate liar, whose lies have increased and gotten more extreme during his run for the presidency.  Tom Moran of the Star-Ledger editorial board, has followed Christie for fifteen years and says:  “they all lie, and I get that.  But Christie does it with such audacity, and such frequency, that he stands out.”  He concludes by saying: “Don’t believe a word the man says.”

Moran’s “personal favorite” lie was certainly audacious.  In his 2009 campaign for governor, Christie was asked by the various public workers unions if he wanted to cut their benefits.  Christie told them that he would not, because the benefits were “sacred” to him.  He wrote them saying: “The notion that I would eliminate, change, or alter your pension is not only a lie, but cannot be further from the truth.  Your pension and benefits will be protected when I am governor.”  Moran then notes that: “he then proceeded to make cutting those benefits the centerpiece of his first year in office.”  The word “sacred” obviously means something different to Christie than to the rest of us.

During an interview with Fox News, Christie told Megyn Kelly that the Bridgegate scandal was over: “The US Attorney said in his press conference a few weeks ago there will be no further charges in the bridge matter.”  What Paul Fishman, the US Attorney actually said was quite the contrary: that the investigation was ongoing and could result in the two indicted aides to Christie pleading guilty to the charges.

Other Christie classics:

** Christie told George Stephanopoulos of ABC News about his success with pension reform: “We just won a major court decision supporting the pension reforms that we put into place in 2011.”  This is the exact opposite of the truth: the court determined that the reforms were unconstitutional.

** Christie stated that the Democrats intend “to raise your tax rates to 70 or 80 percent.”  Another blatant lie: no Democrat has made any such statement.  Nor does Christie tell us how Democratic policies will necessitate such increases.

** Christie says that Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders has a plan to “raise your taxes to 90 percent.”  However silly and dangerous Sanders’ socialist ideas may be, he has made no such statement nor has anybody shown how Sander’s policies will result in such an astronomical tax raise.

** Referring to the economy in New Jersey, Christie said that his state “gets $38 billion from the businesses at the shore.”  Wrong again; all that money comes from tourism.

Christie is yet another laughingly incompetent candidate who will say anything to get elected.  And the supposed “liberal media” is giving him a free pass on his nonsensical lies and distortions.

Perhaps the most blatant example of Bush’s dishonesty is the fact that he lied about his ethnicity on his 2009 voter registration form.  Although submitting false information on these forms constitutes a 3d degree felony in Florida the media, as usual, has been reticent to bring up this discomforting fact.  Yet the same Republicans who allowed Bush a free pass on this raised the roof when Elizabeth Warren claimed she was part Native American on a job application.  Is there a word other than hypocrisy to summarize this kind of behavior?

There is much more concerning this brother of the 43d president.  During the September 16 Republican debate, he stated that the federal government “shouldn’t be involved in gun laws.”  After attacking Hilary Clinton and President Obama for supporting federal gun laws, Bush said: “That’s not the right approach to do it.  In Florida, we have a background check.”  Well, not quite.  The Brady Law determines how a person can purchase a firearm in Florida.  This law states that buyers must have a background check only when they are buying from a federally licensed firearms dealer.  Bush’s comments at the debate are of particular interest inasmuch as since he signed the “Stand Your Ground” law as governor, murder rates have increased, not decreased, in Florida.

A few more Bushisms:

** “There are a lot of Christians in Syria that have no place now.  They’ll be either executed or imprisoned, either by Assad or by ISIS.”  Bashar-al-Assad runs a secular regime which protects religious minorities; he would never resort to anything like what Bush is claiming in this patently nonsensical statement.

** “We need to be part of the strategy to deal with taking Assad out and taking ISIS out.”  Notice that Bush again mentions Assad before ISIS; apparently, he views a tolerant secular regime more dangerous than a fundamentalist Islamic State.  In other words, Bush seems intent on continuing to do the exact same things that led to the rise of ISIS and its concomitant atrocities in the first place.

** Perhaps the most outlandish thing Bush has come up with so far is when he said: “As it relates to my brother, there is one thing I know for sure, he kept us safe.”  Try selling that comment to the families of the 9/11 victims.

So Bush, like the other Republican candidates, is ever willing to lie about anything if he thinks it will help him win the nomination.  Policy wise, he looks rather like a clone of his brother.  An utter failure as governor of Florida, there is no doubt that were he to become president, his term would be as disastrous as his brother’s was.  Perhaps worse.

