Dissecting Cheney & co.’s bullshit, via Rachel Maddow

Republicans have been having a jolly good time these past few days since the attempted terrorist attack on Delta Airlines flight 253, getting the outrage machine cranked up at full about the failings of Obama and his administration when it came to protecting American lives and ensuring air travel security and whatnot. This is, of course, a blatant case of fear-mongering hypocritical nonsense, and no-one is more of a war-monger or a dishonest dunce than is Dick Cheney. No-one in the media or amongst the Democrats seem interested in shutting them up with only a rudimentary amount of fact-checking to quell their lies, so I suppose it was up to Rachel Maddow to dissect the bullshit. And she did beautifully. (Naturally.)

The whole thing is a great watch as she tears through all the lies and mindless babble, but below is the part that really stands out, at the 6:43 mark, when she describes just how and why Republicans not only get away with jackass stunts like this, but somehow act as though it were their responsibility to do so:

‘For the most part, Democrats are letting these charges from Dick Cheney and the rest of Republicans go unanswered – even though these are charges that collapse very quickly in the face of even rudimentary fact-checking. But, even if you step back from the specific, ridiculous claims that they are making, consider what Republicans are trying to do, here. Republicans apparently think they can survive the fact-checking problems they will have here if anybody ever decides to look into these things they’re saying. They think they can survive the fact-checking because they imagine they have this transcendent credibility on national security matters. A credibility on national security that – what, transcends the facts of their record?

Exactly right.

The world of journalism and the media needs about a hundred more like her to counterbalance against all the incompetent twits who claim to share news and who do little more than spread conservative talking points and lies without bothering to take five seconds to filter the bullshit out of them. If I wanna watch unfiltered Republican lies and hypocrisy go unanswered, I’ll tune in to Faux Newz, thank you very much. The rest of the media should be held to (much) higher standards.

(via @todayspolitics)