What to Do When the Right Lies

What to Do When the Right Lies

By Timothy V. Gatto

I’ve noticed that when the right has nothing to stand on, when their rhetoric doesn’t make any sense, they just lie. I’m not making this up. We have seen lies about health care from the beginning. Lies about “death panels” lies about the government “rationing” health care, and lies about tax increases for those with health care that they wish to keep. The reality is that the right, when they can’t compete on issues using rational arguments, they make things up. The problem with this is that there are many impressionable citizens that when they hear something from a person in authority, they automatically believe it to be the truth.

The right did the same thing during the run-up for the Iraqi War. They lied us into it with claims that Saddam Hussein has “Weapons of Mass Destruction” witch proved to be false. Their followers didn’t blink. They just automatically accepted that we were there to bring “freedom to the Iraqis”. What kind of freedom do they have now with 130,000 U.S. soldiers and as many mercenaries in Iraq? Still, the loyal right sees nothing wrong with the status quo. This is nothing short of remarkable! How can so many people, when exposed to the truth, still cling to the lies that came from corrupt leaders?

Today the so called Progressives are buying into the lies from the Obama administration. The President claims that he doesn’t have the votes for single-payer health care or the “public option”. The Democrats have an airtight majority in Congress. They don’t need the GOP and the Democratic holdouts can be brought to heel. The excuse for the continuing war in Afghanistan is that we must not let Al Qaeda, an organization that was developed by the CIA, have a base in which to attack America again. That sounds to me like the “We must fight them there so we don’t have to fight them here” propaganda that the Bush Administration used.

I look around every day to see what the left in this country is doing to usurp what the right is saying. Sadly, I don’t see much. It is doubly amazing when you remember that we have the truth on our side, in health care reform and in the aggressive wars that are being fought in the name of America, a country that we happen to live in. The wishful thinking that the Democrats are going to somehow right the wrongs of the Bush Administration is just that: a wish. The Attorney General won’t even charge those that violated the law by torturing suspected insurgents which is not only against American law, but international law. In my mind, if the Attorney General won’t prosecute Bush and Cheney for authorizing that torture, he is obstructing justice himself.

The left must get their collective heads out of the sand. There is no one man or one party that will put things right in America. Capitalism and the mantra of “free trade” are synonymous with letting the rich rape the little guy. Capitalism as a single economic solution for a nation is dead. The “robber barons” of yesterday have given birth to the “robber barons” of today. The truth is that Obama surrounds himself with former employees of Goldman Sachs, one of the actual entities that run America. The same people on Wall Street that sold inflated investment vehicles that brought us into the mess we just witnessed, are being paid from public funds to continue to run riot.

I stopped believing in political parties when The Liberal Party of America folded. I do however, believe in movements. I saw a movement bring us out of the Vietnam War and I saw a Movement bring women a semblance of equality. I also saw a movement bring civil rights to people of color. Political parties didn’t do it, people did. It is about time that the people who see the true danger of aggressive wars, capitalism run rampant and a right that will lie to cover up the truth stand up against these things. No more outsourcing of prisons to private enterprises, no more mercenary armies and no more of spending 48% of the entire planets military budget on our armed forces.

When the right run rampant, we on the left need to shout them down with the truth, I believe we can all see what is happening here. We still have our freedom and we still have the right to dissent. I believe we must use them before they are gone.

timgatto@hotmaol.com http://liberalpro.blogspot.com Read Tim's New Book "From Complicity to Contempt" from Oliver Arts and Open Press

Views expressed on this page are those of the authors and not necessarily those of Campaign for America's Future or Institute for America's Future