25 Years (And Counting) Of Fake GOP Outrage
This highlighted portion falls under the category of "every accusation a confession."The Republican Party and its allies in the right wing media specialize in generating and sustaining outrage. Stirring up anger is how the GOP motivates its voters and manipulates the press. Moreover, the very lucrative business model of the right wing media is all about maintaining a 24/7 outrage machine. It never stops. It also works and has had a significant (and very negative) impact on modern American history.
The history of fake GOP outrage began during the 1992 presidential campaign and the Clinton Presidency. That era also marked the emergence of right wing talk radio on the national scene and the Fox News Network. For years, the GOP railed about Bill Clinton’s affairs and they even tried to impeach him for lying under oath in a civil lawsuit that had been dismissed.
What we found out about Clinton’s accusers was that many of them were guilty of much, much greater sins than the ones they claimed they were so mad about. Then House Speaker Newt Gingrich was carrying on an affair with a junior staffer who was eventually his third wife. After Gingrich was ousted, he was replaced by Robert Livingston — who was forced to resign due to his own many affairs. The Speaker who actually presided over the impeachment of Clinton — Dennis Hastert — plead guilty to sexually abusing four boys. Then House Whip Tom DeLay committed perjury in a civil lawsuit over the breakup of his pest control business.
As it turned out, the GOP’s fake outrage over Bill Clinton turned out to be effective. The Republicans conned the mainstream press into following these fake scandals and it had a big influence on the 2000 election. This despite the fact that Clinton had a 65% approval rating in 2000.
The person who was probably most outraged over the Lewinsky matter was Al Gore. This influenced him to choose Connecticut Senator Joseph Lieberman to be his running mate. Gore selected Lieberman because he had been very quick to express outrage over the Lewinsky issue on the Senate floor. Lieberman added nothing to the ticket since he was from a Blue State that Gore was going to carry anyway. If Gore had selected then Florida Senator Bob Graham to be his running mate, Gore would’ve won the election and the country would have avoided the disastrous Bush Presidency.
The fake GOP outrage we experienced during the Clinton Administration was replicated during the Obama Administration. Perhaps the biggest source of outrage from the GOP during Obama’s Presidency was over the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi in 2012 in which four American heroes died. The GOP sank so low that it began its assault on the Obama Administration even while the battle still raged in Benghazi. Subsequently, there were no less than 8 Congressional investigations of Benghazi conducted by GOP majority committees and none of them confirmed any of the right wing’s paranoid conspiracy theories.
What was never mentioned by the GOP and the mainstream press was that there were 13 embassy attacks during the George W. Bush Administration in which 61 people died. During the Bush years, there was no outrage from the GOP about these embassy attacks and no investigations. This proves once again that it was 8 years of fake GOP outrage during the Obama Administration over Benghazi. The GOP shamelessly exploited the deaths of four American heroes for crass partisan political purposes.
Republican fake outrage over ethics in government reached its apogee during the 2016 election cycle. The GOP went into full outrage mode over Hillary Clinton’s private email server and literally made that server the biggest issue of the campaign — bar none. The attacks over the private email server were especially audacious since many prominent Republicans had used private email accounts to conduct official business.
George W. Bush’s staff made extensive use of private email accounts from the RNC and went so far as to delete 22 million emails. Both Colin Powell and Condi Rice used private email accounts when they served as Secretary of State. Moreover, Mitt Romney purchased the email servers he used as Governor of Massachusetts and destroyed the entire email correspondence compiled during his four years as governor of Massachusetts. In addition, Jeb Bush, Scott Walker, Marco Rubio, Bobby Jindal and Rick Perry all used private email accounts to conduct official business.
Despite this brazen hypocrisy and fake outrage from the GOP, the mainstream press and the Clinton campaign never mentioned the extensive use of private email accounts by these prominent Republicans. As a result, millions of voters were misled by the GOP and the mainstream press. That is one of the many reasons why we ended up with Trump as the president.
Republican hypocrisy on the use of private email accounts has carried over into the Trump Administration. Many of Trump’s White House staffers — like the Bush Administration — are using RNC private email accounts. But we’ve heard no outrage from the GOP over this. Nada. Nothing.
One of the GOP’s big complaints during the campaign was that Clinton’s private email server caused her to allegedly be careless with classified information — even though there was never any evidence of any security breaches. Nevertheless, it is the Trump Administration itself that has already committed serious security breaches.
Trump himself continues to use an unsecured android phone to communicate and post tweets on the internet. At a recent meeting with the Prime Minister of Japan at his Florida estate, Trump conducted an open air situation room meeting over a recent North Korean missile test. This classified conversation occurred in a dining room in which the discussion was overheard by other diners and the wait staff.
Perhaps the biggest security breach of the nascent Trump Administration revolves around Michael Flynn’s short tenure as National Security Adviser. In late January, the Department of Justice warned the White House that Flynn was vulnerable to Russian blackmail. Yet Flynn wasn’t fired by Trump until after three weeks had passed. During that three week period, Flynn had complete access to all U.S. intelligence secrets.
