Lyin’ Traitor Kevin McCarthy Tries To Distract And Deflect From Republican Insurrection With A Border Stunt

Update to Lordy, There’s Tapes! Lyin’ ‘Traitor’ Kevin McCarthy Needs To Resign From Office (Updated).

Lyin’ Traitor Kevin MCarthy, desperate to distract and deflect from new revelations about his duplicity on Friday, and new revelations about the House GQP Freedom (sic) Caucus – more accrurately described as the House GQP Fascist Caucus – on Saturday, and new revelations about the massive conspiracy of insurrectionist GQP Coup Plotters on Monday, staged yet another border stunt on Monday to promote the GQPs anti-immigrant hysteria “white fright” campaign strategy for 2022. Of course, much of the feckless media played along.

The Post’s Dana Milbank was having none of it. McCarthy’s lying at the border cements him as the Great Prevaricator:

The Great Prevaricator stood on the banks of the Rio Grande and released a mighty river of deceit.

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, in a news conference Monday afternoon with fellow Republican lawmakers at the southern border and in a separate interview with Fox News, misrepresented the source of illicit fentanyl. He grossly distorted a description of phones the federal government is using to track immigrants who crossed the border illegally. He teased the dubious notion that Democrats somehow obtained and leaked the audio of a private meeting he had with fellow Republican leaders.

And then there was this showstopper: He dissembled about his own lie.

First, he claimed he wasn’t lying when he falsely denied a New York Times report that he had told colleagues after the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection that he would advise President Donald Trump to resign. He suggested he misunderstood the question.

Yet McCarthy then appeared, in his garbled syntax, to repeat the original lie that he never told colleagues he planned to ask Trump to resign: “If you’re asking now, ‘Did I tell my members that we’re going to ask?’ Ask them if I told any of them that I said to President Trump. The answer is no.” (According to the audio recording of that meeting, McCarthy in fact said he was “seriously thinking” of telling Trump “it would be my recommendation you should resign.”)

Sooo, what you are telling me is that “I told my caucus that I would, but I am such a craven coward, that I chickened out“? Sounds about right. I don’t see how that helps, it doesn’t change the facts of what you said on tape.

Telling a baldfaced lie, particularly one of such magnitude, is a sign of low character. But repeating the very same lie just seconds after explaining you hadn’t told the lie in the first place is a sign of low brain activity.

Alas, this may well be the next speaker of the House.

This would be Americans murdering American democracy.

That’s crazy talk. In this Trumpified Republican Party, lying is not a liability. To the contrary: The only truly career-damaging move a Republican lawmaker can make at the moment is to tell the truth.

McCarthy knows this firsthand. He told the truth once in 2015 — and it cost him the speakership then. He had been next in line for the job until he inadvertently said something truthful to Fox News’s Sean Hannity: that Republicans launched a probe of the Benghazi terrorist attack for the purpose of harming Hillary Clinton.

Since then, it has been fairly easy to tell when McCarthy is lying: His lips are moving. He even banished fellow Republican Rep. Liz Cheney (Wyo.) from leadership for telling the truth about Jan. 6.

There was a time when getting caught on tape lying might have ended a career. Sam Rayburn, the legendary House speaker of the mid-20th century known for his integrity, famously said that “any fellow who will cheat for you will cheat against you.”

McCarthy is the sort of man Rayburn warned of. He has been a torrent of disinformation — about his statements immediately after Jan. 6, about Biden’s tax proposals, about the Jan. 6 committee, about the economy, about covid-19 relief and about the 2020 election.

In the caucus he leads, such deceit is standard. McCarthy was joined at the border by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), who in sworn testimony last week flatly denied calling Nancy Pelosi a “traitor to the country.” A lawyer then displayed the quote of Greene saying exactly that. “Oh, no, wait, hold on now,” Greene said, revising her account. She also said she didn’t recall whether she advised Trump to impose martial law after he lost the election; text messages reported Monday by CNNshow her telling Trump’s chief of staff that “several” lawmakers “are saying the only way to save our Republic is for Trump to call for Marshall (sic) law.”

Yet even Greene had a hard time keeping up with the Great Prevaricator on Monday. As Greene hovered off McCarthy’s shoulder, the Republican leader declared that “all” fentanyl is coming “across this border” — which must be a surprise to China and to traffickers who bring most of their product through legal entry points. McCarthy announced he had seen just-apprehended migrants “opening up the iPhones that the government was providing them” and on which it would “pay for their calls”; in reality, the devices aren’t iPhones and don’t work for purposes other than monitoring.

