In their continuing effort to top each other and thus earn the title of author of the “Most Outrageously Hypocritical Political Statement of the week,” this week various high-profile members of the GOP yacked up some pretty jacked up big league BS.
Among the runners-up this week include:
In 3rd place: Russell Pearce’s flimsy attempt to flim-flam his way around being caught without a clue, jumping on the broken bandwagon of Republicans trying to label the Constitution as “Unconstitutional.” As the sponsor of the incendiary SB-1070, AZ Legislative District 18’s State Senator, Russell Pearce, has leapt to national prominence over his outspoken stance on America’s immigration issue, and become the latest in the series of poster boys for the thinly veiled racism and xenophobia that passes for Republican policy these days. Like Joe the Plumber without the looks, or Palin without the brains.
Pearce has even posted his studied and misquote studded opinions on the 14th Amendment on his website, and thus professes himself an expert. Weighing in on the latest GOP “Wrong is Right and Ignorance is Strength” fad, on prime-time CNN no less, Friday Aug. 6th, feigning massive moral and mental superiority, “Prof” Pearce’s pompous points were precisely punctured by … first, interviewer Anderson Cooper, then debate opponent Paul Begala, and then, after the break, internationally respected Constitutional historian, Eric Foner was brought in to further poke holes in any attempts at a claim of legitimate Constitutional precedent, or functional scholarship for that matter, by the GOP for their recent anti-14th Amendment rant. The 14th Amendment was written to establish the rights of citizens and non-citizens alike, to protect the children of immigrants, in a nation built of immigrants. Imagine that.
Also worthy of consideration in recent news was the GOP push to perpetuate the Bush era rich guy tax cuts. To keep that straight, those tax cuts for the richest 2% of the population that Bush swore we could afford cost us hundreds of billions each year in uncollected revenue and will drive up the deficit by as much as a trillion a year for the foreseeable future according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
Now, even Alan Greenspan and David Stockman (Reagan era budget director), with all the due vengeance of reformed whores, have copped to the fact that GOP Congressional leaders are apparently parading around with their pants on fire. Rather than the GOP foisted myth that “Secret Socialist Commie Obama” has been single-handedly destroying our economy, bankrupting us all through all sorts of unnecessary spending;” it’s actually the Bush tax cuts that are the single most important component of our structural deficit and current GOP efforts to continue them is a disastrous mistake … and a deliberate deception. Stockman goes so far as to say, ” Mr. McConnell’s stand puts the lie to the Republican pretense that its new monetarist and supply-side doctrines are rooted in its traditional financial philosophy.” This from a party which has repeatedly claimed an irreproachable reputation for fiscal austerity as a guise to challenge and even derail many of Obama’s efforts.
Yep, those were some great moments in hypocrisy. But there’s no point in further following the Eric Holder model of prosecuting governmental abuses (i.e. “Beating around the Bush”), so let’s get to the goodies: This week’s title, “Morally Wrong,” comes to us from the howler of a quote from Defense Secretary Robert Gates, an Obama Republican holdover from the previous administration. This quote was regarding Wikileaks’ recent public posting of years’ worth of US military dirty laundry. While dodging specifics about pursuing charges with the Department of Justice, just yet, Gates appeared to invoke a higher law in condemning Wikileaks and its putative founder, Julian Assange: “There’s also a moral accountability. And that’s where I think the verdict is guilty on Wikileaks.” Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen also manned a pulpit to call out the sinner and took up the call of morality to pillory Assange, claiming the US government had a “moral obligation” to the people in the Af-Pak theater of operations and should be the sole authority when it comes to how much the public should know about the wars waged in their name.
To recap: in late July the international whistle blower website, Wikileaks, released their latest bombshell exposing corruption and conspiracy on a massive scale. Already internationally acclaimed for helping concerned citizens document the misdeeds and cover-ups of various corporations and governments, Wikileaks operates on a simple principle: its “primary interest is in exposing oppressive regimes in Asia, the former Soviet bloc, Sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East, but we also expect to be of assistance to people of all regions who wish to reveal unethical behavior in their governments and corporations.” In Kenya, Iceland, Thailand, Britain and Australia, for example, conspiracies revealed have rocked nations.
This time their sources had revealed a cache of info on a case of mismanaged war on a massive scale — murder and abuse and misuse of funds at an incomprehensible level: a compendium of more than 91,000 on-the-ground reports of misguided violence, greed, and/or stupidity. Unfortunately the culprits this time were us, as in the US military, in just the latest revelation of our continuingly misguided misadventures in Afghanistan.
To make matters worse, the documents quite clearly revealed a pattern that our supposed best buddy in the war on terror, Pakistan, was actually in bed all along with Al-Qaeda, with the Taliban, and basically with just about every other crank in the neighborhood who hated baseball, apple pie, and/or Chevrolet. Allegations of the Pakistan aiding, abetting, and even being agents of terror against the US have never been honestly addressed ever since 9/11 Truthers were marginalized trying to draw attention to the 2004 UK Guardian article documenting that “General Mahmoud Ahmed, the then head of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), wired $100,000 before the 9/11 attacks to Mohammed Atta” and in the wake of the 9/11 investigation, the US government was trying to hush this revelation up.
A war promoted under false pretenses, perpetuated for profit, and inflicting untold misery and death on the civilian population, and for what cause? Because they don’t like us enough? Our friend in the war is the world’s number one exporter of opium and our other friend works for our sworn enemies. But Wikileaks was not supposed to reveal any of that.
Like Ellsberg before them, Wikileaks’ publication of the low-level “low-threat” (according to the New York Times) military logs, was not likely to endanger the lives of the men in the field nearly as much as it will the boys in the back room. Furthermore, according to CNN, “neither Gates nor Mullen, who appeared on both the CBS program Face the Nation and the NBC program Meet the Press, could cite a specific example of any Taliban attacks based on information from the leaked materials.”
So, to recap, sell a war with lies, under-man it for years to focus on the other fiasco in Iraq (also sold with lies, etc.), partner up with drug dealers and double agents, bomb a stone-age country back to the pebble-age, inflame the region against our country, invoke religious intolerance, and then tolerate and cover-up widespread corruption and abuse. This is the legacy of former Iran-Contra player, CIA/Council on Foreign Relations figure, Robert Gates and the last four years of his war. No wonder he wants to hide it. Meanwhile the guys who report on it are the bad guys, are “morally wrong”?
Ha-ha, I get it! You, Robert Gates, are a hypocrite AND the winner of this week’s title as the author of the “Most Outrageously Hypocritical Political Statement of the Week.”
And the losers? Everyone else.