Lie-gos

“A half-truth is a whole lie” -- Yiddish Proverb

Anybody idiot can lie, but only a powerful, massively well-funded machine can engineer bushels of goofy, paranoid individual lies into the interlocking components of a Great Wall of lies. And this is the one thing that the Right does supremely well: employing literally hundreds of thousands of people to construct an entire lie-based infrastructure which is constantly rebuilt, refreshed and expanded upon.

What I once called "the fucking Guanine and Adenine in [the Right's] fucking political DNA".

Of course, every now and then, rather than building out the lies and dumbing-down the Base with the steady, consistent, workmanlike evil of a Lee Atwater or Karl Rove Frank Luntz, some eager member of the Wingnut Leadership Caste -- like, say, Glenn Beck -- will try to rush things along by using every wingnut lie in the wingnut witchbag simultaneously to throw a single, poorly engineered suspension bridge to power through the howling, ignorant, paranoid heart American Conservative Movement

with predictable results.

But overall, the constant, tireless carving and lathing of lies into cheap, mass-produced Lego-blocks that can be endlessly rearranged to tell and re-tell the same, depraved fairy tale over and over and over again has been depressingly successful.

So when Paul Krugman reports that the notion of "The Stimulus" failing being a lie because...there really was no stimulus:

What’s extraordinary about all this is that stimulus can’t have failed, because it never happened. Once you take state and local cutbacks into account, there was no surge of government spending.

I cannot help but notice how efficiently this single lie has not only been used by the Right to discredit the very idea of a stimulus...

And yet the failure of the stimulus that never happened has become conventional wisdom — which is what I feared would happen, two years ago, when I was tearing my hair out over the inadequacy of the original plan.

But in the hands of the rest of the Right it also enjoys an endlessly recycled second life...

...from small-bore frauds about personally abusing the money to help out family members (via Urban Legends):

FW: stimulus jobs...

Some have said that the stimulus hasn't saved any jobs, but here is a case where at least one job was saved.

According to an unnamed source, Oregon State University Athletic Director Bob DeCarolis was considering firing their basketball coach, Craig Robinson, after an 8-11 start (2-5 in the Pac 10 conference).

When word of this reached Washington , Undersecretary of Education Martha Kanter was dispatched to Corvallis with $17 million in stimulus money for the university. The source now says that Craig Robinson's job is safe for this year.

For the record, Coach Robinson just happens to be Michelle Obama's Brother.

Analysis: While it's true that Oregon State University head basketball coach Craig Robinson is Michelle Obama's brother, virtually everything else in this message is false.

...to larger-gauge mendacities like the plush, Xanadu-style prison that ex-Senator Obama supposedly had built in Illinois using stimulus money (presumably so that any of his terrorist friends who get caught trying to destroy America could enjoy premium cable and 24-hour on-call massage services while serving their time):

...

One recent example were pictures of an palatial prison with the heading, "Wow, your tax dollars at work." The pictures showed courtyards, basketball courts and game rooms -- it could pass for a luxury hotel -- and it was alleged to be a new prison in Chicago.

The item noted, "Now... who was the Chicago US Senator who helped arrange the funds to build this beautiful `punishment' center. Oh yes, it was B. Obama!!! No wonder he sees nothing wrong with the wasted spending in his `Stimulus Plan.'"

Problem is, the palatial prison is in Austria, according to http://www.snopes.com, which debunks Internet rumors. Obama never had a thing to do with it.

...to the vast, ideology-spanning lies that the likes of David Fucking Brooks spin out of the myth of the Failed Stimulus to prop up their own, bullshit Centrist thesis that the Right should not be punished too hard for, say, lying us into Iraq and then botching their war-of-choice because Liberals get Big Things Wrong Too!

And as long as lying to idiots on behalf of fascists in remains a respected, low-risk/high-reward media gig in these United States, this situation will only get worse.