Last week was dominated by the Republican National Convention (RNC), which ended up officially choosing Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan as the Republican candidates for president and vice president. This week will be dominated by the Democratic National Convention (DNC). I am writing on Monday morning, before the start of the DNC, because of the time difference with London. But I will venture to say that the Democrats' convention will be more truthful and closer to the reality of domestic conditions in the United States, and around the world, than the RNC had been. Politics is a word that is synonymous to lying. But in four decades of my work, including those years I spent in Washington D.C., I have never heard or observed lying so blatant that it insults the audience, as the one I have seen gushing from the Republican Party (GOP) - or the industrial-military council that Dwight Eisenhower had once warned against, and the party of the rich that is trying hard to deprive the poor from healthcare, in the wealthiest country in the world. “We Built This", the RNC motto, was itself lying incarnate. If they wanted to be sincere, the motto should have been “We Destroyed This". Indeed, we are talking here about a history that we all were contemporary to, and witnessed in video and audio. The Republican President George W. Bush had inherited a trillion-dollar surplus from the Democratic President Bill Clinton, and then left a trillion-dollar deficit to the incumbent Democratic President Barack Obama, and $ 14 trillion in debts, after the losing wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and the War on Terror. Thus, the fabrication of premises for the war on Iraq ended up dealing a fatal blow to the U.S. economy, leading to the ongoing crisis of 2008, after the Bush administration borrowed from China to wage and lose wars around the world. The RNC overlooked foreign policy and national security except for a few nods here and there, as Mitt Romney expresses his support for Israel, attacked Iran and promises to increase military spending in a bankrupt country. For his part, Senator John McCain expresses his objection to withdrawing from Afghanistan in 2014, and called for intervention in Syria, while former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice spoke about “Peace through Strength", and ignored her role in precipitating wars that killed one million Arabs and Muslims. Once again, I say that the premises for the war were deliberately falsified, and the real reasons for it were entirely oil-related and Israeli calculations, rather than American interests. The RNC was conceived in deception, like man is conceived in sin, as the Hebrew Bible says. As the well-established destruction they perpetrated was turned into construction in their motto, the dominant claim in the convention was that the Republicans had tried to cooperate with Barack Obama to overcome partisan differences and rebuild the economy together, but that he refused. This claim is a slap in the face of the truth. To be sure, the Republicans had decided from day one to push the new president to fail, even if that meant deepening and protracting the crisis unleashed by them, and then blaming the new president for it. The radio host who represents the GOP's demagoguery Rush Limbaugh said, literally, after the Republicans were defeated in 2008, “I hope Obama fails." Then Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, speaking about his party's position, said, “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president." Mitt Romney himself, who is a multimillionaire that pays less tax than his staff, had said, “Let Detroit go bankrupt". In other words, he found the U.S. auto industry in trouble, so he did not ask for a solution to its crisis, and wished ruin upon it instead – i.e. the ruin of hundreds of thousands of Americans who work in this industry, just to hurt the president. How can the Republicans claim today that they had tried to work with Barack Obama, and that he refused to shake the hand they extended to him? They fought healthcare for the poor, and when a diluted healthcare plan was passed, they called it Obamacare as an attempt to disparage it. After the 2010 midterm elections, when they came to dominate the House of Representatives, they blocked every single proposal by the president – and the deliberations are all recorded so it is impossible for them to deny this. I write this a few hours before the start of the DNC, which will choose Barack Obama and Joe Biden as the Democratic candidates for president and vice president. All I can expect this week is that the lying will be less, because it cannot possibly be more. [email protected]
