Big-Lies-2012.Pdf

Big Lies 2012:

The Right-Wing Propaganda Machine and How It Still Distorts the Truth

By Jason Sattler

Edited and Foreword by Joe Conason

Big Lies 2012: The Right-Wing Propaganda Machine and How It Still Distorts the Truth By Jason Sattler Edited and Foreword by Joe Conason

First Edition

ISBN: 978-1-300-34081-2

Table of Contents

Introduction ...... 4

Big Lie One: The GOP Reveals Debt Clock They Misplaced In 2001 ...... 7

Big Lie Two: Paul Ryan Repackages The Gingrich Medicare Hoax ...... 10

Big Lie Three: Killing Obamacare And Stealing From Seniors ...... 14

Big Lie Four: Fabricating A Failed Obama Presidency ...... 16

Big Lie Five: Job Creationism ...... 19

Big Lie Six: Redistributing A Failed Argument ...... 22

Big Lie Seven: Republicans Are Fiscally Conservative ...... 25

Big Lie Eight: The Osama Swiftboaters ...... 27

Big Lie Nine: “Completely False” Race-Baiting On Welfare Reform ...... 29

Big Lie Ten: The Right To Be An American ...... 31

About the Author ...... 35

About the Editor ...... 35

Introduction

Nothing has better characterized the vicious 2012 presidential campaign—which began, for Republican leaders, with the inauguration of Barack Obama in January 2009—than the re-emergence of disinformation and dissembling as the right’s primary weapons in political combat.

While these techniques scarcely represent anything new, as I documented in Big Lies: The Right-Wing Propaganda Machine And How It Distorts The Truth (St. Martin’s Press, 2003), time has multiplied the capacity of the Republican Party to amplify falsehoods about the economy, health care reform, civil rights, immigration, and a host of other critical issues. Added to the truth-destroying artillery of Fox News Channel plus The Rush Limbaugh Show and all its broadcast imitators are the online venues, such as the Breitbart empire and—perhaps most significantly in an election year—the vast advertising resources in all media provided by dark campaign money under the Citizens United ruling to groups like Karl Rove’s American Crossroads and the Koch brothers’ Americans for Prosperity.

Just review the fact-checking sites that have become so influential over this cycle, and it is easy to see that Republican deception is the dominant theme of this campaign—and of politics in America today. On sites like the Pulitzer Prize-winning Politifact, as science journalist Chris Mooney has documented, the frequency and intensity of “Pinocchio” or “Pants on Fire” ratings earned by Republicans far outstrips those won by Democrats, even though mainstream fact-checkers strive to achieve partisan parity. Well before the election season officially began, the likelihood of being rated a liar was roughly two to three times greater among Republicans than Democrats.

We have argued in The National Memo and elsewhere that this imbalance is not accidental, for the capacity of Republicans to attract voters depends heavily on concealing the historical results of their policies.

Consider the economy, which voters and pundits agree is the most salient question in a nation still recovering from the Great Recession. Polling data shows that most voters still hold the Bush administration responsible for the ruinous condition of the economy, dissatisfied as they may be with the progress achieved since President Obama took office. Yet roughly half the electorate still regards Mitt Romney and his fellow Republicans as more likely to improve the economy and create more jobs.

Based on the historical record, this is a grave misconception—as former President Bill Clinton has pointed out many times. And characteristically, he has done the arithmetic. At the Democratic National Convention in September, Clinton explained: "Since 1961, for 52 years now, the Republicans have held the White House 28 years, the Democrats 24. In those 52 years, our private economy has produced 66 million private-sector jobs. So what's the job score? Republicans 24 million, Democrats 42." When CNN fact-checked Clinton’s numbers, the network found that he was just slightly off—because he was too generous to the Republicans. Their numbers showed “a net increase of 44.7 million jobs created during the Kennedy, Johnson, Carter, Clinton and Obama administrations, compared to a 23.3 million figure during the Nixon, Ford, Reagan and both Bush administrations.”

The partisan pattern of Republican economic incompetence goes back much further than 1961, however, as Dr. James Gilligan of New York University carefully documented last year in his path-breaking book Why Some Politicians Are More Dangerous Than Others (and as I reported in Big Lies as well). Using statistics compiled by the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the National Bureau of Economic Research, Gilligan found that unemployment rose during every Republican administration and fell during every Democratic administration for more than a century. Every Republican president left unemployment higher than when he entered the White House, and every Democratic president left it lower, with unemployment rates remaining higher for longer periods under the Republicans.

“If we count up the net sum of all the increases that occurred during Republican administrations from 1900 through 2008, we find that the Republicans brought about a cumulative increase of 27.8 percent in the unemployment rate, and the Democrats an almost exactly equal decrease of 26.5 percent,” Gilligan calculated. The reason was that America suffered about three times as many months of recession under Republican government than under Democratic government, from 1900 through 2010, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research—an organization headed for many years by the conservative Harvard economist Martin Feldstein, who is currently among Mitt Romney’s top economic advisors. Recessions began 17 times during Republican presidencies and only six times during Democratic presidencies, and always lasted several months longer under Republicans, too.

Only a torrent of malarkey, as Joe Biden would say, can distract and deceive the citizenry about these basic facts— combined with the historical amnesia that remains our most crippling political affliction. But the economy is certainly not the only important issue distorted by Republican mendacity.

As National Memo’s executive editor Jason Sattler demonstrates in these brief but biting essays, the trumpery extends from health care reform and Medicare to the federal deficit, taxes, and the record of the Obama administration itself. What is most troubling about this year’s campaign is the determination of the Republican ticket and its supporters to mislead voters not only about the president’s achievements and intentions, but about their own plans for the nation’s future.

The Big Lie lives. But in these pages you will find the big truths that are the only effective antidote. We’ve made them available for free, because we believe that reliable information and honest analysis are vital to defending democracy and defeating plutocracy.

I hope you will share Big Lies 2012: The Right-Wing Propaganda Machine and How It Still Distorts the Truth as widely as possible between now and Election Day.

Joe Conason Editor-in-Chief The National Memo

The Big Lie: The Republican National Convention featured a debt clock to hold the president accountable for the mounting debt.

The Truth: Republican policies and the economy they created are responsible for the vast majority of the debt and the Romney/Ryan budget plans would only increase the debt.

One of the most notable decorations at the 2012 Republican National Convention was a clock that counted the amount of debt racked up from the moment the event opened. It was supposed to be a visual indictment of the president’s policies—the result of “wasteful government spending.”