Ohio governor John Kasich is a candidate who wants to portray himself as a moderate.  The facts dispute this.  Like all the other candidates, he receives support and money from the extreme right wing of his party.  As governor, he practically destroyed his states’ educational system.  He has often railed against women’s rights.  He has called for a new federal agency to promote Judeo/Christian “values.”  With Kasich, those values obviously include being as offensive as possible: He is known to be extremely short tempered and can be infuriatingly arrogant as well.  Politically, despite his claims to the contrary, he is just as extreme as Mike Huckabee and Ted Cruz.

John Kasich is a big supporter of Common Core and has claimed that: “Governors themselves wrote the standards.”  However, there were no governors involved in writing the actual standards.  He also stated that President Obama had nothing to do with the adoption of Common Core when in fact Obama told each state that they had to adopt it before they could get an exemption from the obsolete standards set by No Child Left Behind.

When Nina Turner, who is a black legislator, offered to help Kasich build a racially diverse cabinet, he said: “I don’t need your people.”  Here, Kasich shows himself to be an unreconstructed racist.  Why is it that such an astoundingly immoral statement could be ignored by the mainstream media?

If Kasich calls himself a moderate, one can only wonder how extreme someone would have to be before he would label them as an extremist.

Although he is running as a Libertarian, most of Rand Paul’s ideas are far removed from those typically associated with Libertarianism.  Most of them dovetail with what the Republican party is espousing.  While Libertarians tend to be fiscally conservative and socially liberal, Rand is far from the latter: he opposes a woman’s right to choose abortion; he opposes same-sex marriage and he opposes the legalization of marijuana.  Most disturbingly of all, Paul stated in an interview with Sean Hannity that he would have no problem imprisoning people who were listening to “radical political speeches.”  This is fascism, pure and simple.  No doubt he would classify anything opposing his views as “radical.”  While he may claim to be “a different kind of Republican,” his comments and stances are virtually identical with those of his fellow Republican candidates.

Here are a few classics uttered by Mr. Paul:

** Paul quotes George Washington as saying: “Let the world be filled with the knowledge of Thee and Thy Son, Jesus Christ.”  Edward Lengel, who is professor and director of the Washington Papers at the university of Virginia, has traced this quote to an 1891 prayer book attributed to Washington “and generally regarded by scholars (including myself) as a forgery.”   No doubt right-wing historical myth-makers such as David Barton (who, despite his popularity at fundamentalist Christian events, has no historical pedigrees at all) would make much of this in their efforts to portray our first president as a religious fundamentalist but Rand Paul?  Apparently, he thinks he knows more about history than the actual historians such as Lengel.  In fact, Washington hated talking about religion in public.  Buzzford reporters have shredded this and numerous other historical “quotes” uttered by Paul.

** Paul, in one of his books quotes Abraham Lincoln as saying: “I know there is a God, and that He hates the injustice of slavery…I know I am right, because I know that liberty is right, for Christ teaches it, and Christ is God.”  When Harold Holzer, the author of fifty books on Abraham Lincoln, was presented with this quote, he said: “Oh, not this again” and added: “I hope Sen. Paul can find another Lincoln prayer to console him because Lincoln never uttered anything like this.”

With Rand Paul, lying is taken to new levels; not content with merely spouting untrue historical nonsense, he has written two books about the founding fathers in which he attributes some dazzlingly false quotes to them, mostly about their religious views.  When Buzzfeed, after reviewing one of Paul’s books, sent him a letter asking him to stop using false quotes, he responded by attacking Andrew Kaczynski (the researcher of the quotes) by calling him “an idiot” for daring to question the veracity of the quotes.  Paul said: “That guy, the only criticisms have come from some guy who’s a partisan.  We discount partisans.”  How convenient: anybody who points out his lies is a “partisan” and not worth answering.

Here we go again: facts are irrelevant to Republican leaders like Rand Paul.  They will to continue to spout nonsense and the Republican voters will continue to believe whatever they say.

Marco Rubio is often viewed as one of the few moderates within the Republican party.  While his speeches and talks tend to sound moderate, his actual record is much more incendiary.  As usual, all the issues he concerns with have a religious base.  Recognizing the need to connect with Christian evangelicals, he hired Eric Teetsel to direct his faith outreach (why a position of this nature should even exist is a telling indictment of the Republican party).  Teetsel is rabidly anti-gay and has said that LGBT people need to find a “better way” or else they had better prepare to “suffer.”  This aside, Rubio holds equally extreme views on marriage equality, climate change, and of course, abortion.  Regarding the latter, Rubio has a 100% approval rating by the National Right To Life and also by the ultra-right-wing Family Research Council.  And this man is a moderate?

