Truth

From a column expressing astonishment at the whacko statement1 from the guy running against Claire McCaskill for the Senate in Missouri:

Michael Kinsley famously defined a gaffe as “when a politician tells the truth — some obvious truth he isn’t supposed to say.” This election season, Republican politicians have offered a variation on this principle: They’re getting in trouble for saying some obvious truth about what they actually believe about women, baring the ignorance, contempt and cruelty therein instead of pretending this is about protecting women or babies.

True enough. I think it’s partly because they are emboldened by the 2010 midterm results which saw so many Tea Party loonies win. They now think there’s no need to obfuscate what they really think; so many voters must feel the same way or they wouldn’t have elected all those Republicans two years ago. I think they’re wrong. There’s at least some need to fib about your intentions, as the Romney-Ryan ticket is doing. They recognize that turning Medicare into a voucher (oops, “premium support”) system won’t fly by itself, so they lie about Obama’s re-allocation of $716 billion from Medicare into other areas of health care even as they take the same $716 billion and use it for millionaire’s tax cuts.

1“First of all, from what I understand from doctors [pregnancy from rape] is really rare,” Missouri Senate hopeful Todd Akin said in an interview Sunday, explaining why his ideal abortion ban wouldn’t include an exception for rape. “If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down,” he added.