But the Republican debt clock would have been more honest if it had been captioned by the RNC’s slogan: “We Built It!”

No one at the podium in Tampa addressed the actual source of the debt. The most candid speaker was New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, who said he hopes everybody has forgotten: “It doesn’t matter how we got here.”

Facts are now officially for the other guys.

During the Republican National Convention, Mitt Romney’s pollster Neil Newhouse finally said something that fact-checkers found accurate: “We’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact- checkers.” The Romney campaign’s disregard for facts is warmly embraced by a right wing that has built up a vast alternative media to reinforce their own version of reality.

In this reality, President Obama’s 2009 budget was the first budget ever to hit a $1 trillion-dollar deficit, which was entirely the result of his policies. The fact that the president passed a $787 billion stimulus early in his administration lent this argument seeming validity. But what Republicans ignored was the mounting cost of Bush-era policies and failures.

The actual facts are undisputed: In 2000, the debt clock in New York City was shut down because it was ticking backwards. A few months later, George W. Bush came into office with a budget in surplus. Facing a mild recession, he promptly blew the surplus with a round of across-the-board tax breaks that were mostly enjoyed by the richest Americans.

Then 9/11 happened. In the midst of two wars, Bush and the Republican-dominated Congress passed another huge tax cut that greatly benefited the investor class, and an unfunded expansion of Medicare that shortened the lifespan of the program. Along the way, Bush also exploded government spending on the military and homeland security. By 2008 the financial crisis hit, triggering hundreds of billions of dollars in mandatory spending increases for the millions of Americans who were suddenly out of work.

All this was entirely the result of right-wing policies approved by a right-wing president and a right-wing Congress. You can blame the financial crisis on Bush—or simply note that it happened after seven years of his occupancy of the White House. But there’s no doubt: the policies were Republican.

As Ezra Klein explains: “If there’d been no Bush tax cuts, no wars, no financial crisis, and everything else had been the same? Debt would be between 20 and 30 percent of GDP today, rather than almost 100 percent.”

Since President Obama took office, he signed the stimulus into law and extended the Bush tax breaks because the GOP held the breaks for the middle class hostage. Along with the extension he was able to get the GOP to agree to a temporary payroll tax reduction twice and an extension of unemployment benefits. He has also reduced the deficit with Obamacare, as well as forged a $4 trillion debt deal during the debt limit crisis—a deal the GOP now refuses to honor. Altogether, President Obama has grown government at a slower rate than any president in generations.

The president has proposed a plan that would cut the debt to about 70 percent of GDP mostly by ending the Bush tax breaks for the rich, slowing the growth of the military and withdrawing from Afghanistan.

Romney and Ryan’s plans to deal with the debt will actually do little to reduce deficits and the debt. Both propose massive tax breaks for the richest that are supposed to be paid for by eliminating deductions. But once the Tax Policy Center revealed this would require a $2,000 tax increase for the middle class, Romney backed away from a promise to make the cuts deficit-neutral and is now simply promising a 20 percent across-the-board tax cut. For the middle class, this would be about enough money to fix a dent in a small car. For the richest, their cuts will be enough to buy a small car factory. Romney and Ryan both want to increase the growth of the military and cut government everywhere else, eventually passing on huge health care costs to seniors.

None of that would do much to slow the debt clock. And if they were elected, you can bet they wouldn’t be so quick to implement their cuts, knowing a recession would be inevitable.

It’s nice that the GOP finally found the clock they misplaced in 2001. It would be better if they remembered—and admitted—who got it ticking again.

The Big Lie: Medicare is unsustainable and Republicans want to “save” it by “reforming” it.

The Truth: Medicare is the most cost-effective health care system in America. Paul Ryan’s plan to turn it into a fixed-benefit voucher program would violate the Medicare promise and cost seniors trillions of dollars, while further enriching private insurance companies.

Less than two years after his inauguration, a charismatic Democratic president suffers a shellacking in a midterm election. A fiery Republican majority floods into the Capitol, declaring their determination to take the country back and attack the scourge of big government. A bold intellectual leader roundly praised by the Washington elite for his “seriousness” steps to the forefront, certain that he has answers for the American people.

His solution to budget woes? End Medicare as we know it.

The year? 1995. The Republican leader? Newt Gingrich.

“Now we don’t get rid of it in round one because we don’t think that that’s politically smart, and we don’t think that’s the right way to go through a transition,” Gingrich said, in a now-famous statement replayed thousands of times during the 1996 presidential campaign. “But we believe it’s going to wither on the vine because we think people are voluntarily going to leave it—voluntarily.”

When Medicare was signed into law by Lyndon B. Johnson in 1965, a majority of Republicans voted against the creation of a single-payer health care plan for retirees that, combined with Social Security, promised security and a basic standard of well-being for all Americans 65 and older. Generations later. Medicare remains one of the most popular government innovations in American history. A 2011 poll found that 88% of Americans believe that Medicare has been good for the country—making it nearly as popular as tax rebates, mid-afternoon naps, and apple pie.

And it’s not only liberals who love Medicare. In 2010, in the midst of the Tea Party’s peak furor, a New York Times/CBS poll found that 62 percent of Tea Partiers answered “Yes” when asked, “Are the benefits from government programs such as Social Security and Medicare worth the costs of those programs?” Sixty-two percent! That’s nine points higher than the percentage of Tea Partiers who described themselves as “angry” at the federal government.

Still, the Republicans cherish their fantasy that people would voluntarily want to leave Medicare—even after saving it helped Bill Clinton win an easy re-election in 1996.

Fifteen years after Newt Gingrich revealed his plan to let the original vision of Medicare wither away, another right-wing scion stepped forward to propose an updated version of the same scheme. Call it “Kill Medicare 2.010.” Like the second version of the Terminator, this futuristic destroyer was a shape-shifter, determined to succeed where its predecessor had failed.

Paul Ryan—the latest GOP wunderkind to believe that all retired people are missing in life is the joy of wrangling with private insurers—is part of a new House majority that has even less shame than Gingrich’s 1994 “Contract With America” class. For Ryan and the so-called Tea Partiers who took 63 seats in the 2010 elections had actually won their majority by campaigning against cuts to—say it with me—Medicare!

It was a Machiavellian move that would make Machiavelli blush (which is, by definition, a Karl Rove move). Republicans around the country attacked their opponents for voting for $500 million in Medicare cuts that were part of the Affordable Care Act. What they didn’t explain is that those cuts were aimed solely at a program called Medicare Advantage, a private insurance experiment championed by conservatives that has proved to be wasteful and bloated.

