Dirty Money, Dirty Lies
by digby
Greg Sargent makes trouble by pointing out the obvious fact that those nice All-American citizens Karl Rove and the Chamber of Commerce are not only bankrolling the Republican Party with foreign money (which we all know can’t possibly be true and even if it is nobody cares) they are using their mega-millions to spread outright lies:
Last week I noted that the ads that have been bankrolled by Karl Rove’s groups and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce against Senate Dem candidates across the country have been widely debunked by independent fact-checkers for their multiple falsehoods and distortions. Turns out the same is true of the Chamber’s ads against House Democrats. These Chamber ads, which are running or have run in multiple districts across the country, contain many claims that are demonstrable distortions or have been repeatedly debunked as false by independent fact-checkers. This is the side of this story that continues to unfold under the media radar. Much of the media focus has been on the high-profile Beltway spat between these groups and the White House and Dems over their undisclosed donors. But the ads themselves are not receiving anywhere near the high-profile media scrutiny that Dem claims about the Chamber have — even though they constitute a massive national campaign flooding airwaves in multiple races that could tip the balance of power in Congress.
Read on for the details.
I don’t now if we will ever be able to tally up the numbers spent in this campaign and we certainly will never know the names of all those who bankrolled it. But the scale of this corporate intervention into politics is unprecedented and their willingness to just lie outright — with no fear reprisals — is fairly amazing. American politics are, in effect, a financial free-for-all now and I would guess they will stay that way for at least another 20 years until the Roberts Court can turn over (and even then, under liberals, the principle of stare decisis will undoubtedly be rediscovered.)
What the hell are we going to do about this?
.