Yes, let's talk about lies. To your points:
1) Yes, bigotry is an equal-opportunity evil. But the right-wing media only seem concerned about it when they claim it comes from "the left", whoever that includes. According to them, no bigotry comes from anywhere on the right. Fox, Drudge, Breitbart, Limbaugh and the rest are silent about that aspect. A recent poll of Georgia Republicans showed that 24% believe interracial marriage should be outlawed, and 73% admire Paula Deen, vs. 59% Martin Luther King. Similar polls in recent years have shown a persistence in racial prejudice among Republicans and conservatives. Michael Steele, the former GOP chairman, says he heard several RNC members muttering racial slurs against him just after his election as GOP chair in 2009. Surprise, surprise, they dumped him after their wildly successful election of 2010; whereas white Reince Priebus, under whom the Republicans suffered severe defeats and setbacks, was reelected. Years ago, J.D. Watts, the reliably conservative black congressman from Oklahoma, wanted to move up in the House leadership from his mostly token fourth-ranking position. But he was blocked by the GOP membership for no good reason, leading to his decision to quit Congress, and he believes race was the obvious factor. The other day, Tea-Party protestors in Arizona chanted at Obama, "Bye-bye, black sheep" and carried signs reading "Impeach the foreign-born black Muslim".
2) This "Obama is a racist" crap is typical of the mindset of right-wing racists who deny any flaw on their own side. I have no more regard for Rev. Wright than most people and I don't like the fact that Obama belonged to his church. But in typical McCarthyite, guilt-by-association fashion you smear Obama not only with Wright but with Louis Farrakhan. What does Farrakhan have to do with Obama -- who, by the way, has denounced him, as well as Wright's rantings. You say it's for political expedience. Your opinion, without foundation. But Obama is not responsible for their beliefs. Your link to Farrakhan is utterly irrelevant as none of this has anything to do with Obama. There is video of Tea Partiers at the Capitol in 2010 calling Rep. John Lewis a n----r and spitting on another black member of Congress. Are Mitt Romney and other Republican leaders responsible for those people's acts -- which, by the way, neither he nor any single Republican ever denounced?
As far as being members of strange churches goes, Sarah Palin, for one, belongs to a weird sect that speaks in tongues and indulges in bizarre rituals and preachings. Is she at fault for what her foreign-born pastor does? Ted Cruz's father, an itinerant preacher of a self-invented extremist sect, recently said that God has chosen his son to become president. Is Cruz responsible for his father's blasphemy?
3) Racial divisions have been exploited and made into law by the Republican legislators in states including North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Florida, Ohio, Wisconsin, Virginia, and several others who passed laws explicitly -- and by their own stated admission -- designed to prevent minorities from voting in order to hold down the "Democratic" vote. Of course, the people who seek to hide their own racism (in many cases, to deny even to themselves that they're racists) do so by claiming Obama, or liberals, are racists. It's just twisting the truth to fill your own ideological predispositions.
4-7) Yes, ACORN was founded in 1970. Funny how the right never made it an issue until a black man was running for president 38 years later. Anyway, Obama worked for ACORN briefly, in 1995, when he was one of several Chicago-area lawyers who served as local counsel in a voting rights lawsuit filed by the Justice Department and the League of Women Voters. Any work he did for them afterward was limited and connected with such legal matters. His work for them was incidental and in conjunction with his work as a community organzier.
True, ACORN was "liquidated" after the so-called "scandal" stemming from Giles and O'Keefe's work. However, typically, you did exactly what they did -- selectively reported what happened; in this case, what Wikipedia says. As the article points out, and as other objective news organizations have proven, their videos, released by Fox and Brietbart, were selectively edited and falsified to show what they wanted them to show. Four subsequent investigations in 2009, by a former Attorney General of Massachusetts, acting as an independent investigator, as well as by the AG of California, the DA of Kings County, NY (Brooklyn), and the federal General Accounting Office, all found the videos to be "heavily edited" and deceptive. In its 2010 report the GAO found no evidence that any federal money had been mishandled by ACORN. Nevertheless, the bad publicity and the Democrats' cowardice in caving to the phony Republican media onslaught led to the organization's being defunded. None of this had anything to do with allegations of voter fraud.
As to that topic, investigations through the 2000s unearthed a number of instances where ACORN volunteers did turn in either duplicate voter registrations (i.e., names of people already registered) or, in a few cases, false registrations. These were discovered in several states (including Nevada), and in each case ACORN sued to recover the payments given to these volunteers, whose motivation was money (they were paid based on the number of signatures turned in), not voter fraud. Again, and as was pointed out even by states that went after these frauds, there was no effect on the actual vote because non-existent people, by definition, do not vote. When the affected states weeded out the duplications and fake registrations the remainder of ACORN's registrations were allowed to stand. It was determined that about 7% of ACORN's registrations were defective, not much more than the 5% figure that normally occurs in state or other voter registration drives. Nevada and the other states where registration irregularities were found all settled with ACORN and did not accuse the organization itself of conducting, condoning or covering up such cases. On the contrary, in most cases ACORN itself acted ahead or independently of the states in going after these abuses once they were discovered.