No cuts to actual benefits were made. No costs were passed on to seniors. In fact, the Affordable Care Act closed the so-called Medicare Part D “donut” hole, giving many seniors a $250 refund on the prescriptions they purchased. And for the first time Medicare would cover preventive care for free.

So what did this new Republican majority propose as soon as they were blown into Washington on the wind of their campaign against cuts to Medicare? Trillions and trillions of dollars in real cuts to Medicare benefits.

It should go down as history’s greatest political bait and switch. But in a post-Citizens United America, history belongs to whoever can afford it.

Of course, Paul Ryan and the new class of Republicans had learned one thing from Gingrich’s debacle: they would never be able to get those who enjoy or were about to enjoy Medicare’s benefits to opt out of the program. They knew first-hand that seniors would reject any immediate cuts to Medicare, the same way they’d rejected many Democrats who voted for the ACA.

So how do you gut Medicare when seniors who always vote won’t let you gut Medicare? You pretend that your plan to voucherize Medicare and to raise the retirement age to 67 won’t actually affect seniors. “If you’re 55 or over,” Paul Ryan said over and over, “this doesn’t affect you.” You get to keep the program you love, he said. Don’t worry, seniors, Ryan reassured. This won’t affect you. It will only affect your younger siblings, your cousins, your children. They’ll pay for you to keep traditional Medicare.

This is how you save Medicare, Ryan claimed.

Why would Ryan claim that he was “saving” Medicare as he was proposing to dismantle it? Simply because he knew nearly no one wants to buy what he’s selling.

When Ryan released his plan, polls showed that 65 percent of Americans opposed turning Medicare into Ryan’s voucher system, about the same percentage who opposed Gingrich’s Medicare ideas in the 90s.

Why do they reject Ryan’s Vouchercare? Mostly because Medicare works. Not only are the costs of Medicare rising much more slowly than private insurance—despite serving an elderly population—but the program is much more popular than the private insurance programs into which the GOP wants to funnel hapless older Americans.

A 2012 Commonwealth Fund study states the case plainly: “Medicare beneficiaries age 65 and older are more satisfied with their health insurance, have better access to care, and are less likely to have problems paying medical bills than working-age adults who get insurance through employers or purchase coverage on their own.”

In every way that matters to Americans, Medicare is more cost-effective and popular than private insurance. Gingrich and Ryan both know this fact. So how do they make the case to end this program that has saved so many lives and alleviated so much heartache?

They scream: “Medicare is going broke!”

The idea that Medicare is going broke is almost as old as the program itself. The GOP knows that no one trusts their assessment of the solvency of a program they clearly want to kill. That would be like trusting the Big Bad Wolf to babysit Little Red Riding Hood. So to properly scare Americans, opponents of Medicare constantly turn to the good old Medicare Trustees’ Report.

In the Trustees’ report, GOP politicians always find the Mediscare they’re seeking. In 1970, the report said Medicare would go bankrupt in 1972. In 1981, it predicted Medicare would be out of cash by 1994. In 1990, the expiration date was 2003. In 2010, the predicted year of insolvency was 2029.

The Affordable Care Act’s elimination of private-insurer waste and addition of smarter care has added years to the life of the Medicare program. And this is before the ACA even begins to take full effect, potentially improving the health of the millions of Americans who become eligible for health care every year and saving us untold billions.

Despite looking at 19 years of solvency—the most optimistic prediction for Medicare since the days of the Clinton surplus—Republicans decided that their huge victory in 2010, won by “defending Medicare,” was a mandate to tear the program apart while they had the chance.

Paul Ryan loves to say that the United States is facing the most predictable debt crisis in history. He says the only solution is to reduce our debt now by cutting spending and asking seniors to pay more for Medicare—roughly twice as much for the same care that current beneficiaries receive now.

If we are truly headed for a crisis, wouldn’t any “serious” leader point out that taxes on the American people haven’t been lower in more than 30 years? When mega-millionaires like Mitt Romney are paying 14 percent tax rates, certainly there are solutions other than passing enormous costs on to seniors and cutting essential services.

But now we come to the darkest lies in Paul Ryan’s rhetoric. While asking future seniors to pay $6,500 more a year for Medicare, he would be cutting taxes on millionaires by an average of $265,000 a year. Is this what you do when you’re facing a debt crisis?

The Ryan Plan was obviously written in The Twilight Zone. It isn’t a plan to save Medicare. It’s a plan to fleece the middle class.

How can we actually save Medicare? Keep the efficiencies written into the Affordable Care Act. Don’t invite private insurers and Wall Street into the system to vacuum trillions of dollars from senior citizens. Legislate basic reforms that in the past have been supported on both sides of the aisle.

For instance, many commentators have asked why everyone who uses Medicare isn’t required to sign a living will stating how they’d like to be treated in their final days, the period when a remarkably high percentage of the Medicare budget is actually spent. This sort of reform has been scare-mongered by Ryan’s allies as a nefarious government plan to get between you and your doctor (those “death panels”) when it does just the opposite.

You can also make the argument that the best way to save Medicare is to expand it to all citizens, as Canada has done with a system they ingeniously call “Medicare.” As President Clinton has pointed out until he’s hoarse, every developed country in the world has universal health care and they all pay less for their care than we do. The fact that the Affordable Care Act provides near universal coverage will also lead to a more healthy population of Medicare beneficiaries in the years to come.

But rest assured, the best way to save Medicare is to keep Newt Gingrich, Paul Ryan, and the Republicans who want to “save” it as far from the program as we possibly can.

The Big Lie: Romney and Ryan’s plan to repeal Obamacare means there will be no benefit cuts to anyone 55 or over.

The Truth: Romney and Ryan’s Medicare plan cuts benefits to current seniors and promises massive benefit cuts to follow.

The only honesty you can expect from the Romney campaign between now and November 6 is when they tell reporters that giving any more details on their Medicare plan would be “suicidal.” The lesson Mitt believes he learned when he lost to Ted Kennedy in 1994 is that details don’t help. They cost you votes and they cost you elections. And in this case, Mitt Romney could not be more correct.

By choosing Paul Ryan, he made Medicare the central issue in the campaign. Since then, they have both blasted the president for more than $700 millions in savings to Medicare that were passed in the Affordable Care Act and affirmed later in Paul Ryan’s own House Republican budget. Meanwhile, Romney has promised seniors that his plan includes “no adjustments, no changes, no savings.” If that’s true, Mitt is also promising to bankrupt Medicare by the end of his first term, which is what the Medicare Trustees say would happen if Obamacare is repealed.

