“Mr. Smith, do you still beat your wife?” and other lies the GOP must contend with in order to win in 2016

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The lies of the left drive American politics. For years we heard the “Bush Lied” mantra chanted endlessly. It didn’t matter that the claim was wrong. A lie is a very specific thing… Saying a falsehood when you know it to be wrong. Bush never did that. While in retrospect the question of Saddam’s WMDs is unclear, at the time George Bush, Bill Clinton and the intelligence agencies of most of the world believed he did. There is a difference between being wrong and lying… but the left doesn’t care about truth when a lie better serves their purposes, whether it’s WMDs, the “rape culture”, the “war on women” or blaming Benghazi on a video.

Two illustrative examples can be found in Ferguson, MO and Indiana. One was the “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” meme that played itself out everywhere from the House chamber to the NFL and countless places and broadcasts across the country. Of course the basic premise was a complete lie, and an easily known one at that, but that didn’t matter. There was little hard reporting by the mainstream press to illuminate that fact because it supported their political agenda.

Similarly a similar scenario played itself out on the national stage recently when Indiana passed its Religious Freedom Restoration Act. Across the mainstream media and the left (sorry for being redundant) cries of discrimination could be heard. The suggestion was that the RFRA would allow any business to choose not to serve gay customers simply because they were gay. That was a lie. The legislation did nothing of the kind. It simply protected from suit or prosecution those whose believed their religion was against gay marriage and therefore declined to participate in the wedding or its various supporting activities. The difference may be subtle, but it’s distinct. Not that that matters to the left because fealty to the truth are foreign concepts to them.

Why does any of this matter? Because government responds to the voices of the people, eventually. We got the disaster of Obamacare because the left convinced enough people that the failures of the healthcare marketplace were due to insufficient regulation, despite the fact that the opposite was true. We got Dodd-Frank because the left convinced enough people that the financial collapse of 2007 / 2008 was due to a lack of regulation when in reality the opposite was true. Even now Barack Obama is ramping up his push of the fictional “global warming” agenda because he buys into the hoax that’s been foisted on the nation over the last two decades despite overwhelming evidence that no such warming exists.

In modern day America reality is no longer the driving force for policy, instead it’s whatever the left says it is, factual or otherwise. Even when it comes to the GOP, they play according to the rules established by the left rather than dealing the reality most Americans actually live with. And that’s a problem… for the GOP and the country. If the GOP agrees to play by the ground rules set by the left, they will have handed victory to Hillary or Pocahontas or whoever emerges from the cesspool of the Democrat party.

2016 promises to be the single most defining election in a century and a half. The choice will be between continuing down our current path that inevitably leads to a fascist state where economics and culture are dictated by whatever the left deems is acceptable, or returning to a path ordered by limited government and individual rights. But that choice only exists if the GOP is willing to stand up and make the argument for freedom.

In both 2008 and 2012 the GOP candidates allowed the left to set the agenda and played a defensive game throughout. Defense may be the winning strategy in the NFL, but it’s not in national politics. It is preordained that the GOP is going to be labeled racist, sexist and homophobic. The left and the media (again… apologies for the redundancy) will no doubt seek to portray the GOP as the party of the rich that cares not for the pain and suffering of the poor. Like the innocent man who spends his time answering “no” to the question “Mr. Smith, do you still beat your wife?” rather than disputing the premise of the question in the first place, if the GOP allows the left to define the parameters of the campaign they’ve lost before the nominee is even selected.

During the run up to the convention and through to the general election, the GOP candidates have to be willing to take the slings and arrows that come with saying that Michael Brown was not the “Gentle Giant” the left has made him out to be and that his death was directly related to his actions, not his skin color. They must be willing to withstand the vitriol directed at them as they articulate the difference between discrimination against gays and the religious freedom that protects Christians from being forced to participate in gay “marriage” activities. They must be willing to endure the accusations of racism that would follow any suggestion that the need for strengthening the southern border is a matter of national security.

Whoever the eventual GOP nominee is, he or she will have the most fertile soil to till since Ronald Reagan in 1980. Eight years of Barack Obama will have set the lines stark, between economic fascism and free markets, between cultural coercion and individual rights, between international retreat and international leadership. The challenge for the GOP will be to articulate conservative positions that offer the greatest prospect for prosperity but rarely fit easily on a bumper sticker like “Coexist” or “Hope”. Not only will they have to figure out how to make the arguments in a way that a majority of Americans can understand and embrace, they’ll have to do so while facing a media that is lined up against them from the start and who is actively carrying water for the other side. The first step to doing so would be learning that the right answer to the question “Mr. Smith, do you still beat your wife?” is not no, but “I reject the basic premise of your question and here’s why…”.

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You’re correct in you observations, Vince.
I’ll just fill out the underlying motivations behind one of them you glossed quickly over:

Even now Barack Obama is ramping up his push of the fictional “global warming” agenda because he buys into the hoax that’s been foisted on the nation over the last two decades despite overwhelming evidence that no such warming exists.

