They’re wrong.

They keep sending these mail pieces to a Union household.

By the way, who’s paying for this crap?

Right wingnut millionaires or billionares don’t fund propaganda mail pieces to your household telling you…

…which church you should join or support.

…which charity you should join or support.

…which YMCA (seriously, WTF?) you should join or support.

If they were truly concerned about the welfare of working people and their families in Missouri you’d think they would, right?

Nah, they just believe that peeple in misooree our stoopit.

Previously:

Astroturf propaganda (August 1, 2017)

Since when is an astroturf right wingnut organization truly concerned about the economic welfare of working people? (August 30, 2017)

Astroturf. You know, fake grassroots.

They sent this to a union household:

“Union bosses” are elected by their members. Are billionaires? Just asking. Yeah, right, billionaires and multi-millionaires are going to choose to pay working people higher wages.

Previously:

Astroturf propaganda (August 3, 2017)

Since when is an astroturf right wingnut organization truly concerned about the economic welfare of working people? (August 30, 2017)

No, Americans aren’t ‘fine with torture.’ They strongly reject it.

By Paul Gronke, Darius Rejali and Peter Miller December 11

[….]

What it’s called matters – a fact not lost on the Bush Administration, which coined new phrases to call practices “not-torture.” It redefined the meaning of legal words and concepts, and described specific interrogation techniques as vaguely as possible….

[….]

EITs it is, then.

A picket sign from around 2002.

As if anything has changed in the last decade.

Previously:

A Small Clique Of Legal Extremists… (February 24, 2008)

We have already determined what we are… (December 9, 2014)

“…to otherwise commit moral and national suicide by euphemism.” (December 10, 2014)

The world remains the same (December 11, 2014)

Remember when GOPer Roy Blunt ran for the Senate by harping on the “failed” stimulus?

Remember when Rep. Todd Akin (R-2) took to the floor of the U.S. House to denounce the Recovery Act (i.e., the stimulus) as a failure, and Obama and the Democrats for turning the Bush recession into a depression?

Remember when Rep. Billy Long (R-6) demanded that Congress “admit they made a mistake and vote to repeal the Stimulus Act in order to reduce our deficit”?

These examples offer a very small subset of the disrespect that our GOP delegation lobbed at the Recovery Act. Almost every Missouri GOPer has a small archive of similar statements. They are usually accompanied by recipes for budget cuts, deficit reduction and similar austerity measures.

Which is what makes this chart (h/t Maddow blog) so sweet (for those of us in the U.S. at least).  Look at what happened to Great Britain and the Eurozone countries that took the austerity message so deeply to heart:

Britain, whose austerity policies many GOPers urged the administration to emulate, has officially entered a “double-dip” recession, while the U.S., where our President and his Democratic allies managed to push a small stimulus past GOP obstructionists, shows slow but consistent growth ever since the stimulus package began to take effect in the second half of 2009.

Don’t forget, either, that many economists have faulted the Recovery act only for being too small. Most realize,  though, that a larger stimulus would have been impossible given the Republican’s hide-bound, seemingly ideological opposition to the Keynesian approach that proved so effective in the 1930s and 40s.

Ed Kilgore, reporting on Robert Draper’s new book on the 111th Congress, quotes several passages that indicate that the GOP war on the stimulus may have been motivated by political considerations as much or even more than ideological concerns. Draper recounts the almost immediate mobilization of key Republican policy makers, at a dinner on the night of the Obama inauguration no less,  to devise ways to “submarine” the Obama presidency. Kilgore summarizes the strategy they devised:

In Draper’s account, these schemers decided on three very immediate steps: a campaign of villification [sic] aimed at Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, an effort to obtain a unanimous vote in the House against economic stimulus legislation, and an early initiation of attack ads.

So political has the attack on the stimulus been and so divorced from fact, that I doubt whether the dire effects of the austerity crash across the Atlantic will penetrate GOP rhetoric in the slightest degree. I predict we’ll continue to hear the same tired canards about the “failed” stimulus” from the same cast of characters from now until November. Maybe then, if we’re lucky, the players will change for the better – in a few cases at least.

First: I know this is supposed to be a blog about Missouri politics and politicians, but on the grounds that, judging from polls and the virulence of local Tea Party crowds, lots of Missourians form their views of the political firmament based on Fox reporting and opining, this report by Eric Boehlert of Media Matters is, if not exactly enlightening, at least validating. It is based on interviews with a former Fox News employee and is worth reading in its entirety.

Second: My apologies for offering little or no commentary, but the following highlights from Boehlert’s article say it all:

– On Fox’s Republican bias:

It is their M.O. to undermine the administration and to undermine Democrats,” says the source. “They’re a propaganda outfit but they call themselves news.

– On Fox’s political role:

The real story, and the real danger posed by the cable outlet, is that over time Fox News stopped simply leaning to the right and instead became an open and active political player, sort of one-part character assassin and one-part propagandist, depending on which party was in power. And that the operation thrives on fabrications and falsehoods

– On employee attitudes:

My internal compass was to think like an intolerant meathead,” the source explains. “You could never error [sic] on the side of not being intolerant enough.

– On the Bush years:

We were a Stalin-esque mouthpiece.  It was just what Bush says goes on our channel. And by that point it was just totally dangerous.  Hopefully most people understand how dangerous it is for a media outfit to be a straight, unfiltered mouthpiece for an unchecked president.

– On the Fox news strategy:

… If one controversy faded, goddamn it they would find another one. They were in search of these points of friction real or imagined. And most of them were imagined or fabricated. You always have to seem to be under siege. You always have to seem like your values are under attack. The brain trust just knew instinctively which stories to do, like the War on Christmas.

And best of all:

The former insider admits to being perplexed in late 2009 when the Obama White House called out Murdoch’s operation as not being a legitimate new source, only to have major Beltway media players rush to the aid of Fox News and admonish the White House for daring to criticize the cable channel.

You don’t say.

Remember how Tom Sawyer managed to get out of the onerous job of painting Aunt Polly’s fence? He just employed a little misleading rhetoric and persuaded his friends that it was the best fun ever, and if they would only pay him for the privilege, he would surrender the paint brush and let them paint to their hearts content.

Isn’t this exactly what the GOP and their media supporters have managed to do in reverse? That is, take a long lineup list of Democratic legislative achievements that will make our lives better, persuade a big swath of not so savy Americans that the list is a criminal indictment, and if they’ll only fork over their votes, they’ll get in on the fun and get to lob some figurative stones at the responsible malefactors.

Let us be clear – Republicans have done nothing for two years but try to stamp their sclerotic old feet on the brakes. It was Democrats who stabilized the economy and staved off another Great Depression. Democrats gave us health care reform that will provide millions of previously uninsured people with protection, rationalize medical spending and ultimately contribute to lowering the deficit. In spite of massive lobbying efforts to stop them, Democrats took on the broken regulatory system and passed a major financial oversight bill. There are dozens of smaller achievements.

But just today we read in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch that Robin Carnahan hid from the Vice President when he visited here on Friday.  The report details the ways she tries to brush off any association with the successes of the past two years. If you read Michael Bersin’s recent Claire McCaskill Q&A posts, you’ll note that she’s definitely on the defensive also. Which leads one to ask: Why aren’t our Missouri Democrats on the attack instead of on the run? Don’t they know that if you run, you’re gonna get chased down and the end isn’t usually pretty?

I don’t mean to be too hard on our Missouri Democrats – who would probably love to do the right thing. They are no different from the rest of the party. As a group, they’ve been outclassed by the Tom Sawyers of the GOP, who have joined up with the media arm of their right-wing noise machine to blast heavy-duty flim-flam from coast to coast – and Americans sure do like them some flim-flam.

In part, this is an issue of what George Lakoff calls framing although I prefer to talk about hijacking. Republicans use simple, frequently dishonest, often manufactured refrains, repeated incessantly and aimed at the gut in order to hijack perceptions. They’re cynical enough, crazy enough, or stupid enough to do this without qualms. And how should Democrats respond to being hijacked by crazed morons? Certainly not by pretending to be just as cynical, crazy or stupid.

Remember the Maersk Alabama hijacking? The ship’s crew didn’t jump overboard – they threw the hijackers off. Before Democrats can successfully reframe their agenda, they have to stand up to Republicans. If they jump off the boat, it’s lost.

Instead of hemming and hawing about her previous  support for health care, why doesn’t Carnahan demand to know how Blunt could vote against the welfare of the millions of Americans? Why aren’t Carnahan, McCaskill and other Missouri Democrats demanding that the Republican zealots stand up and face a few unpleasant facts? Why are they all so dammed nice and quiet, only speaking up when they think they might be able to claim a Republican brownie point? Instead of running in the direction that the polls point, why aren’t they out there planting the direction signs? Where are our leaders?

* Third from last paragraph edited for clarity. The phrase “frequently dishonest, often manufactured” was added to the second sentence .