This is one just one of many details of the Romney Medicare plan that he’ll never mention.

Killing Obamacare will also eliminate two specific benefits to seniors: a $250 rebate on prescription drugs that helps millions, and free preventive care for all.

That is a benefit cut.

Then with Medicare set to go bankrupt, Mitt will have to make cuts to current Medicare beneficiaries or let the program go bankrupt. What will Mitt do? His advisors have floated upping the retirement age or making Medicare, which is already means-tested, even more means-tested.

That is a benefit cut.

Both Romney and Ryan promise huge cuts for Medicaid, which help the most vulnerable seniors unable to afford Medicare co-pays and nursing homes.

That is another HUGE benefit cut.

Romney and Ryan promise that everyone who is 55 or older can keep current Medicare. What they don’t mention is that they will have to decrease benefits in order to forestall bankruptcy. Everyone under 55 will receive a voucher that will cover only a fraction of their insurance, costing seniors an estimated $6,000 a year more for what current beneficiaries are already getting.

This is obviously another huge benefit cut.

Romney/Ryan apologists like the New York Times’ David Brooks look at the nominees’ plan to turn Medicare into a “premium support” program and ignore the unknown costs of such a plan. Brooks writes, wrongly, that “the burden for paying for basic health care would fall on the government, not on older Americans.” The fact is that Americans who have been paying into Medicare since 1966 should be very afraid that the benefits they’ve been promised will deteriorate rapidly if the Romney/Ryan plan is put into effect.

All the evidence we have suggests that benefits will be reduced if Republicans get their way. Romney has said that his plan is very similar to the privately-operated Medicare Advantage program. Medicare Advantage currently overpays about $2,000 per beneficiary compared to traditional Medicare. And there’s no evidence that the “competition fairy” will decrease costs, no matter how many times the GOP conjures it. Who will pick up the extra costs of a less-efficient system?

This will amount to another HUGE benefit cut, too, when the costs are picked up by seniors.

Romney and Ryan have to either lie or obfuscate when it comes to Medicare because their plan is simple: Cuts to current seniors, along with inefficiencies that speed up Medicare’s bankruptcy, followed by huge benefit cuts to future seniors.

That’s their central campaign theme. Just don’t expect them to ever mention it.

The Big Lie: President Obama’s tenure has been marked by a failure to fulfill his own promises to grow the economy and cut the deficit, while squandering his historic opportunity to lead the world.

The Truth: President Obama’s critics must fictionalize his record in order to justify supporting Republicans who have failed in every way the president has succeeded.

How do you attack a president who prevented a Great Depression? A president who saved the auto industry and passed student loan, credit card and health care reform while securing trillions in deficit cuts? How do you bring down a president who oversaw the capture of Osama bin Laden and the destruction of most of the leadership of al Qaeda? A president who ended one war and convinced the nation to responsibly end another?

If you’re a former John McCain advisor with a huge crush on Paul Ryan, you simply make up a different president to attack.

Historian and Harvard professor Niall Ferguson did just that in a screed featured on the cover of Newsweek magazine in August. In what amounts to a free Romney campaign ad, Ferguson’s article is a tour de force of the same tired bromides that have been used to bash the president since the day he took office, along with a cavalcade of falsehoods.

The chief arguments presented by Ferguson are recycled Republican clichés. First, he blames the president for job losses that began in January 2008, when Hillary Clinton was still the frontrunner in the Democratic primary. Second, he upbraids Obama for predictions and promises made before anyone— including the Bush administration—had any idea how deep the financial crisis would become. But we haven’t seen a single right-wing critique of this president that doesn’t rely on faulty predictions from early in 2009 as the crisis was unfolding. Suddenly the fact that the Bush economy was worse than anyone expected is this president’s fault.

What makes Ferguson’s attack particularly contemptible is his willful deception about the Affordable Care Act, insinuating that the president broke his promise to pass health care reform that would not add to the deficit. His reform doesn’t. It cuts the deficit by billions. Rebutting criticism by Paul Krugman, Ferguson said he had deliberately referred to just one part of the bill, intentionally misleading the reader.

This admission of trickery prompted economist and Berkeley professor Brad DeLong to issue a demand to Newsweek and The Daily Beast: “Fire his ass.” DeLong went on to say that Harvard should examine whether Ferguson has the moral character to teach at the university.

In fact, Ferguson’s laundry list of complaints against the president reeks of intentional deception. He uses shady, conflicting measures of the deficit. He ignores massive green energy investments in the stimulus program. He intentionally portrays China’s surging growth and enormous population—which mean that its economy will inevitably outgrow ours—as a failure by the president.

Meanwhile, Ferguson ignores the crucial role played by his hero, Paul Ryan, in destroying the two best opportunities for a “grand bargain” to bring down the deficit even more. Ryan voted against the Simpson- Bowles Commission recommendations and reportedly nixed a deal the president had tentatively struck with Speaker Boehner during 2011’s ridiculous debt limit charade. While berating the president for doing nothing to cut the deficit, Ferguson cynically lambasts him for “steep cuts to the defense budget.”

In his dizzy look at Obama’s foreign policy, Ferguson mentions neither the sanctions the president has placed on Iran, nor a certain infamous name: Osama bin Laden. As if he were his own straight man, Ferguson then writes: “Remarkably the president polls relatively strongly on national security.”

Ferguson also regurgitates the “You didn’t build this” attack on government’s role in the economy. But this is merely an interlude before his final ode to Paul Ryan. “There is literally no one in Washington who understands the challenges of fiscal reform better,” Ferguson drools, accepting at face value Ryan’s plan to gut government to pay for tax breaks for the richest, while his budget does nothing to cut the deficit.

Yet Ryan is our savior, Ferguson assures us. How does he know? When they first had dinner to discuss the debt crisis, he recalls fondly, “Ryan blew me away.” Maybe as he was blowing Ferguson away, the congressman gave the professor the missing details of his budget—including the trillions in deductions he would have to eliminate to achieve a semblance of reality.

But why would we ever trust Niall Ferguson, who has been wrong about every economic issue that matters since the president took office?

In response to the Newsweek piece, James Fallows apologized on behalf of his alma mater Harvard. Jonathan Alter said that Newsweek, the magazine where he worked for 28 years, had “disgraced itself.” Alex Pareene of Salon.com quipped: “Getting every single fact wrong in a magazine cover story is a great way to get everyone’s attention.”

But Newsweek itself did not respond, except to tweet Ferguson’s response.

A dishonest attack like Ferguson’s is to be expected in an election year. But a national news magazine should check the facts in a broadside cover attack on the president.

