More Lies and Lying Liars

Republicans--but not only them, also the gullible or worse in the media --have been promoting viral lies this week, two in particular.

The first is that 61 men released from Guantanamo have already returned "to the battlefield" as terrorist fighters. Where did this number come from? The charitable guess would be up somebody's ass. Here's how Keith Olbermann summarized it on Monday's Countdown:

Out of those 61 alleged recidivists, only 18 are actually even confirmed by the Pentagon in their definition of the term. The other 43 are simply, quote, “suspected.”

But quite how the Defense Department managed to suspect or even confirm recidivism remains unclear considering that a report from Seton Hall University pointed out, that the Pentagon does not actually keep track of released prisoners and their whereabouts, and that the Obama administration is just beginning to realize that there are almost no records of any kind about the detainees still at Gitmo.

And the official number of recidivists fluctuates while appearing to be inconsistent with other Defense Department data. The Seton Hall report also pointing out that some of those who, quote, “returned to the battlefield” have, in fact, done little more than utter anti-American comments or appear in a documentary about Guantanamo.

But then, this is the kind of thinking that gets Quakers and vegans spied on by Homeland Security and other federal thugs for terrorism, because they opposed oh say the Patriot Act, or the Iraq war, or they just weren't sufficiently reverent towards Fearless Leader G.W. Bush. That, combined with the laziness and incompetence that also results in this (Olbermann continued):

As for those 245 or so prisoners still in Gitmo, the “Washington Post”
is reporting that man of them have no comprehensive case files, that the
information and evidence against them is, according to a senior
administration official, quote, “scattered throughout the executive branch”
which means it takes weeks or will, or even months just to find out the information to begin the case-by-case review ordered by President Obama last week."

The purpose of these bogus figures was to cast President Obama as a terrorist tool for daring to close Gitmo. But before the truth could quite catch up with these lies, the Republicans were pushing another lie, this time to oppose President Obama's economic recovery package.

It's not going to stimulate the economy fast enough, they said, because this here Congressional Budget Office Report says so. It says it will take years. How many years depended on who was talking, but that didn't stop the media from jumping on the bandwagon--to the tune of at least 81 times, not just on Fox but on MSNBC, CNN and broadcast networks.

With all those important folks saying it, who could contradict it? Oh I don't know, how about the Congressional Budget Office. And they didn't have a minor quibble with the interpretation of the numbers or anything. They had a major quibble with the idea that they'd issued a report at all, because...they hadn't. Someone from the CBO put it this way: "We did not issue any report, any analysis or any study.”

Now it may be too much to ask media reporters to actually read the reports they report on, but I'd feel better if they actually looked at the cover sheet, or otherwise verified that it in fact existed.

Otherwise the Republican habit of lying is never going to be broken. And this country will continue to be governed by lies, laziness and bullshit.

By the way, according to Budget Director Peter Orzag--who happened to be the director of the Congressional Budget Office until he took this job quite recently--three-quarters of the recovery money will be spent in the next year and a half.