Todd Akin thinks he’s being treated unfairly – after all, he only made a “six second mistake” when he mispoke about lady parts, rape and the right to chose not to carry your rapist’s baby:

“My six-second mistake is well known. But Claire McCaskill’s six-year record is something you should know.  “McCaskill voted with Obama 98 percent of the time. She cast the deciding vote to pass Obamacare, that cuts Medicare by over $700 billion dollars. She voted for Obama’s budget-busting stimulus spending and raised our taxes but didn’t pay her own.

What’s this election about? Saving our country.

I’m glad that Akin feels so sanguine about his little misadventure in expressing his deepest beliefs. He wants us to think that Claire McCaskill’s six year record more than balances his little error – and maybe to the reality-challenged rigtwingers who form his base that’s the case. Who can account for lunatics anyway?

However, in common with Missouri GOP spokesperson, Mr. Prouty, whom we referenced in a previous post, Brother Todd has failed to get his facts straight. He thinks Claire McCaskill has voted with Obama 98% of the time. First of all what does 98% of the time mean? Much of what Claire McCaskill and other senators have voted on is routine, or otherwise so removed from the scope of partisan distinction that it’s almost impossible to make quantitative statements of this sort – and if you do, I’d really want to know what your criteria is. We’ve already noted (and documented) the fact elsewhere that McCaskill’s voting record is a lot more complex than can be digested in simple soundbites – and it’s far from always being congenial with a progressive, or even the Obama administration agenda (and, FYI, they’re not always the same thing either).

But where Todd, who likes to claim that he’s an honest man, really oversteps the boundaries of truth is when he echoes the dishonest claims about Medicare that are also being promulgated by Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan. As I am now writing for the umpteenth hundred time, the $750 billion that Obamacare cuts from Medicare are mostly administrative costs, including subsidies to private supplemental insurance programs with inflated costs. These supplemental programs will not go away, but will be tied to quality metrics so that we get a better bang for the buck. As The Swampland notes, The Obamacare cuts that Claire McCaskill supported will not change the program’s benefits:

The idea, however, that the Affordable Care Act struck a dangerous blow to Medicare that will change the program in fundamental ways is untrue. Under the new law, Medicare will remain a wildly popular, public single-payer health insurance system that provides comprehensive coverage to millions of Americans.

Nor does pious Brother Todd tell us that he voted for the Ryan budget that makes those same identical cuts, plows the money’s into the deficit (where it’s hardly a drop in the bucket) instead of using it to expand benefits, and then, after taking the Medicare loose change, voucherizes Medicare, essentially destroying the program for current as well as the future retirees who are the only ones Ryan says will be affected. Pretty devastating. And just like the lying Romney/Ryan duo, Todd hasn’t got the cojones to admit what he’s proposing to do with Medicare, but tries to lay it off on Claire McCaskill. For shame, Rep. Akin.

Oh, and by the way – there is a consensus among economists is that the stimulus did work. But I’ll give Brother Todd a pass on his naysaying piece of GOP BS on the topic since he probably gets his economic information from the same sources who told him about the birds and bees.  

The Ryan Budget is a big gift to all of us, right and left, because it clearly shows us what the GOP stands for – nature red in tooth and claw where we struggle for survival of the fittest  – with a little extra help for our rich citizens who are probably considered to be the most fit because they can afford to pay Congress for the assistance.  This blatant embrace of the 1% is interesting because new research suggests that it does not really reflect the beliefs of the important if somewhat confused Tea Partiers who are popularly supposed to be playing an important role in the ever more rightward drift in the GOP itinerary.

Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson, who have exhaustively researched the Tea Party phenomenon, have concluded that even those strident advocates for “liberty” from taxes, don’t really oppose government spending – as long as the spending is lavished on people they perceive as being like themselves. As Steven Teles summarizes it in The Washington Monthly:

In short, the fundamental principle of Tea Party activists is that government is fine when it’s helping people like them-hardworking, uncomplaining, non-mooching, self-restraining, religious (but not Muslim!), patriotic Americans-but it’s a threat when it’s helping people who are not like them. Screaming about the debt is really just the language Tea Party activists use to express their fear that the reins of government have been taken away from the people who actually make the society work, and given to a coalition of weirdos and parasites.

Which brings us to the three Republicans vying to represent their party in the race contesting Claire McCaskill’s Senate Seat. Their reactions to the Ryan budget provide a type of Rorschach test not only for the individuals involved, but for the degree to which they are actually attuned to attitudes that animate their base:

Todd Akin, a.k.a. Mr. Predictable, makes no bones about the fact that he wants to push even the lame, halt and starving little birdies out of what he views as a nest unfairly feathered by the  government at great cost to the rich:

This is a concrete plan that will put our economy back on track. Now is not a time to sit on the fence or to wait to see where the polls and political winds blow, it is time for action and leadership

Since almost no economists believe that the Ryan spending plan will do anything other than increase the deficit, gut the safety net and enrich the rich, this has to be a case of hard-core ideological blindness, disguised with the now cliched GOP efforts to paint Ryan as a bold thinker – or even as a thinker. Clearly, Akin would love to see the last of such programs as Medicare – and he might find that this attitude won’t endear him to the very folks he’s relying on to support him.

Sarah Steelman, the anointed candidate of the Tea Party Express if not all generic Tea Partiers in Missouri, is more in tune with the Tea Party mentality that Skocpol describes, albeit in a cautious fashion:

I would like to move towards a fairer flatter tax, shrink the size of government and balance the budget sooner. I am also taking a closer look at the Medicare revisions to make sure that Congress isn’t treated better than our seniors and that seniors have the option of staying with the current Medicare plan.

In other words, Steelman wants to deflect attention from the issue of privatizing Medicare, and tries to placate her Tea Party followers by reassuring them that if they suffer, she’ll make sure that Congress suffers too. Congress  is usually a fail-safe stalking horse. Notice that Steelman says nothing about making sure that the wealthy pick up their fair share of the load that the Ryan Budget foists off on the poor and middle class.

And John Brunner? Mr. No-Show does it again:

The third GOP candidate, St. Louis businessman John Brunner, said that Ryan showed “courage and leadership,” but declined to offer his views on the Wisconsin lawmaker’s proposed budget.

Interesting that Bruner chooses to emphasize “courage and leadership” while carefully showing neither. It seems that what he dubs the  “message of the citizen-senator against the career politician,” when speaking about his campaign, seems to be no more than an empty piece of paper.

No word yet about what the newest candidate, anti-stem cell guy Mark Memoly, thinks about budget priorities. I suspect it’ll be entertaining.

So there you have it. The old-line, crank right winger, Tea Party confusion and obfuscation, a corporate GOPer who stands for almost nothing but getting elected, and a cipher. And they want us to entrust them to watch out for programs like Medicare and Social Security that have sustained and built the middle classes, programs that even important segments of their own base support.    

So Rush Limbaugh thinks our Missouri Senator Claire McCaskill is a “commie babe liberal“? Lordy! Sure fooled me. I can’t speak to the “babe” epithet, but nobody’s really a “commie” nowadays. It’s passé. McCaskill might be mildly liberal, although I think that she’s been pretty careful to try to hew to the right-of-center line with only tiny detours leftwards now and then. If labels were strictly a function of policy positions, I suppose I’d be inclined to describe her as similar to that old standby, the “Rockefeller Republican” with a little feminist leavening. But these days, of course, we Democrats make do with what we can get.

To make that point even clearer, McCaskill proved that it takes a centrist to know a centrist policy when she pointed out that Obamacare is a mild-mannered and moderate plan that lines up with many GOP preferences. In McCaskill’s words it is Ryancare for the non-elderly:

“The irony of this situation is that these are private insurance companies people will shop to buy their insurance. It’s not the government,” she told KMOX of St. Louis on Wednesday. “It’s exactly what Paul Ryan wants to do for Medicare.”