And Professor: If you’re going to write Paul Ryan fan fiction, why not keep it in your diary where it belongs?

The Big Lie: Tax cuts for the rich pay for themselves by creating jobs for the middle class.

The Truth: Tax cuts for the richest have a devastating effect on the economy by creating fiscal deficits while deepening income inequality.

Mitt Romney’s campaign has been ripe with a putrid old lie that America’s right wing has been reheating and serving up for years: We understand how the economy works and thus we know how jobs are created!

But when you poke at what the GOP is actually serving, you realize that this collapsed soufflé displays a certain disconnection from reality. The Republican right is stuck with a cult-like devotion to a Big Lie that has been disproved again and again.

Despite all evidence to the contrary, despite their loud talk of debt and deficits as a “cancer” that will destroy America, Republicans cling to the belief that tax breaks for the rich create jobs. Call it Job Creationism.

The myth of Job Creationism goes like this: Ronald Reagan’s tax cuts created an economic miracle in the 1980s that lasted through the Clinton years and would have worked in the Bush era, except that Clinton had ruined everything by enjoying his Reagan windfall too much.

Both Reagan’s and George W. Bush’s tax cuts left us—to paraphrase George H.W. Bush—in deep voodoo. After the Republicans manufactured these massive debts and were then ousted by voters, they decided the bills must be paid immediately with cuts to government services and benefits. Why? Because deficits start to matter as soon as Democrats take office.

If Republicans are so concerned about debt, why not just raise the top tax rates back to where they were during the economic booms of the 1950s, or at least the 90s?

Because in the Job Creationist doctrine, tax increases on the rich—sometimes known as tax increases on small-business owners—always kill jobs. Even though they only affect a fraction of actual small businesses.

Job Creationists swear by this dogma, despite the fact that Bill Clinton—facing what now seems like a quaint $300 billion deficit—raised taxes on the rich. Right-wingers falsely called it “the largest tax increase in history” and promised economic doom. What followed was the largest sustained economic boom in American history. Then George W. Bush lowered taxes by trillions and the result was the worst decade of job creation in generations.

Federal taxes as a share of gross domestic product have not been this low in 60 years.

If tax breaks were a magic tonic that created jobs, we would be booming again. We are recovering, but millions are still out of work. Even while emerging from a financial crisis, however, America under President Obama has created jobs faster than President George W. Bush did in either of his terms. And that growth has occurred despite huge cuts in government jobs.

How? Tax cuts for the 95% of Americans who aren’t rich.

When it comes to stimulating the economy, what’s always most effective is helping those in need. Unemployment insurance and food stamps have a far higher multiplier effect on growth, while tax breaks for the rich often sit in bank accounts. If cutting taxes on the rich creates jobs, those jobs are overseas.

Yet the other effect of Job Creationism is even more destructive. According to a new study by the non- partisan Congressional Research Service, tax breaks evidently worsen income inequality.

Right before the financial crisis of 2008, the top one-tenth of one percent of American households took in a larger share of income than at any time since the last Republican businessman presided over a huge financial crisis—in 1929, when Herbert Hoover occupied the White House.

Before Reagan’s tax cuts for the rich in the 1980s, the top one-tenth of one percent’s share of the economy hovered below five percent. Since 1985 their share of the income has never been below five percent. Often it has reached over 10 percent.

Those numbers reveal the true goal of Job Creationism. The point has never been to create jobs or to cut the deficit—Romney’s plan would hurt the middle class and radically explode the debt. The point has always been and always will be to make the rich richer.

At the very top, Republicans only play dumb. They know exactly what they’re doing.

The Big Lie: Only the president believes in “redistribution,” which is against free market principles.

The Truth: Both parties believe in redistribution—it’s just that Republicans want to redistribute upward.

What do you do when a secret video shows your candidate disparaging about half of the American electorate as self-pitying “victims” who cannot be convinced to take responsibility for their own lives?

After Mitt Romney basically affirmed that the leaked video reflected his views, but perhaps in a not-so- elegant way, his campaign—aided by The Drudge Report, Fox News and the rest of the vast right-wing media complex—decided to focus on another video that supposedly shows the president in 1998 saying he’s for “redistribution.”

Typically, the old Obama video was edited to leave out the section where he clarifies what he meant when he said, “… I actually believe in redistribution, at least at a certain level to make sure that everybody’s got a shot.” He went on to say:

“How do we pool resources at the same time as we decentralize delivery systems in ways that both foster competition, can work in the marketplace, and can foster innovation at the local level and can be tailored to particular communities?”

Basically, the president was saying he believes in some redistribution, in ways that increase competition.

Who else believes in this strange concept?

Anyone who says “you’re passing on debt to your grandkids” and thus acknowledges that as a nation, we share debt —and that debt will have to be paid by other Americans—understands redistribution. Anyone who believes in a progressive tax system in which those who earn the most should pay the highest tax rates believes in redistribution. Anyone who believes that Social Security and Medicare should keep the national promise to elderly Americans who have outlived their contributions is swearing by redistribution.

Two-thirds of working-class whites—Mitt Romney’s coveted base—believe that taxes on those earning $1 million or more should be raised. Social Security and Medicare as they’re currently structured are two of the most popular things the American government does.

And you know who else believes in redistribution of wealth? Mitt Romney.

When describing how George Romney was on welfare when he first came to America, Mitt defended the idea that Americans support those in need—also known as redistribution: “By the way, that’s the way America works, we have big hearts, we care for people who have needs. We help get them back.” He just didn’t call it redistribution.

Mediaite’s Tommy Christopher points out that Romney isn’t being honest about why we give to those in need. “We don’t have a safety net because we have big hearts, we have a safety net because a widespread descent into poverty drags down the entire economy, and examples like Romney’s dad, and former National Chairman of the Republican National Hispanic Assembly Danny Vargas, demonstrate the necessity and efficacy of that safety net, even as they try to rip it down for those who come after them.”

By attacking redistribution, Romney and Ryan seem to be suggesting that America’s problem is that too much is being taken from the rich. Nothing could be less true. We’ve pointed out that for the rich taxes are at near-all-time lows while inequality is about as high as it has ever been—possibly worse than in 1774, even if you factor in slavery.

In 2011, the richest 400 Americans saw their net worth increase by 13 percent to a total of $1.7 trillion. To match the wealth of the six heirs to the Walmart fortune, you’d need to work seven million years at Walmart. Meanwhile, the majority of tax breaks in our tax code go to the richest Americans.