The major problem with ACORN was its incredibly sloppy organization. In 2008, The New York Times (that liberal paper) broke the story of widespread embezzlement in the organization by the founder's brother and another person, which ACORN tried to handle in-house, a stupid decision that worsened the group's credibility. Such things occurred in a few other instances, none of which involved wrongdoing on the part of the organization itself and all of which saw the indivduals responsible -- not ACORN itself -- prosecuted according to the law. And again, none of this had anything to do with voter registration. The fact that much of the valid criticism and wrongdoing connected with ACORN was discovered and pursued by "liberal" media gives the lie to complaints by people like you who claim that the "liberal media" are in the tank for Obama et al and do not report the truth.
Still, ACORN is a convenient whipping-boy for conservatives uninterested in facts, or in some cases, reality. After the 2012 election, polls showed that around 40% of Republicans believed ACORN had "stolen" the election for Obama -- even though the organization had gone out of existence almost two years earlier!
8) The IRS "targeted" Tea Party and similar groups on its own. Despite all the right-wing talk and abusive investigations there is absolutely no evidence of any White House involvement in or cover-up of this practice. You neglect to mention that it turns out the IRS also went after liberal interest groups at the same time. Tea Party groups and the GOP in general had no money problems in 2012. They spent more money than the Obama campaign, certainly a lot more than any "unconnected" liberal interest groups. Much of their money was misspent or wasted, one reason Romney lost. And by the way, though you can quarrel about how it was handled, the IRS was right to go after any group (left or right) seeking tax-exempt status even though it engaged in political activities -- which, by law, cannot be tax-exempt. Any TP group that claimed to be non-political was lying and did not merit tax-exempt status. (By your own admission, they were engaging in political activity.)
9) Fox News notwithstanding, there has been no "cover-up" of Benghazi, and all the investigations have turned up little of consequence, certainly nothing that shows the administration covered up or lied about it. There's plenty of blame to go around -- including among Congressional Republicans who cut security funding for embassies in the federal budget -- but the allegations of some massive cover-up are a pack of lies. If they had been substantiated the House Committee would still be investigating the issue. This is in tandem with the GOP claim that Obama didn't label the attack a terrorist act for weeks -- a faleshood exposed in the presidential debate last October, when people were reminded that Obama had called it "an act of terror" the very next day, as proven by the videotape of his news conference that day.
10) You're right, Holder withholding those documents was a stupid thing to do. Illegal? Probably not. But as usual you fail to mention that the documents finally were released...and nothing came of them. Not to mention that Fast and Furious was a Republican program instituted under Bush, under whom most of the abuses occurred. As for Obamacare, the only lies are yours -- "death panels" and the rest of those fabrications. It's now the law, and it isn't going to be defunded any time soon; so we'll see how well it works out. In the 1960s most Republicans said the same things about Medicare; now they all want to keep it -- including the Tea Party, many of whom have carried signs reading, "Keep the Government Out of My Medicare"...all of them too stupid to realize that Medicare IS a government program.
11) "Obama habitually lies about the state of the economy. His statements are so fantastical, one has to wonder if he's even capable of understanding it." What lies? The GOP, its messenger boy Fox, and others of that ilk claimed throughout the campaign that the administration was falsifying unemployment figures -- without, of course, offering a shred of proof. When has Obama "lied" about the economy? Not once has he made an untrue or deliberately false statement. Of course, he tries to put the best light on the economy, while the Republicans try to put it in its worst light, which is very helpful to the recovery. But that's different from "lying". Just because you don't like the facts doesn't mean they're untrue. And just how "capable" are you of understanding the economy? Our problems stem from the crash brought on by the reckless economic practices of the banking and mortgage industries in the 2000s, abetted by a sympathetic Bush administration in the tank for their policies.
I know the Drudge Report, have read it many times. He's been discredited repeatedly and is about as unreliable a "source" as they come. Plus of course he has a political agenda and so distorts the truth whenever he has to to further his far-right biases; hence the "billion" hits he gets every month -- mostly just people who already agree with his agenda seeking self-reinforcement of their views. Such numbers are meaningless in so far as credibility is concerned.
And that's the problem -- you blindly accept whatever right-wing outlets tell you because they agree with your preconceived beliefs, and "validate" what they say mainly through similar sources in the conservative echo chamber, reinforcing your opinions as "fact", and rejecting out of hand contrary facts or sources as "the left-wing media" and other such nonsense. Unfortunately, this kind of thing is true of a lot of people, left and right. The problem is, when people choose to believe their own "facts" instead of reality, there's no true basis for discussion, rendering further talk moot.
Not to mention that none of this has anything to do with the fine movie, Trial.
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