Big Lies

Two and a half years later we continue to hear Obama being blamed for the big deficit. Deficits are inevitable during recessions, but Obama didn't create the famous 1.3 Trillion dollar deficit of 2009. Bush created it, as the ultra conservative Cato Institute points out.

Honesty has never inconvenienced FoxNews though. If there's a useful lie, repeat it, louder if possible. Eventually it will collect a consensus around it, giving it "truthiness", and it'll become what people believe is true.

“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.” Joseph Goebbels

The Republicans have also learned it's useful to exhume the Founders and use them like sock puppets. (There's a good story about this in the Atlantic. They call it Zombie Economics.) Never mind that the Founders would never have said what the Republicans pretend they said. Remember, Alexander Hamilton created the National Debt to help our economy grow, and Washington used the military to enforce tax collections. It didn't end there. Our greatest presidents supported what the Republican Party opposes today, and deplored what the Republican Party now stands for. Lincoln favored Labor over Capital. Theodore Roosevelt was a progressive lion who pushed worker protections and aggressively broke up the largest corporations of his time. Eisenhower opposed massive military spending. Even our bad presidents are better than the current Republican leadership: Nixon proposed universal health care and created the EPA.