But to Romney and Ryan, the problem is that the rich need more wealth redistributed to them. Robert Greenstein of the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities looked at Paul Ryan’s 2012 budget—which was the inspiration for many of Mitt Romney’s proposals—and said, “It would likely produce the largest redistribution of income from the bottom to the top in modern U.S. history, and likely increase poverty and inequality more than any other budget in recent times (and possibly in the nation’s history).”

As Ezra Klein wrote, “In a sense, almost every choice the government makes about how to spend or how to tax involves a decision to redistribute in some way or another.”

Klein examined Romney and Obama’s budgets and says that both have plans to redistribute wealth.

Romney would transfer wealth—in the form of health care, food stamps and Pell grants—from the poor to the rich via tax breaks and spending on defense. Obama would transfer a small percentage of wealth from the rich to the poor.

Like John McCain with Joe the Plumber, Mitt Romney is trying to distract from his flawed plans and callous comments, by conjuring the spectres of Communism and Socialism. And like McCain, he’ll likely fail.

Because when it comes to whether and how wealth should be redistributed in this country, most Americans agree with the president.

The Big Lie: Republicans have a plan to balance the federal budget, and care deeply about fiscal responsibility.

The Truth: The last Republican president to balance the budget was Dwight Eisenhower.

Between 1998 and 2000, President Bill Clinton’s Treasury Department paid off more than $360 billion in debt. As a result of 115 straight months of economic expansion that began after an increase in the top income tax rate—which was virulently opposed by the right—the huge deficits left by 12 years of Republican rule had been transformed into a surplus.

Within months after taking office in the narrowest victory of nearly any U.S. president—by only one vote in the Supreme Court—George W. Bush had begun to turn that surplus back into deficits that grew and grew, despite funding two wars on emergency supplemental bills that were not figured into the budget.

Vice President Dick Cheney laughed off the promises that the Bush tax breaks would pay for themselves and the budget would be balanced: “Reagan proved deficits don’t matter.” But deficits do matter to Republicans… whenever there is a Democratic president.

Since they woke up from a coma on the day President Obama was elected, Republicans have pushed two Big Lies: The president is responsible for the deficit—which is nearly entirely the result of Bush-era choices that the Republicans refused to abandon—and the deficit is responsible for the poor economy.

In both instances, the opposite is true.

Using the deficit as a battering ram, the GOP pushed for the rapid adoption of a Balanced Budget Amendment to the Constitution, which would ignore the true causes of the deficit—tax breaks, the wars and an unfunded Medicare expansion—and demand huge cuts to Medicaid, Pell grants and every service the government provides.

Paul Ryan proposed a budget plan with these draconian measures, yet impartial experts warn that his budget doesn’t balance for decades. The largest expenditure in the Ryan budget is interest on the national debt.

Eager to prove how conservative he is, Mitt Romney signed up for a balanced budget plan that works even faster than Ryan’s, by cutting even more government services. And he pledges to do it without asking rich Americans like himself to ever pay a nickel more in taxes.

Like the majority of Republicans in Congress, Romney has signed a pledge to never say aye to any new taxes. Forget asking the rich to contribute what they can. Under Romney’s plan they’ll pay even less. Of course to do this, Romney would have to demand that the working poor and the middle class pay up to $2,000 a year more to make the math work.

And when does Mitt Romney’s budget balance? Don’t ask Romney senior advisor Ed Gillespie (who also advised George W. Bush). Gillespie told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, “ Uh… Wolf, I’m not sure of that myself, actually. I’ll get that to you, though, and I’m sure it’s on our website.” Don’t count on it.

Why? Romney purposely released a budget that can’t be scored, and thus makes no serious projections. No one can say he isn’t a Republican now!

Republicans have long abandoned any impulse to open a real discussion about the federal budget in hopes of distorting the debate. They’re attacking cuts that eliminate wasteful spending in Medicare, while proposing trillions in cuts that would do real damage. They’re blaming deficit spending for a bad economy that only deficit spending can help us to escape. They’re promising to balance the budget with Paul Ryan’s smile and the magic of trickle-down economics.

And how did that work out last time?

The Big Lie: This president overstates his role in the capture of Osama bin Laden and leaks national security secrets in order to improve his foreign policy record.

The Truth: The president painstakingly gave credit to all who participated in the mission that he personally approved against bin Laden, while protecting national security secrets far more scrupulously than the previous administration.

How do you deal with a Democratic president who is responsible for killing Osama bin Laden and most of al Qaeda’s top leadership, a president who—in the midst of a highly polarized election—earns a 58 percent approval rating on terrorism, according to Gallup?

Republicans only have one trick up their sleeve when it comes to attacking a Democrat with an impressive military record. It’s called “swiftboating,” and in 2004, the original swiftboaters disgracefully demeaned the war record of Senator John F. Kerry, a genuine war hero and Democratic presidential nominee.

In 2012, the GOP faces an even more difficult predicament, running against a president who undeniably played a crucial role in not only ending a war, but ending the life of the man behind the 9/11 attacks. Worse still, the GOP nominated a ticket with less foreign policy and national security experience than any Republican nominees since at least the 1940s. Leading the ticket is a man who avoided the Vietnam draft when his church sent him as a Mormon missionary—to France! Which made the announcement of his vice presidential choice on a warship look just slightly ridiculous.

So Republican attacks on the president have to be even more outrageous to distract American voters from the truth they watched playing out before their eyes when bin Laden was dispatched.

A group calling itself Special Operations Opsec Education Fund has put together a short film and a website that attack the president for taking too much credit for the bin Laden raid and risking national security by approving intelligence leaks.

The claims are laughable in substance and originate from suspect sources—including many of the people behind the original swiftboat attack, Republican partisans and members of the Bush administration whose record when it comes to national security leaks was appalling.

Millions of Americans remember the president’s speech on the night of May 1, 2011. “Tonight, we give thanks to the countless intelligence and counterterrorism professionals who’ve worked tirelessly to achieve this outcome,” he said. “The American people do not see their work, nor know their names. But tonight, they feel the satisfaction of their work and the result of their pursuit of justice.” They also remember the president visiting Ground Zero to honor the 9/11 victims and responders. And they remember the president paying tribute to the courageous members of the military and intelligence community who made the raid possible, then using the event as a pivot to “recede the tide of war.”

But the Opsec filmmakers attempt to create a false narrative by editing the president’s words and ripping his quotes out of context, making an argument only the most partisan voters will buy.

