GOP Construction of a Fictional "Obama" Has Taken a Turn to the Absurd

[This article also appears on Huffingtonpost.com. You can access it from my author page here.]

Bill Maher, in relaying his last "New Rule" on the Jan. 27 episode of "Real Time," returned to an argument about the GOP presidential race that he has advanced regularly:

"You know, Republicans have created this completely fictional president. His name is Barack X. And he's an Islamo-socialist revolutionary who is coming for your guns, raising your taxes, slashing the military, apologizing to other countries, and taking his cues from Europe, or worse yet, Saul Alinsky! And this is how politics has changed. You used to have to run against an actual candidate. But, now, you just recreate him inside the bubble and run against your new fictional candidate."

(You can watch the clip of the whole "New Rule" here or read the transcript here.)

Maher isn't really exaggerating. Contrary to the fictional stories told by Republicans, the president has cut taxes (taxes are lower under Obama than they were under Ronald Reagan, and the tax burden on Americans is the lowest it's been since 1950), raised the military budget, been more aggressive in fighting Islamist militants than his predecessor (bin Laden and numerous dead Taliban and al-Qaida leaders would attest to this fact if they could, as well as all those hit by increased drone attacks, not to mention--although they're not Islamists--Qadafi and all the Somali pirates who have met their demise on the business end of American military hardware), and has not proposed or supported any anti-gun legislation (instead, signing a bill that included a Republican amendment allowing guns in national parks).

Andrew Sullivan did a great job in January of laying out the Obama created by the GOP and then showing how the facts spoil the Republican fiction.

And, to be clear, we're not just talking about fringe right-wing attention-seekers making stuff up about Obama. The GOP presidential frontrunner (is he still?), Mitt Romney, accused Obama of "putting free enterprise on trial" and delusionally claimed:

"President Obama believes that government should create equal outcomes. In an entitlement society, everyone receives the same or similar rewards, regardless of education, effort, and willingness to take risk. That which is earned by some is redistributed to the others."

Apparently, extending the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy makes you an opponent of free enterprise, and continuing the bailout of the banks makes you a proponent of wealth redistribution.

(And if Rick Santorum is now the front-runner, which I don't buy, well, he makes Romney look clear-eyed regarding the president. According to Santorum, Obama wants Iran to have nuclear weapons, has "overt hostility to faith," has failed to fight "militant socialism," defunded abstinence-only programs because he wants "people to be in poverty," etc.)

But even as commentators start to note the GOP effort to create a fictional Barack Obama, it looks like Republicans have decided to double down on the stupid. That is, they have strayed from plausible lies (lies that, to the uninformed, could feel true) to absurd ones.

For example, on Tuesday, Sean Hannity made the ridiculous comment that Osama bin Laden's death "wouldn't have happened if he [Obama] had his way."

Really think about what he said for a second. When SEAL Team Six went into Pakistan to take out bin Laden, who gave the order? Here's a hint: He has an oval-shaped office in the White House. If Obama didn't want bin Laden killed, bin Laden would still be alive.

(Oh, and you'll notice the president didn't ask for Pakistan's permission to breach its borders, nor did he offer any apologies for doing so.)

By now, the story of the bin Laden mission is well known. Success was not assured. The president weighed all of the information at his disposal, which had been accumulated from years of bin Laden surveillance since his inauguration, and he took a calculated risk to approve the mission. According to Vice President Biden, when the president's senior advisers made their final recommendations, nobody (with the exception of CIA Director Leon Panetta) gave an unqualified yes. Most waffled. Biden offered a solid no. But the president opted to go forward.

If the mission had failed, Hannity would have surely placed the blame on Obama for making a reckless decision. But it worked. And now he's saying the president didn't want it to happen?

To throw a little more absurd syrup on top of the bat-s%#t-crazy sundae, remember that Obama didn't just succeed in getting bin Laden; he made it a priority, unlike his predecessor, who said, "I really just don’t spend that much time on him, to be honest with you."

In short, Hannity says the president who prioritized finding bin Laden and made the difficult and risky decision to take out the al-Qaida leader (something the previous president couldn't be bothered with) didn't really want to kill him.

This is the level of absurdity to which the right has sunk in creating a fake Barack Obama.

Maybe this is all a good sign. Maybe, despite gains in the 2010 midterms (when the Republicans successfully created a fake health care law: Death panels! Care for illegal immigrants! They're taking your Medicare!), the GOP doesn't think it can beat the real Obama in November. Or maybe Republicans are worried by the numerous instances of buyer's remorse since November 2010, with successful candidate and statute recalls in Wisconsin, Ohio and Maine, as well as recent polls showing the GOP in trouble in Ohio and Obama doing relatively well in the battleground states.

Whatever the reason, the American people may be easily fooled at times, but nobody outside of the right-wing echo chamber will believe that Barack Obama didn't want to kill bin Laden. (That's even less believable than the idea that the guy who opted to fight in Vietnam and was awarded three purple hearts was a coward, while the guy who pulled strings to get into the National Guard to avoid going to Vietnam was a courageous leader, right?)