Flynn is just the tip of the iceberg of the emerging Russia scandal that has cast a dark cloud over the new administration. That burgeoning Russia scandal is one of the greatest examples ever of fake GOP outrage. For years, the GOP has postured as the party that is tough on Russia. During the Obama Administration, the GOP blamed him for the 2014 Russian invasion of Crimea and claimed he was soft on Russia. Yet Obama and the international community hit Russia with devastating sanctions after that invasion. Currently, the Russians are desperate to have the sanctions lifted.
Since the election we found out that Putin and Russia had meddled in our elections with the goal of electing Trump. The Russians supported Trump because they are (justifiably) hopeful that Trump will lift the international sanctions. Recent revelations indicate that the Trump team was in regular contact with senior Russian intelligence officials in the year before the election. There is no benign way to explain frequent campaign contact with Russian intelligence. Campaigns just don’t do that. Ever.
Trump and the Republicans have responded to these allegations by either denying them or simply refusing to discuss them. Already, most Republican members of Congress have expressed no interest in investigating Russian interference in the 2016 elections. As Rand Paul said: “I just don’t think it’s useful to be doing investigation after investigation, particularly of your own party. We’ll never even get started with doing the things we need to do, like repealing Obamacare, if we’re spending our whole time having Republicans investigate Republicans. I think it makes no sense.”
So far, with the exception of Ben Sasse, Nebraska’s Congressional representatives haven’t commented on the explosive revelations coming out about the Russia scandal. Sasse has posted a few tweets that were mildly critical of Trump but he hasn’t done anything. At the same time, all five of our members of Congress have voted with Trump 100% of the time. It’s obvious that our Congressional delegation is emphasizing party over country.
As activists, we need to contact our members of Congress and demand the appointment of a special prosecutor to investigate the Russia-Trump scandal. If our members of Congress ignore this request, then we need to vote them out in 2018. Already, several prominent political analysts have indicated that Trump’s unpopularity could lead to Democratic control of the House in 2018. We can do it! Let’s get it done!
So we're already well aware of the botched investigations into Hillary's emails and Benghazi. They turned out to be a complete waste of time. But this is the modus operandi of the GOP, and it works together with Right Wing fake news media to push the narratives.
Take the whole birther movement as an example. For many years Trump insisted he had hired really smart people to get to the bottom of it and he had proof, soon to be released, that Obama wasn't American born. "Wait and see" we were told. "Heads are going to roll," we were assured.
Turned out to be a huge flop, and Trump as to this day never apologized for any of that nonsense, which, of course, couldn't possibly be racist.
The next example that comes to mind is the Stolen Election and the thousands of sworn affidavits about witnessing voter fraud. The My Pillow Guy insisting he had hard proof Dominion machines were compromised and controlled by Venezuela.
"Wait and see" we were told. "Heads are going to roll," we were assured.
Related to this was the promise that investigations would prove the election counts were all wrong.
"Wait and see" we were told. "Heads are going to roll," we were assured.
But the Arizona recount investigated by Republicans only proved Biden's win was by a larger margin, and the three recounts in Georgia proved Biden won all three times.
Then there was the Hunter Biden Laptop story - Just two weeks before the 2020 election Tucker Carlson clings onto a viral internet story about Hunter Biden's laptop, claiming he had obtained "'Authentic and damning" documents from the laptop. He never told us what they entailed or how they were damning, he just promised his audience that he was going to release them soon. The next day he said he lost those docs when he mailed them on a USB jump drive. Then after he and the Right Wing ecosphere pushed conspiracies about how someone tried stealing them from the mail, the jump drive was eventually recovered. So did Tucker produce what was on them? No. Instead he said he was going to back off the story because he didn't feel like piling on Hunter Biden, whom he referred to as a "broken man."
Bobulinski swore that the docs he had proved Joe Biden was guilty of crimes, but the news division of the Wall Street Journal deemed that to be false. Right Wing media criticized the legit media for failing to report on the Hunter Biden laptop story but the reason was because Rudy Giuliani had a copy of the hard drive and he refused to provide it to any media outside the NY Post.
NY Post Reporter Behind Dubious Hunter Biden Story Refused to Put His Name on It
Then, Fox News Passed on Hunter Biden Laptop Story Over Credibility Concerns
John Durham was going to blow the lid off of the "hoax" that was the Trump/Russia investigation. FOX News ran wall to wall coverage with predictions of multiple indictments and people going to jail.
"Wait and see" we were told. "Heads are going to roll," we were assured.
But after a three year probe by Durham, his case was reduced to nothing more than trying to prove a former Clinton lawyer had lied to the FBI. The case was so weak that the jury acquitted the attorney in just a few hours, which was a humiliating defeat to Durham and the Right Wing angertainment industry.
And today Twitter is full of GOP folks talking about "mounting evidence" against the "Biden Crime family" based on mysterious "whistleblowers" who never seem to appear when they're needed.