The president’s boldness in ordering the raid is beyond question. Adm. William H. McRaven of the Navy, the flag officer who oversaw the raid as commander of the Joint Special Operations Command, said: “The president and his national security team—I’m not a political guy, but I will tell you as, as an interested observer in this —they were magnificent in how they handled it start to finish.”

What remains questionable are the people and the motives behind the Opsec smear:

Karl Rove, President Bush’s political boss, who was himself implicated in the unethical outing of active CIA agent Valerie Plame, endorses the effort. Fred Rustmann was a CIA employee who defended the Plame leak in 2005. Chad Kolton was a spokesman for the director of National Intelligence during the George W. Bush administration. He was known for his off-the-record briefings. And many of the participants in the film are Republican activists.

The only people who have accused the president of leaking are his political opponents — including Mitt Romney, who employs many of the same advisors behind the misadventure in Iraq.

This fresh eruption of swiftboating is so lacking in credibility that the media immediately compared it with the widely discredited 2004 attacks on Kerry. The difference is that this time, Democrats are fighting back.

The Big Lie: The president “gutted” the work requirement from welfare reform.

The Truth: Mitt Romney attacked a policy he has supported -- which encourages more welfare recipients to work -- for the express purpose of provoking racial resentment.

In 1976, when Ronald Reagan attacked a mostly fictionalized “welfare queen” in a Cadillac, there was no doubt what he was invoking. Some call it the “Southern Strategy.” Our Joe Conason calls it “blowing the racial foghorn.”

But implications were clear. “Those people” are trying to take your money.

In 2005, Mitt Romney signed a letter from the Republican Governors’ Association that asked President Bush for “increased waiver authority” in implementing the Transitional Assistance to Needy Families program, more commonly known as “welfare.”

In 2012, President Obama gave five governors, two of them Republicans, more flexibility in how they managed their welfare rolls, so long as the changes resulted in at least “20 percent increases in the number of people getting work.” This is precisely the policy Romney sought.

In 2012, struggling to find an issue that voters cared about and seeking to avoid a report that suggested Mitt Romney would raise taxes on the middle class while cutting them for the rich, the GOP’s presumptive nominee accused the president of “gutting the work requirements” in welfare.

All the usual fact-checking organizations declared this attack completely false. President Bill Clinton, who signed the bill into the law, has called the claim, “especially disappointing.” Republican Joe Scarborough said on MSNBC’s Morning Joe: “It’s just completely false.”

Still, Romney has run three ads that made these same claims while making a promise to “put work back in welfare” a staple of his stump speech.

Why does he repeat this entirely invented charge? It seems to be helping him in swing states. Having vowed to make this election entirely a referendum on the economy, Romney has found that voters don’t trust him to do any better than President Obama has done. This may be because of the doubts encouraged by Obama ads targeting his record at Bain Capital or his secrecy about his own tax returns. Unable to make a convincing argument, Romney has to rely on issues that divide or cause conflict—also known as “wedge issues.”

Romney first edged toward a wedge-based campaign when he took the president’s comments about who built America’s roads and bridges out of context. But the most effective wedge issues tie identity politics to an issue. That’s why welfare is such an appealing wedge. Who’s on welfare? “Them.”

Though the vast majority of welfare recipients are white, how many people were thinking of a white “welfare queen” tooling along in her Cadillac?

The chief suspect in bringing this issue to the Romney campaign is Newt Gingrich, who immediately leaped into the new debate over welfare to attack the president. Gingrich spent much of the primary calling President Obama “the food stamp president,” another racial foghorn blast. He was the Speaker of the House when welfare reform passed and must know that the accusation he’s making is hollow.

Mitt Romney believes he’s entitled to his own facts about welfare, taxes and Medicare, issues that now make up most of his campaign. But Medicare and taxes are two issues where he has to make the facts suit his campaign. Welfare is an issue he wandered into for one reason: resentment. Getting more people off welfare as soon as possible is the whole point of the president’s plan. Arguing otherwise is fatuous and shameful.

This is the kind of Big Lie that makes decent Republicans embarrassed. But decency isn’t what Mitt Romney is pursuing these days.

The Big Lie: States’ rights are being threatened.

The Truth: States clearly retain the rights to make their own laws on any power not named in the Constitution, as long as civil rights and the federal government’s authority are respected.

To rise as a leader in the modern conservative movement, you need one key quality—shamelessness. It’s not enough to disavow nearly everything you supported during the Bush administration. You must rewrite history to make a convenient point.

How else do you explain conservative demagogue Glenn Beck holding a rally at the foot of the Lincoln Monument, 47 years to the day after Martin Luther King Jr.’s historic “I Have a Dream” speech, to claim the civil rights revolution as a victory for conservatism?

“We are on the right side of history! We are on the side of individual freedoms and liberties and, dammit, we will reclaim the civil rights moment,” Beck said in the days leading up to the event. “We will take that movement—because we were the people who did it in the first place.”

Beck’s academic expertise is conservative fan fiction with a simple moral: We are always right. How else could he claim that the conservative movement—which rose to prominence by first resisting federal civil and voting rights and then by luring in Dixiecrats who left the Democratic Party—deserves credit for the one thing they’ve resisted most?

Beck does have some facts to hang his tortured logic on. He points out that it was the Democrats of the 19th century who were the party of slavery. (As if that were the same party of John F. Kennedy or Barack Obama.) He then adds that a higher percentage of the Republican caucus than the Democratic caucus voted for the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

But what these revisionists never note is that far more Democrats than Republicans voted for the crucial Civil Rights Act of 1964, opposed by GOP presidential nominee Barry Goldwater and Texas Senate candidate George H.W. Bush, and still reviled by many modern Republicans, including Kentucky Senator Rand Paul.

The fact is, some Republicans do deserve credit for civil rights. But the right wing certainly doesn’t.

For generations, Democrats pandered to Southern conservatives and the lingering respites of white supremacy for electoral advantage. That deserves condemnation, but not by the exact same people who still use the identical strategy today. To call out past conservatives while engaging in the same despicable politics requires shamelessness. Especially as right-wingers like Beck embrace the doctrine that is most responsible for justifying the mistreatment of Africans and African-Americans: states’ rights.

To make this argument, you point out that Senate majority leader Lyndon B. Johnson weakened the 1957 Civil Rights Act to get it passed over the record-setting filibuster of Strom Thurmond. And you invariably leave out the fact that when President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that he championed into law, he made a prophetic observation: “We have lost the South for a generation.”

With the exception of Jimmy Carter’s post-Watergate sweep of the South in 1976 and a handful of Southern states voting for Arkansas governor Bill Clinton, LBJ was right—except that he should have used the plural: generations.