The Republican construction of a fake Barack Obama has gone off the rails. I hope the GOP keeps it up, as it only helps Obama's chances in November.

Ignoring the Publicity Seekers: A New Year's Resolution We Should All Make

[This article also appears on Huffingtonpost.com. You can access it from my author page here.]

While you sometimes have to convince skeptics that politics matter, it's even harder to get people to see that the decisions the media make when it comes to pop culture are important. But they are. We live in a time in which celebrity is not only something that often comes without being earned by any achievement, but fame is inescapable in our culture and the focus of so much attention on television and online.

I think we're paying a price for our obsession with faux celebrity. So even though I know it's a losing battle, my 2012 New Year's resolution is meant to take a shot at fighting back.

My 2012 New Year's resolution is to ignore people who receive news coverage despite the fact that, by any reasonable approach, they shouldn't matter as public figures.

Of course, when the subject of famous for being famous comes up, the first people to spring to mind are the members of a certain family whose late patriarch was an attorney for O.J. Simpson, mainly three of the daughters who seem to be famous for marrying professional athletes and shopping. This family (I won't name them and violate my resolution before 2012 even begins, but you know who I'm talking about) is the low hanging fruit of the faux celebrity phenomenon and the symbol of an entire class of reality show "celebrities" who are famous even though they have literally done nothing to warrant attention other than being on television. (This very online publication saw fit to feature on its front page the pregnancy of a woman whose claim to fame is having an affair with a professional golfer.)

It all reminds me of an exchange between Jason Alexander's George and a television executive played by Bob Balaban in the Seinfeld episode "The Pitch," in which the executive asks George why people would watch a show about nothing, and George responds, "Because it's on TV." The 20 years of television history since the episode ran seem to support the idea that George was right.

But I'm not just talking about the famous-for-being-famous set. Sometimes people used to matter but don't anymore. Or at least shouldn't. This week a former SNL performer, who hasn't had an acting gig of note since she left the show nearly 20 years ago, was in the news because she said the Muslim Brotherhood has infiltrated the U.S. government and is going to institute Sharia law. (Again, I'm not naming her.) If my next-door-neighbor said the same thing, no newspaper, website, television network or even community newsletter would cover it. Why? Because it's the rantings of a bats*$t-crazy lunatic. But because she was on a successful comedy show 20 years ago it's news? No.

Put another way, if this former actress announced she was switching from an iPhone to an Android phone, would the press cover it? No. Why? Because she doesn't matter. (Right or wrong, if Angelina Jolie swapped phones, there would be articles analyzing the underlying meaning. It's clear the former SNL performer only gets coverage for saying crazy crap.) So if she doesn't matter when she talks about mundane things, we shouldn't care about her isnane conspiracy theories, either.

Besides, it's pretty clear the actress gets this. When she says nutso things, the press covers it. When she doesn't (as happened for close to 20 years), she lives in obscurity. Clearly she's doing it to get publicity. Why give it to her?

So who cares if the press covers pseudo stars and washed up performers? I do, because the same mentality has seeped into politics.

This week a sitting member of Congress who is seeking the Republican nomination for the presidency made the obviously false, seriously insane charge, "The president can put abortion pills for girls 8 years of age, 11 years of age, on the bubblegum aisle." You may think, "Well, it's Michele Bachmann. Everyone knows she says ridiculous, false things all the time." But why does she? I don't believe she actually thinks the president wants to make morning-after pills available to minors in the candy section of stores. Even she has to know that's not true.

But she also knows that she will get attention when she says crazy, false, incendiary things. It's not like she can impress people with her intelligence, knowledge, depth of thought, competence or insightful proposals. Controversial is all she has, especially now that her campaign is deader than Kris Humphries' marriage (I can name him because he has an actual skill and reason to be covered, at least by the sports press). And it's a lesson learned from those who can only find celebrity through acting crazy.

Not that Bachmann is the only no-chance candidate making use of this tactic. Rick Santorum has made the obviously false statements that universities are liberal "indoctrination centers" and the president is a proponent of Marxism. Rick Perry decided to release a gay-bashing television commercial and was happy to relay an obviously false patient anecdote about the new health care law. The lesson is clear: Controversial statements get press, no matter how false, hateful or insane they are.

Clearly, the media has to (and should) publicize when a public official says something that is false and crazy. The public needs information with which to make civic and electoral decisions, and knowing that a politician has no problem lying to make a point and/or has off-the-wall beliefs is absolutely relevant.

But if a reality television star used to have a lousy hairstyle, well, I'm quite sure we can survive as a democracy without knowing this nugget of information.

So I resolve in 2012 not to contribute to the publicity of people that don't matter. If any of the far more powerful members of the media decide to follow suit, I think that would be a really good thing for our democracy.

