Tuesday, September 10, 2013

WaPo Gives Senator Ted Cruz’s Obamacare Video Three Pinnochios

We all know that popular Tea Party adage, don’t we? “If at first you don’t repeal, lie, lie again.” Perhaps no one personifies their expertise in such matters than the neo-McCarthyite smarm king himself, Senator Ted Cruz. The Canadian Senator from Texas has just released a new one-minute video about his opposition to the Affordable Care Act, known more commonly as Obamacare, and it was so full of lies that The Washington Post gave Cruz three of their “Pinnochios” for his effort. In other words, Cruz’ video is worthless for anything other than propaganda distribution.

Cruz starts by taking Senator Max Baucus ridiculously out of context with a quote from around April of this year where Baucus said the way that information was getting to the public about Obamacare was a “train wreck.” Cruz took that one snippet and just like the Romney campaign did with Obama’s “You didn’t build that” sound byte, he created an entire premise of his video that one of the people who helped craft the bill himself thinks that Obamcare is a “train wreck.”

But that wasn’t all. He lied about large corporations quietly being excused from the mandate (the employer requirement side of Obamacare was delayed for all employers, and the news was anything but quiet). He lied about the teamsters being opposed to the ACA because it would destroy the 40-hour work week. While the quote Cruz used from Jimmy Hoffa, Jr. was correct, the context was once again completely wrong. Hoffa and the teamsters he represents were concerned about regulations and there are economists who say what the unions were pushing for was “double-dipping” into benefits anyway. In any event, the president of the AFL-CIO, the country’s largest labor organization, says that great progress has been made, so pretty much from start to finish this new ad from Cruz is one lie after another…and the sad part is many of his constituents probably have no clue just how mendacious it is.

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