TPM explains the seeming GOP cognitive dissonance about Obamacare in terms of the underlying agendas of progressives and conservatives:

McCaskill’s point is an important one that exposes the real nature of the underlying fight over how to fix health care. The progressive ideal is a single payer system, a la Medicare, but for everyone. The conservative ideal is a deregulated market-based system with a diminished federal role. The Affordable Care Act, despite the right’s protestations of socialism, is a middle ground between the two. And the insurance exchanges mirror what the Ryan plan does to Medicare – as Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) and Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) have conceded.

These awkward admissions reveal that the broader fight is really about which direction to move vis-a-vis national health policy. Conservatives hate Obamacare because, by setting up regulated, subsidized exchanges for the public at large, it moves the existing system away from their goal of rolling back federal health care programs. Liberals hate Ryancare because, by replacing Medicare with a subsidized private insurance market, it constitutes a leap backwards from the current state of affairs.

As TPM’s Sahil Kapur implies above, no matter how big a backwards step Ryancare might represent, Obamacare still constitutes a mighty step forward for American health care overall given the nature of the previous status quo. It represents a necessary compromise in light of the rightward drift of American politics over the past couple of decades, which has created an environment in which a middle-aged, middling moderate pol can be described by a nasty-mouthed shock-jock as a “commie liberal babe.”

 

Last week Greg Sargent’s Plum Line detailed some of the falsehoods in the flood of third party ads produced by Carl Rove’s Crossroads group and by the Chamber of Commerce. Because of the furor over their funding – the undisclosed donors, the possibility of foreign contributors, etc. – the fact that these ads are chock full of blatant, egregious falsehoods had not received much attention earlier. The onslaught has now truly begun; third party ads have been flooding the airwaves (on some evenings I have seen the same ad over six times – and I don’t watch that much TV). Many of us were worried about what Citizens United would mean for our democracy; these ads, the ugly spawn of that decision, prove that we were more than right to be concerned.

One ad in particular centers around absurd claims that the Affordable Care Act cuts Medicare by 500 billion dollars – the ad has been directed at several Democrats with only slight variations. You can see some of the versions of the ad and get the real facts about its lies here (you can also see one such ad below the fold). Take a look at it and then compare it with the new Roy Blunt ad (also shown below the fold) – not too much difference, right?

Given Blunt’s past propensities for abusing the truth, I’m not surprised that he is putting out one more dishonest ad, nor am I surprised that the subject matter is Medicare. He is clearly hoping to stem the damage Carhanan did in their last debate when she not only brought up Roy’s past statements about Medicare, but confronted him with proof when he denied them:

Among other things, the Carnahan camp disputed Blunt’s apparent denial during the debate that he had ever said that Medicare shouldn’t have been created. Carnahan’s campaign sent out a number of links to numerous news accounts — including two videos (click here and here) — in which Blunt appeared to disparage the government health-care program for the elderly, voted for cuts or voted for a proposal to turn the program into a voucher system.

What better way to save face when you are caught in a lie, but to lie some more – hence this new Medicare ad. Of course, if you are Roy Blunt, your contempt for your constituents is so great that you don’t even bother to come up with something plausible – you simply crib from your Crossroads GPS pals and adapt their all-purpose lies to do your dirty work. After all, Carl Rove proved that if you tell a lie often enough, everyone will think it’s the truth.

Update: FiredUp! Missouri has video of a KMBC TV segment that factchecks the Blunt ad.

One of the Crossroads GPS ads, the new Blunt ad, and two videos of Blunt dissing Medicare can be found below the fold:

Crossroads GPS ad attacking Joe Sestak (PA):

New Roy Blunt ad:

Roy Blunt on Medicare:

And: