Are Republicans liars, or are they just dumb?

republican-lies

There was another tea party protest rally in Washington to demonstrate against the House health care bill which will be put to a vote over the weekend.

The Republicans, led by John Boehner, spent the day making speeches about the proposed health care bill, all of it based on what Republicans say will be the results if the bill is passed. ( one of the featured speakers was actor Jon Voight. When actors like Susan Sarandon and Sean Penn speak out on behalf of liberal causes, Republicans mock them as “just” actors and who cares what they think? Determined to stick to their label of being The National Hypocrite Party ,the same doesn’t apply if its an actor supporting their agenda)

Boehner used the favorite Republican talking point that the public option would lead to a government take over of health care. But there is nothing in the bill that suggests it will lead to a government take over. In fact if they were paying attention they would know many Democrats who support universal healthcare feel this bill doesn’t go far enough in that direction. So is that what they really think (which would make them dumb) or is it something they are using to try and rile up their base (which means they are lying). And if they are actually making a prediction, the fact is every prediction Republicans have made over the last 15 years has been wrong. Which could mean they are both lying and dumb.

The favorite mantra of the tea party protestors is that the public option will add to the deficit ( they also say its socialism but there is room for only so much stupidity to be analzyed in one column). They say it even though the CBO has scored 4 of the 5 health care bills and said they would acutally reduce deficit. Needless to say the news media, especially CNN seems to give equal weight to the estimates of the CBO and tea party protestors wearing “Obama Sucks” t-shirts. So we can add the news media to the dumb category also.

And if that wasnt enough stupidity to go around, at what might well be called a Stupidity Rally, John Boehner waved a document that he said was the constitution and told the assembled tea partiers that he stood with the constitution. Waving the document aloft he yelled into his microphone with the legislatively psychotic Virginia Foxx nodding behind him, that he “stood behind the words of the constitution” that ” we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal and that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights including life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness!” And the crowd went wild.

The problem is those words are not in the constitution. They are in the Declaration of Independence. So like most Republicans and tea party protestors, Boehner has spent as much time reading the constitution and knowing what’s in it as he did the health care bill. And his knowledge of what’s in both is about the same.

Rep. Michelle Bachman, again showing how out of touch Republicans are, warned that “Democrats have not learned the lessons of town hall meetings”. The only lessons to be learned from the town hall meetings is that you just ignore lunatics who were nothing more than dupes of Republican organizers who sent them memos telling them when and how to shout, yell and otherwise disrupt the meetings. The memo was already made public. Maybe Bachman didnt see it.

One more piece of lunacy at the tea party rally was actor John Ratzenberger who played Cliff on “Cheers” (seems like Republicans love what actors have to say as long as they are saying what they want them to). He denounced the health care bill by saying, “Remember, these are Woodstock Democrats.Their philopsophy doesn’t come from America it comes from overseas”.

So now we also have a Republican who not only doesn’t have a clue about health care reform, he doesn’t know what Woodstock was about either or, the Sixties. Sounds like John spent the sixties watching the girls in the miniskirts go off with someone else, maybe the prime motivating factor as to why conservatives hate liberals.

So which is it? Are Republicans lying about all the things they say or are they really just dumb? The more one listens to their arguments against health care, not one of which is backed up by a single fact, and if one looks at the results of having Republicans in power for the eight years of the Bush Administration, and what John Boehner thinks is in the constitution and John Ratzenberger thinks what inspired Woodstock, we hold these truths to be self-evident — they are both dumb and lying.