Republicans refuse to accept that Lincoln’s Republican Party (or even the Republican Party of the 1960s) has less in common with the conservatives of today than the Honda Odyssey does with Homer. What’s the biggest difference between today’s party of the elephant and that of the past? Republicans used to embrace those they now trash as “liberals.”

Of course, it’s nearly impossible to thrust modern political labels on figures like Lincoln. But it would be impossible to call the Rail-Splitter a conservative.

Lincoln lost his seat in Congress for opposing the Mexican-American War, calling it "a war unnecessarily and unconstitutionally begun by the President of the United States.” (Sounds a bit like liberals who opposed the Iraq War, doesn’t he?) He was not elected as an abolitionist, but as someone whose goal was to prevent dissolution of the Union. As the Civil War began and he came into contact with educated blacks such as Frederick Douglass, Lincoln’s lifelong hatred of slavery (“If slavery isn’t wrong, nothing is wrong”) progressively turned into a tactical policy of freeing the slaves in the Confederate states.

As president, Abe imposed the first income tax, favored government infrastructure projects, and started the Transcontinental Railroad project in the heat of the Civil War. Combining those with his policy of land grants and land grant colleges, and it’s impossible to suggest that he was a small-government conservative. And it’s impossible to call the man who said, “A house divided against itself cannot stand” a believer in so-called “states’ rights.”

Lincoln believed in the genius of the federal government as an instrument of the people, by the people, and for the people. In this he stood with the great senator from Massachusetts, Daniel Webster. When faced with state legislators who wanted to nullify federal laws in 1830, Webster said, “Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable!” This concept stands fundamentally at odds with the agenda of those who claim to believe states’ rights trump civil rights.

The original framers of the Constitution rejected the idea that states can and should act as little republics. We know this for sure because that’s exactly what the original Articles of Confederacy created. The result was a resounding failure. When the Founders gathered in Philadelphia to consider a new future, the only solution they saw was one where the original 13 colonies were inextricably bound by a single covenant that created a strong but limited federal government. This concept of a strong union that rests on the federal government was born in the Constitution of the United States, which declared itself “the supreme law of the land.”

The Bill of Rights was added a few years later, with the Tenth Amendment stating: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” Yet the nine previous amendments explicitly stated all the rights that citizens of the United States enjoy and thus can never be abjured by any state government. States had the freedom to act as “laboratories of democracy” but never were permitted to limit the rights set forth in the Constitution.

Yet when it comes to the rights of the most vulnerable, states have often been laboratories of oppression. Or as Jon Stewart called Arizona in 2011, “a crack laboratory of democracy.”

The idea of “states’ rights” flowed, like most of American history, from the pen of Thomas Jefferson. In response to attempts to curb the freedoms of speech and association in the Alien and Sedition acts, Jefferson and his closest ally, father of the Constitution James Madison, wrote the Kentucky Resolutions. Those documents became the foundation of the Democratic-Republican Party.

During the South Carolina nullification crisis, Madison recognized that he had made a mistake and undermined the Union he’d so thoughtfully crafted. He embraced the Constitution as the Supreme Law and rejected the claim that states had the power to undermine individual rights.

The residue of white supremacy lingers in American politics, encouraged in some ways by the political ideals of ultra-conservatives. Poor whites fought for the peculiar institution of slavery not for their own economic benefit but because of the notion that it provided a hierarchy that ensured a dominance of at least one caste of society. When actual slavery was banned, states used the failed notions of “states’ rights” to impose measures that stopped African-Americans from voting and enforced segregation.

George Wallace declared "segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever" in his 1963 inaugural address as governor of Alabama. He later said he should have said, “States' rights now! States' rights tomorrow! States' rights forever!"

As civil rights became settled law, mainstream Republicans avoided that tainted term and the injustices it justified. That changed, however, when Ronald Reagan kicked off his 1980 presidential campaign in Neshoba County, Mississippi, an area known for the murders of three civil rights workers in 1964. He actually uttered the words “states’ rights” as a coded rallying call to the Southern states that had voted for Jimmy Carter in 1976.

Since then, the phrase has been used to justify extreme abortion restrictions, but it was largely kept out of the national dialogue until President Obama was elected. Suddenly, “states’ rights” became a way to object to nearly everything he wanted to accomplish. When the president signed the stimulus into law to prevent another Great Depression, Texas Governor Rick Perry hinted that secession might be necessary. “If Washington continues to thumb their nose at the American people, you know, who knows what may come out of that?"

Of course, Perry took the funds and used the money, along with the growth of the government workforce, to post some of the best jobs numbers of the Great Recession.

When Republican-appointed Chief Justice John Roberts became the deciding vote that saved Obamacare from nullification by the Supreme Court, Republicans were enraged. But Roberts was doing a true conservative’s duty, protecting the existing powers of the federal government.

“States’ rights” has stood for preventing the federal government from enforcing the equal protection clause of the Constitution for too long. It’s not an excuse to stop people from voting or to stop women from making their own health care decisions or to deprive the poor of health care.

However Glenn Beck wants to misremember history, we remain one nation under God, no matter what state happens to be your home.

About the Author Jason Sattler first entered politics as part of an AP Government extra-credit project. He became a member of the California Democratic Party and was the campaign manager for two local campaigns, helping a friend become the youngest person in California history to win a primary. After retiring from partisan politics while still in college, he wrote for MTV.com and Wired.com, and became the "voice" of the relaunched version of Napster. After earning his MFA in Creative Writing at St. Mary's College of California, he began writing about politics and is currently the executive editor of The National Memo. He lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan with his wife Wendy and their two beagles.

About the Editor A highly experienced journalist, author and editor, Joe Conason is the editor-in-chief of The National Memo, founded in July 2011. He was formerly the executive editor of The New York Observer, where he wrote a popular political column for many years. His columns are distributed by Creators Syndicate and his reporting and writing have appeared in many publications around the world, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Yorker, The New Republic, The Nation, and Harper’s. Since November 2006, he has served as editor of The Investigative Fund, a nonprofit journalism center, where he has assigned and edited dozens of award-winning articles and broadcasts. He is also the author of two New York Times bestselling books, The Hunting of the President (St. Martin’s Press, 2000) and Big Lies: The Right-Wing Propaganda Machine and How It Distorts the Truth (St. Martin’s Press, 2003). Currently he is working on a new book about former President Bill Clinton's life and work since leaving the White House in 2001. He is a frequent guest on radio and television, including MSNBC's Morning Joe, and lives in New York City with his wife and two children.

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