Monday, May 10, 2021

The Republicans are not just lying to us and their supporters. They are lying to each other.

We are all familiar with and frustrated by the lies, and the damned lies, that have been coming out of the Republican party for years. The lies that started years ago, but whose volume and frequency were amped up by tRump, who, although he refused to put any energy into helping the country, spent many of his waking hours lying, and lying again.

The Rs are continuing at the same ambitious level of lies set by the loser they love. And not just about results. And not just about vaccinations.

It turns out the Rs are lying to themselves about tRump’s support.

Here are some relevant paragraphs from an article about Liz Cheney in the Washington Post. (Michael Scherer, Josh Dawsey and Dan Lamothe)

The refusal to accept reality, she realized, went much deeper.

When staff from the National Republican Congressional Committee rose to explain the party’s latest polling in core battleground districts, they left out a key finding about Trump’s weakness, declining to divulge the information even when directly questioned about Trump’s support by a member of Congress, according to two people familiar with what transpired.

Trump’s unfavorable ratings were 15 points higher than his favorable ones in the core districts, according to the full polling results, which were later obtained by The Washington Post. Nearly twice as many voters had a strongly unfavorable view of the former president as had a strongly favorable one.

Cheney was alarmed, she later told others, in part because Republican campaign officials had also left out bad Trump polling news at a March retreat for ranking committee chairs. Both instances, she concluded, demonstrated that party leadership was willing to hide information from their own members to avoid the truth about Trump and the possible damage he could do to Republican House members, even though the NRCC denied any such agenda.

OK, it is no surprise that the Rs, who have lied so much to us and to their supporters, would lie to each other.

But what is interesting is why they have been lying so much. A lot of speculation has been that that is the only way to keep power. That is what Lindsey Graham has been saying.

But if the support is weaker than they have pretended it to be, if the Rs in leadership are not doing this because they are following the followers, there may be other reasons. Possibly it’s because they have no other plays. Possibly it’s the tRumpian threat to primary these folks, or to send his followers to threaten them in other ways. But possibly it’s because of kompromat. I have been wondering about Graham and kompromat for years.

Mark Twain made popular the phrase, “There are three types of lies: Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics.” But in this case, the Rs have hidden the statistics.

Remember "alternate facts"?  Some things just won't go away.

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