McCarthy then moved on to repeat last week’s lie about Jan. 6 and Trump’s resignation — which he dismissed as “something that happened 15 months ago on a private conversation.”

But 15 months later, the Great Prevaricator’s assault on truth has become a daily menace.

The Post’s Eugene Robinson adds, No Republican who participates in the war on truth deserves your vote (excerpt):

The GQP has made clear that it intends to run a “post-truth” campaign in the November elections. No Republican who goes along with this abominable strategy — no Republican who doesn’t publicly denounce it — deserves your vote. Not a single one of them.

It is no exaggeration to say that what the onetime Party of Lincoln is doing constitutes a dire threat to the very idea of democracy. A contest between liberal and conservative philosophies is healthy. An asymmetrical clash between one party grappling with nuanced reality and another party deliberately spewing paranoid fiction is dangerously corrosive to the fabric of the nation.

If the warp of our differences is no longer held together by the weft of an agreed-upon chronicle of events and a bipartisan encyclopedia of facts, there is no basis for meaningful political discourse. We can only speak past, not to, one another.

It must be acknowledged, because it is the simple truth, that this is not a “both-sides-are-to-blame” crisis. The Democratic Party is engaged in politics as usual, with the customary pull and tug between its progressive and centrist wings. The GOP has gone rogue in a way that is un-American and without modern precedent.

Republicans tolerated Donald Trump’s lies for years. But this tendency to excuse mendacity shifted from bad habit to mortal sin with the party’s embrace of that “big lie” about the election Trump lost to Joe Biden. David Perdue was especially brazen in the way he trumpeted the proven falsehood. But no less guilty are the many other Republicans who perpetuate it by mumbling about “irregularities” in the 2020 vote — or by remaining silent. Their complicity in the lie is not excused by the fact that Trump will try his best to end their careers if they dare speak the truth. They know the difference between right and wrong, and they are opting for personal gain over public service. They should be ashamed of themselves.

The stolen-election lie is just the beginning, though. It establishes a post-truth ethos in which other lies become not just acceptable but also routine. Last week, for example, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) flatly denied a New York Times report that he had told GOP colleagues, in a phone call after the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection, that he planned to advise Trump to resign. Those who were on that call knew he was lying. None came forward publicly to say so.

When the Times and MSNBC released a tape recording of the Jan. 10, 2021, call — in which McCarthy says he will tell Trump, “It would be my recommendation you should resign” — the only public GOP criticism of McCarthy came from Rep. Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, who has already broken with the leadership and serves on the House Jan. 6 committee, and Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida, who accused McCarthy of insufficient fealty to Trump. Most mainstream Republican members of Congress said nothing at all.

Democrats, understandably, were less constrained. “Kevin McCarthy is a liar and a traitor,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) said Sunday. “This is outrageous. And that is really the illness that pervades the Republican leadership right now — that they say one thing to the American public and something else in private.”

Warren did not exaggerate. The whole GOP campaign for the fall elections promises to be built on lies — about critical race theory, about gay and transgender people, about purported attempts to “cancel” conservative voices. I know from private conversations that there are prominent Republicans who are deeply concerned about what their party is doing — but say nothing publicly. The party’s aim is to regain power, and truth is mere collateral damage.

The Democratic Party can be messy, disorganized, clumsy, starry-eyed and overly wonkish, prone to showing up at a political knife fight with a sheaf of briefing books. However, right now, the Democrats are the nation’s only hope for getting our democracy back on the rails. My personal views are obviously on the progressive side, but I believe journalists must stand, above all else, for truth, no matter where on the political spectrum it comes from. The Republican Party no longer acts as if truth matters.

And this state of affairs can’t be blamed entirely on Trump. Republican elected officials have a choice and are choosing to lie. Voters must choose to send the liars home.

As I said, this would be Americans murdering American democracy.

Midterm elections historically are low turnout elections, which inures to the benefit of Republicans. Those who cannot even be bothered to vote are even worse than those who actively vote to murder American democracy. They do not care enough that their own indifference is the reason American democracy dies.

For the generations of Americans who came before who fought and died to preserve American democracy, this is a betrayal of their sacrifices and enduring faith in America.

This election is a choice between pro-democracy and anti-democracy authoritarianism. A Choice between good and evil. That’s it.  Which side are you on?