But, I doubt Obama is any more a ”true believer” when it comes to man-made global warming” than he is a true believer in any religion.
This is a story linked in the FA’s Most Wanted file:
Investigating the Constitutionality of EPA ’ s Clean Power Plan
Reading through all of that PDF last night it became clear that Obama is merely using the EPA’s regulations to hold Federal Highway Funds from any states he doesn’t like.
It’s a big stick of punishment for states that still wish to be as independent as ”state’s rights”’ allow.
It forces all states into a Federalism that is unconstitutional except when it is voluntary.
But the duress involved in withholding massive funding from these states for not going along with the EPA rises to a higher, illegal level , therefore rendering Obama’s EPA regs/punishments unconstitutional.
Obama wanted the power via the EPA.
He is not a true believer in AGW.
But you are 100% correct in that he lies like a rug to get people with their own green agendas to go along with him. They are his useful idiots.

Excellent analysis, Vince. It’s time to start playing offense against the Left lest they get total control of the country (which is what they truly want) and completely ruin whatever is left of it. They will continue to lie to “validate” their propaganda. A most recent example would be the jobs data. Remember we were told that the economy gained 257,000 in January and 295,000 in February? Here are the revised numbers as of today. 201,000 and 264,000 respectively. They were ‘off’ by 77,000 jobs or by over 8%. January was off by 18%. Yet no one calls them out on it thus perpetuating the myth that the economy is “booming”. Imagine if a someone other than a Democrat was in the WH.

http://www.bls.gov/web/empsit/ceseesummary.htm

Good Post Vince, the Repubs need to get the Oval Office in 17 and keep the house and Senate for at least 2 years, that should give them enough time and power to reverse a lot of this crap. Do away with the EPA (by requiring their ‘rules’ to have to be approved by congress. )

@Redteam: The big thing is going to be to appoint Constitutionalists to the bench. That will do more than just about anything to keep all of these experiments with socialism and other government power abuses in check.

Your precedent stated that climate change caused his kid’s asthma. The First Caboose of the US said no, it was peanuts and circus dust. Michael Mann said the oceans ruined his hockey schtick. Give us more government money or else the Kraken, the Behemoth, or Poseidon will get you. Al Gore reiterated that the Oceans are turning into battery acid. Pachauri is up on 3 groping charges. Gore coached him well. You folks have racketeering laws. Use them.

I was reading on Weasel Zippers that a Larry Reid, brother and problem drunk annoyance of Harry’s, laid a beating on the Senate Minority leader. This info came out of a AA meeting in Searchlight, Nevada. This goes to show that exercise equipment is better than the Koch hater stated. That takes care of the beating part of your article, Vince.

@oil guy from Alberta: It would have been poetic justice if one of Romney’s kids or Romney himself laid the ass whipping on him.

@oil guy from Alberta:

Your precedent stated that climate change caused his kid’s asthma.

Actually he said that global warming did it. But it has been pointed out that there has been zero global warming since she was born, so that’s not likely. But it has been pointed out that with Obozo being a smoker, she is 8 times more likely to develop asthma. So he did it to her, but he wants to blame innocent people. But then he doesn’t have any education so he can’t be expected to have learned much.

Who needs to lie about republican intentions? All you’ve got to do is listen to what they’re saying.

Jeb Bush Calls for Privatizing Elements of Veterans Health Care

Mr. Bush becomes the third 2016 GOP contender – following Mr. Paul and Marco Rubio of Florida – to support a system of vouchers to replace or compete with the VA health care system, which experienced intense criticism last year when an internal audit revealed that VA employees falsified reports of patient wait times at facilities across the country.

When you have problems you fix the problems. You don’t use them as an excuse to hand veterans a voucher and send them off to find their own medical care.

Highly publicized problems with the VA notwithstanding, the fact of the matter is that veterans like the VA healthcare system. The VA healthcare system has been consistently rated higher by veterans receiving services than the private sector healthcare system.

@Greg:

The VA healthcare system has been consistently rated higher by veterans receiving services than the private sector healthcare system.

Mere opinion, there is no empirical evidence to support your assertion….

@Greg:

When you have problems you fix the problems. You don’t use them as an excuse to hand veterans a voucher and send them off to find their own medical care.

Really? Like Obama fixed them? Why not let the public sector have a hand in it. After all, it’s not like the government did a commendable job. All we’ve seen is waste, corruption and cover-up, the mainstays of the liberal movement.

Greg must have missed the fact that Jeb Bush has pretty much no support whatsoever from true Conservatives. As well as the fact that virtually no true conservative counts progressive-establishment “fiscal conservatives” as actually being conservatives. We refer to them as RINOs which Jeb is unquestionably one. Jeb Bush does not talk for all Republicans.