This Week in GOP Hypocrisy

Remember this Golden Oldie?

Watching the GOP-Health Insurance Bund shift its pattern of lies from the "Enrage the yahoos" generic ( Nazi/death panel/Obama-the-Kenyan) to the "Scare grandma" specific (Socialist Kenyan wants to destroy Socialist Medicare to advance his Socialist agenda) those of us whose capacity to form new memories has not been completely destroyed by years of keeping our head stored in Rush Limbaugh's colon could not help but recall just a few, short years ago when the GOP's great love and respect for America's senior citizens was again on full display...

During that long, brutal Spring of 2005.

George W. Cheney had just finished tampering with enough elections and terrorizing enough voters into giving him four more years to finish the job of screwing American completely into the ground when he turned his rapacious, rodent attention

to Social Security.

Or, as I believe it was explained to us at the time, taking old people's dough out of that awful, Commie money-gulag called Social Security, and turning it over to the tender and benevolent care of hedge fund managers, derivative wizards and the never-fail stock market.

First, the Usual Wingnut Suspects robotically ranted out the same 5-6 Rove-spproved talking points endlessly.

When that didn't work, reliable fascist tools like Brit Hume simply lied about it.

The Long March of the Social Security Liars.
...

Wherein video poker slot jockey, bigot and notorious liar Bill Bennett declared, on February 3, 2005 that:

"Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the guy who established Social Security, said that it would be good to have it replaced by private investment over time. Private investment would be the way to really carry this thing through."

After which notorious liar and Bush Family Suppository, Brit Hume, declared that:

In a written statement to Congress in 1935, Roosevelt said that any Social Security plans should include, quote, "Voluntary contributory annuities, by which individual initiative can increase the annual amounts received in old age," adding that government funding, quote, "ought to ultimately be supplanted by self-supporting annuity plans."

(Both via Media Matters)

That was, of course, patently untrue.

Hume carved up FDR’s original words like Hannibal Lechter doing a guest shot on “Nip/Tuck” and inverted their intent in order to advance the House of Bush’s crusade to destroy the legacy of the New Deal.
...

And when that didn't work -- when America's seniors dug in their orthopedic heels and said "Hell No!" to GOP plans to turn their small, government-guaranteed hedge against starvation and penury over to the banksters -- the Right did what the Right does when the screaming and the lies fail: they paid the Swiftboat thugs to slither as deep as possible into Lee Atwater's filthy bag of scorched-earth, ratfucking tricks for something -- anything -- to destroy their opposition.

From Kevin Drum, in 2005:

AARP GETS THE SWIFT VETS TREATMENT....In my continuing quest to prove that a picture is worth a thousand words, here's your picture of the day. Via Josh Marshall, it's a screen capture from the American Spectator site of an ad from USA Next, a loony right group that thinks of itself as the conservative alternative to AARP. Apparently "the real AARP agenda" is to endorse gay marriage and disband the military.

Lovely folks, these USA Nexters. Clicking on the link doesn't provide any explanation for this putrid charge, but no matter. Clearly AARP is little more than a front group for godless communism anyway. Here is USA Next figurehead Art Linkletter, attempting a pale imitation of the John Birch Society:

I’d like to ask some blunt questions: Do you want more taxes taken out of your earnings? Do you want more unelected bureaucrats taking over more details of your life and your family’s life? Do you want federal regulators making your health choices, instead of you, your family, and your doctor? Do you want government regulators to control the investment and retirement decisions of your family, instead of you?

If you answered “Yes,” then AARP is your group....

That brings back memories. In any case, USA Next has now hired the same guys who created the SwiftVets commercials last year — apparently the military/gay marriage ad wasn't quite incendiary enough — and they ought to be a good fit. A marriage made in heaven, so to speak.

...

If the last 25 years has proven any one fact beyond dispute, it is that as long as there are no adults around who are willing to loudly point a finger at the Right and say, over and over again --

"Those fuckers right there are why we are in this mess.
Not "shrill" people.
Not the ACLU.
Not ACORN.
Not Keith Olbermann.
Not Tony Rezko.
Not some non-existent Commie Leftists left over from the Jack Chick and John Birch Society porn you keep hidden under the mattress for emergency, midnight hate-wanks.
Not both sides, equally and always.
No.
It. Is. Those. Fuckers. Right. There."

-- we will never be able to have a sane, responsible public dialogue about anything in this country ever again.