May 9^th

We see today an amazing concatenation of political events; at least they are concatenated in the morning paper. Three of the leading right wing politicos have been caught misleading the public with their comments, or you could call it lying to the public.  They could not have been ignorant that these were misstatements of fact. When you knowingly misstate something you are lying.

Rand Paul, was asked by Greta Van Susteren about the shooting in Texas where a cartoon contest was held to see who could most effectively satirize the Prophet Muhammed. We haven’t seen the cartoon that won but there were two offended gunmen who came calling to do great bodily harm to the participants; both were killed. Senator Paul declared that this was an example of why we should secure our borders. Paul says, “I‘m not sure where they came from but we do need to secure our southern border.” Van Susteren replies, “They’re Americans.” Paul ignored her comment and went on to say that we need to secure who visits us…” They were not visitors either; they were Americans and they drove from Phoenix the day of the murders to avenge what they saw as a religious insult. These were homegrown terrorists but Paul, with his usual arrogance, insists that the remedy is securing the border and carefully screening visitors. Perhaps he has a hearing problem.

Rubio said at the Idaho Faith and Freedom Summit, “We are the only nation that is not building the aircraft, the long range bombers, the aircraft carriers, the nuclear submarines that we need for our national defense.” Rubio is dead wrong; we are building all of these and if he doesn’t know that he has not been paying attention to his primary job of being a Unites States Senator. (Amy Sherman from PolitiFact.com has provided a detailed list of America’s build up in the areas where Rubio claims we are doing nothing.)

Finally we have Governor Huckabee who apparently learns nothing from experience except persistence. The Governor has claimed that we, as a nation, have 93 million unemployed. That is true and counts retirees (like myself), college students, stay at home parents, and, quite possibly, children in nursery school. Now suppose we turn this around: there are about 6 million unemployed, ah, but this is in a nation of well over 300 million so one could say that less than 2% of the population is unemployed! Of course no liberal, even a liberal politician, would try to pull that deception. I’m not surprised that a conservative would pull this mislead (lie actually), but a minister of the gospel; for shame!

Now a confession: The facts herein stated were not gathered by me; they were all in the morning Record-Eagle. The comments and the opinions about the facts are my responsibility and I’m quite happy to acknowledge that.