And it's in the hands of all Americans not to allow themselves to be sucked into the nonsense, whether it's reality television celebrities, long-past-it performers or even politicians prone to attention-getting false and outrageous statements. The press may have to cover the controversy-baiting politicians, but Americans don't have to take them seriously.

It's not like the Michele Bachmanns, Ricky Perrys and Rick Santorums of the world need more encouragement to belch out outlandish lies and hateful charges to get publicity.

Why I Support the Walker Recall, Even as I Have Concerns About Recalls

[This article also appears on Huffingtonpost.com. You can access it from my author page here.]

The minute the clock strikes midnight Monday night, signifying that November 14 has turned into November 15, the effort to recall Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin will begin.

The organizers of the Walker recall have some wind at their backs. They were able to recall two GOP state senators in August. And last Tuesday voters in Ohio overwhelmingly overturned a union-busting law (similar to the one that has made Walker a recall target) that was championed by the state's newly elected Republican governor, while voters in Maine restored same-day voter registration, which had been eliminated by the state's rookie GOP/Tea Party governor and the Republican-controlled legislature.

But recalling Walker will require accumulating more than 500,000 signatures in 60 days just to trigger a recall election. Then the Democratic opponent will have to face an incumbent who will be able to raise tens of millions of dollars from his corporate sponsors. (A Walker supporter formed a bogus recall committee earlier this month as a strategy, allowing the governor to get a head start on fundraising.)

There is one obstacle to a Walker recall that I understand fully, but that I hope won't stop people who oppose the governor's policies from signing a recall petition and voting against him: The idea that using the recall process because you don't like a governor's policies is wrong.

I get it. I admit that, ideologically speaking, I see a lot of merit to the idea that recalls should be reserved for moral, criminal or ethical misconduct. I know regular recall campaigns can create a state of perpetual elections that prevents government from getting anything accomplished. And I find the argument persuasive that the democratic process has to be respected.

I've often said that the democratic process works, even if you don't like the results. When Americans re-elected George W. Bush in 2004, anyone surprised at the incompetence that followed for the next four years clearly wasn't paying attention to his first term. And the same can be said about the 2010 elections. While Walker, like the other Koch Brothers-supported GOP gubernatorial candidates, campaigned on job creation, anyone paying attention had to know that a full-on wish-list of traditional conservative initiatives (union-busting, anti-abortion rules, concealed carry, tax breaks for the wealthy, cuts for education, corporation-friendly laws that hurt consumers, etc.) would ensue, not job creation (something not happening in significant numbers in Wisconsin).

And yet, I will be looking for a petition to sign on November 15. And, if given the chance, I will vote for a Democrat over Walker in a recall election.

Why? My inspiration comes from, of all places, the Tea Party-controlled Republican party. I've watched over the last year as an allegiance to blind ideology has pushed Republicans--in both state and federal settings--into corner after corner, making it impossible to govern responsibly. Want to bargain for long-term deficit reduction? There can't be any compromising because of Tea Party- and Grover Norquist-driven no-tax pledges. Think it might be a mistake to allow visitors to a state capitol building to carry guns? Well, you can't vote against it if you are a rigid ideologue wedded to a vision of Second Amendment supremacy. The list goes on.

The modern GOP, which puts a blind loyalty to far-right-wing ideology over practical governing, has provided me with a wonderful lesson, one I will put into action with Walker's recall.

Yes, in theory, recalls may not be ideal for the democratic process. But unlike the Tea Party-controlled GOP, I will not let ideology get in the way of helping people in need. And there is no doubt in mind that the vast majority of the people of Wisconsin are being hurt by Walker's agenda as governor. He is championing policies that, brick by brick, are rolling back the victories for the middle, working and lower classes won over the last eight decades, trying to turn the clock back to the Hoover years, all in service to his far-right ideology (and, of course, his wealthy and corporate donors).

In addition to the politically motivated union-busting "budget repair" law (he used a budget deficit as a cover to take aim at a key financial supporter of Democratic candidates, so his corporate money could go unchallenged, as well as to pay back his corporate donors like the Koch Brothers, for whom union-busting lies near the center of their agenda), Walker's education cuts are reason alone to support a recall, as they have left the finances of most school districts in trouble (and prevented local communities from taking action to raise money for education).

Walker has pumped out propaganda claiming his policies have helped school districts better handle their finances, but the evidence doesn't back up his claims. Susan Troller of The Cap Times conducted a survey of school district superintendents, and her findings are downright depressing: Bigger classes, discontinued programs, and 3,400 lost jobs (so much for Walker creating jobs). (Troller's piece is a must-read.)

Throw in the governor's concealed carry law, his own voter ID law meant to keep traditional Democratic voters like students and the poor from the polls, and the rest of his anti-middle class, traditional far-right laundry list of initiatives, and it's clear that Walker's policies are a constant attack on the quality of life of a majority of Wisconsin's citizens.

So my concerns about recall efforts must be set aside. It's more important to support the effort to recall Walker, for the good of the state. And I hope others who share my recall concerns come to the same conclusion.