Wednesday, August 20, 2014

National Republican Congressional Committee launched Fake News websites. They really did.

How low will Republicans go to win it all? Dana Milbank explains:
Republicans are learning to embrace their phoniness: The Republican Party finally has admitted what has been fairly obvious for much of the past six years: It produces fake news … it's an important step for the party to embrace the phoniness.

"NRCC launches fake news sites to attack Democratic candidates" was a headline in the National Journal on Tuesday. As Shane Goldmacher reported, "The National Republican Congressional Committee, which came under fire earlier this year for a deceptive series of fake Democratic candidate websites that it later changed after public outcry, has launched a new set of deceptive websites, this time designed to look like local news sources."

These two dozen sites, with names such as "North County Update" and "Central Valley Update" look like political fact-checking sites.
 An NRCC official told me the sites are legal because, if you scroll all the way to the bottom, you'll find, "Paid for by the National Republican Congressional Committee" in small print. "They're not fake websites," the official said. "These are real attack websites." Real attacks, but fake news: This is a fairly accurate summary of what the GOP's scandalmongers have been purveying during the Obama years.

Fast and Furious? No evidence was found. Money for Solyndra to pay the president's political cronies. Didn't happen that way. Obamacare would bring about the collapse of the American health-care system and replace it with socialized medicine and death panels. No such thing has occurred. The IRS scandal? Nope. And now, we have the Benghazi exoneration.

The actual truth of the allegations doesn't matter. Each one sullied President Obama's name. That's why fake news works: Falsehoods can drive a president's approval rating into the cellar while the truth still is getting out of bed. 

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