MSNBC WINGNUT INFESTATION HAS LIBERTY TO LIE WITH IMPUNITY

Take note, MSNBC hosts: Wingnuts and Republicans (they're interchangeable) LIE. They LIE indiscriminately and blatantly. They take advantage of the platform MSNBC gives them to spread LIES and disinformation, because of the network's policy that "balance" means, e.g., giving equal time to those who claim the Earth is 6,500 years old based on 17th century calculations by Bishop Ussher of the generations in the Bible, rather than reliable 21st century scientific radiometric dating techniques used by geologists, that the Earth is at least 4.5 billion years old.

This is a big problem for a news network that, unlike Fox, purports to give the public factual information. What's worse, these LIES go largely unchallenged, not through any fault of the hosts who cannot be expected to have all the facts at their fingertips at all times, but because of a format based on false equivalencies that hold the LIE as just another version —"from the other side"— of the TRUTH.

President Obama today finally drew some lines in the sand. He called out Speaker John Boehner for flip-flop demagoguery: being against "my way or the highway" before he was for it (as long as it was the Republicans' way) in the same speech. And the President declared he will veto any deficit reduction measure from the joint congressional committee that does not include a tax on the rich. Better late than never; this is the speech Mr. Obama should have made much earlier in his term when he and his advisers made the monumental miscalculation of trying to mollify and reason with extremist, ideological right wing hostage-takers.

Following the President's speech, up pops on MSNBC smooth Republican LIAR par excellence Ron Christie to spout the GOP talking point LIES with absolute impunity. (Christie has the habit of sounding indignant and filibustering when anyone calls him for the LIAR he is.) Christie immediately lowered the respect bar by calling the President a liar (projection is a well-worn technique of GOP crapagandists) who was practicing "class warfare" on the super-rich top one percent (yeah right, Ron, pitting the stratified billionaires who have already won the "class" war, against the other 99 percent is really, like, pitting "one group against another"), to which the President had reasonably argued, "it's not class warfare, it's (simple) math."

One technique of these crapaganda wingnut LIARS is to keep pounding the same talking point LIES regardless of their merit in a reasoned, factual response. They will NEVER concede ANY argument on its merits. They are schooled by their Rovian language manipulators to keep repeating the same LIES over and over again, because in repetition a BIG LIE gains the veneer of truth with viewers or listeners being brainwashed. Then Christie made the specious BIG LIE argument that "47 percent of the American people pay no taxes" — later amending his remark to no "federal" taxes, when called out on it. As if, the poor, the working poor, the struggling middle class do not bear an IMMORAL and disproportionate share of the tax burden while corporations and millionaires and billionaires pay a lower rate, as the President pointed out, than their secretaries, janitors, or teachers.

Here are the facts, from David Leonhart of the New York Times:

Income taxes aren’t the only kind of federal taxes that people pay. There are also payroll taxes and investment taxes, among others. And, of course, people pay state and local taxes, too.

Even if the discussion is restricted to federal taxes (for which the statistics are better), a vast majority of households end up paying federal taxes. Congressional Budget Office data suggests that, at most, about 10 percent of all households pay no net federal taxes. The number 10 is obviously a lot smaller than 47.