Let’s have a look at a few of Marco Rubio’s falsehoods:

** Rubio said in a 2014 ABC News interview: “I don’t believe that human activity is causing these dramatic changes to our climate the way these scientists are portraying it.”  So now Rubio knows more than the scientists do on climate change.  It’s the same old Republican story: when confronted with the facts, just deny them.  Rubio is to science what Rand Paul is to history.  Perhaps he will honor us with a few books telling his version of the “real” causes of climate change.

** When asked why he voted against the Employment Non-Discrimination Act which was written to protect LGBT Americans against discrimination in the workplace, he said: “I’m not for any special protections based on orientation.”  What “special protections” are involved?  The bill simply said that it was illegal to harass LGBT people in the workplace.   Would Rubio have a problem with an LGBT person being physically attacked on the job?

** While Rubio obviously has no problem with the LGBT community being discriminated against, he is very concerned with what he sees as discrimination against those Christians doing the discriminating.  “We’re at the water’s edge of the argument that mainstream Christian teaching is hate speech, because today we’ve reached that point in our society where if you do not support same-sex marriage, you are labeled a homophobe and a hater.  So what’s the next step after that, after they’ve done going after individuals?  The next step is to argue that the teachings of mainstream Christianity, the catechism of the Catholic Church, is hate speech.  That’s a real and present danger.”  Rubio conveniently fails to mention who “they” actually are.  So where is the “discrimination” here?    Are people who question the merits of Christianity practicing discrimination of some kind?  Or is there a larger issue here, like silencing free speech altogether?

** As noted above, Rubio is a rabid anti-abortionist and attempts to justify his views by invoking the Constitution: “What I have advocated is that we pass law in this country that says all human life at every stage of its development is worthy of protection.  In fact, I think that law already exists.  It is called the Constitution of the United States.”  Perhaps Rubio can enlighten us as to where exactly in the Constitution we can find references to fetuses as “persons” and that abortion should be illegal.

As if all this were not enough, Rubio now has a major scandal to deal with.  The Washington Post reported that while he was majority whip in the Florida House of Representatives, he abused his position by insisting that his brother-in-law be granted a real estate license.  While this might seem to be typical political nepotism on the surface, the fact that his brother-in-law is a convicted felon puts all this in a different light altogether.  The brother-in-law, Orlando Cicilia, was convicted back in 1989 of distributing $15 million worth of cocaine, and when the feds seized his house, the money had  magically disappeared.  Cicilia’s two sons have also benefitted from Rubio’s largesse, receiving over $130,000 from Rubio-affiliated PACs and various political campaigns over the last twenty years.

Clearly, Marco Rubio is as extreme, dishonest, and corrupt as any of the other candidates.  Like them, he wants to turn this country into his own version of a Christian State where dissent is stifled and democracy and civil rights exist only for fundamentalist Christians.

Webster’s Dictionary defines “lie” as: “To make an untrue statement with intent to deceive.”  This definition might well have been written with the current Republican party in mind.  Perhaps the corruption, dishonesty, and covert and overt lies began with Watergate.  However, the current flock of Republican leaders are so blatantly dishonest in virtually everything they say that, were the media to honestly report their doings, the resulting scandal would make Watergate look like a candy store break-in by a ten-year-old diabetic.

 

 

In summary, the Republican candidates for president in 2016 seem to be living in a new Christian Dark Age, a fate they most enthusiastically seek to impose on every American.  These candidates know that their supporters will not check up on their lies, so they continue to lie with impunity.  On the all-too-rare occasions when they are called to account for their lies, they refuse to admit them.  But they are convicted by their own words.  The lies discussed above should serve as a warning to any thinking American: When a Republican tells you something, be very skeptical about what they say.  Clearly, we are living in a time where politicians in general, and Republicans in particular, inhabit a Machiavellian universe where the end justifies the means and that lying and deceiving the public are justifiable  if it helps them to win elections.  One wonders just how gullible the American people are and how much of this claptrap they will swallow.  The facts speak for themselves: if any of these proto-fascists succeeds in winning the presidency, our country will not long remain the land of the free and home of the brave.