Card's Canard: A GOP Mis-Sizzle

by: Paul Rosenberg

Sat Feb 14, 2009 at 09:00

We all make mistakes, some more than others.  But Republicans prefer the sizzle to the steak.  And thus we have the inevitable:  GOP mis-sizzles.  Here's a good example from earlier this month.  On Feb. 4, Inside Edition reported:

After a rough day at the office on Tuesday, 2/3, President Obama's fashion style is now coming under attack. Former George W. Bush Chief of Staff Andrew Card says the Obama dress code is way too laid back.

"There should be a dress code of respect," Card tells INSIDE EDITION. "I wish that he would wear a suit coat and tie."

Card is the first member of the Bush administration to bash Obama, and he's going after him for forgoing a coat and tie.

"The Oval Office symbolizes...the Constitution, the hopes and dreams, and I'm going to say democracy. And when you have a dress code in the Supreme Court and a dress code on the floor of the Senate, floor of the House, I think it's appropriate to have an expectation that there will be a dress code that respects the office of the President."

The clear implication here--it wouldn't make sense any other way--is that Bush would never have taken off his jacket in the Oval Office, mush less let anyone else do the same.  A Bush high official lecturing anyone about respecting anything is always good for a laugh.  Picture Al Capone lecturing Elliot Ness.  Bush, after all, turned the Oval Office into the central office of Lies, Inc., and millions of people are dead as a result.  Respect?

So, of course, it's only fitting that Card's canard was quickly exposed by Huffington Post.  It was not just another GOP absurdity.  It was another Bush/GOP lie.

Sort of adds an interesting little bit of sub-text to Obama's calling on Sam Stein, now doesn't it?

It also reminded me of the initial Bush Administration canard alleging that Clinton staffers had trashed the White House on their way out, most memorably, by removing the "W" key from keyboards. This was a similarly-timed GOP lie seeking to define the transition from one party's time in power to the others. Daniel highlighted the debunking of this in his mid-January diary "Zombie Lies: Clintonites Removed the 'W' Keys", and I chimed in with a comment discussing some of the surrounding detail of the phony "scandal" and the even more scandalous way the GOP promoted it, summarizing at one point:

So, the damage done--typical of your average situation, with no evidence of anything more than random pranks: $15,000.  The GOP investigation--a deliberate, partisan-fueled waste of taxpayer money in an attempt to score political points against an Administration no longer in office--cost an order of magnitude more: $100,000.

With a $100,000 price tag picked up by American people, that was a much more expensive lie.  But its purpose and logic were quite similar--a false story about a trivial topic used to try to demean and discredit a Democratic Administration, without getting anywhere near matters of substance.  Of course, the "office trashing" lie also distracted attention from election stealing that got Bush into office in the first place.

The GOP involves itself in countless lies of all sorts and sizes.  This is a natural outgrowth of (1) waging constant hegemonic struggle and (2) having nothing real to offer or say.  The natural result is an avalanche of lies from the trivial to the profound, in a never-ending effort to attain "full spectrum dominance".  And yet, in a way, it's the obsessions with truly trivial falsehoods that I believe are the most telling, the ones that are, at bottom, all sizzle and no steak, on top of being outright lies.  "Who would lie about that?" one would naturally think.  The answer: Republicans would.

So I'd like to invite each of you to nominate your favorite examples of what I've dubbed "GOP Mis-Sizzles".  There the sorts of things we don't tend to think about.  Usually, we just shrug them off, and move on.

But the GOP base obsesses over them, never lets them go.  So, in our own Open Left attempt to be more bipartisan, let's see how many of them we can think of.