COMMENTARY

Home of the whopper

Arkansas television viewers get played for fools with great regularity and verve these days.

It’s hard to keep pace with the deception. But we must try.

At the risk of overstating in the fashion of the contemporary political advertising we should deplore, our representative democracy may depend on our keeping pace with deception.

You cannot resist what you do not recognize.

If you’re keeping score at home, as you should be, the Republicans are out-fibbing the Democrats in television advertising at the present time.

If Republicans don’t like my saying that, then they should fib less.

Let’s begin here: The National Republican Senatorial Committee airs a commercial saying U. S. Sen. Mark Pryor voted to give Social Security benefits to illegals aliens.

That is not exactly right, as PolitiFact explained last week in labeling the charge false.

Pryor voted once to table an amendment saying that newly legal immigrants couldn’t get benefits for which they’d been taxed as undocumented workers. He voted twice later for that amendment.

That same NRSC ad says Pryor voted to give members of Congress special favors under Obamacare. That’s not right either.

The new law contained a hostile Republican amendment forcing congressional staff workers, previously covered on a perfectly fine group plan, into the new health-care exchange. Democrats decided they had bigger matters to worry about, so they didn’t fight the amendment.

The subsequent administrative fix, urged by House Speaker John Boehner and supported by Pryor, was for the benefit of congressional employees more than elected officials. It allowed staff members to continue receiving their existing employer contribution toward these newly mandated exchange policy purchases.

It wasn’t a special favor. Instead it mitigated a uniquely punitive measure.

Karl Rove’s American Crossroads group runs a commercial saying Obamacare as supported by Pryor cut Medicare benefits. That’s false. It forced cuts in reimbursements, not benefits.

There were cuts to the privatized Medicare Advantage plans, but not to the coverage offered under basic Medicare. Insurers and providers endured some needed efficiencies. But they got more than compensated by the new business drummed up by Obamacare, at least in states that expanded Medicaid.

Seniors on Medicare A and B simply were not affected in the breadth of their services or the extent of their benefits.

The same spot offers a fuzzy video snippet of Pryor saying what turned out not to be so—that you could keep your insurance plan under Obamacare. That, per usual, is deceptive.

Pryor’s comment was in answer to a question about the effect on employers offering group coverage, not individuals. And, indeed, employers have been able to keep their group plans, though with some rate increases.

The beneficiary of these untruths, U.S. Rep. Tom Cotton, gets personally deceptive himself in his new ad featuring his mother.

He denies voting to reduce benefits for Social Security and Medicare. But he voted to raise the Social Security retirement age to 70. And he voted for Paul Ryan’s budget that would have eroded basic Medicare by offering the option of private vouchers to recipients with which they could buy private insurance—vouchers that might well be insufficient to purchase coverage equal to that provided by traditional Medicare.

In the governor’s race, FactCheck.org declares a “whopper” the charge by the Republican Governors Association that Democratic gubernatorial nominee Mike Ross got a sweetheart deal on the sale of his family pharmacy.

The simple truth is that Ross and his pharmacist wife had a vibrant small-town business that got snapped up by a drugstore chain in a voracious acquisition mode. He got a nice price because that was what the free market provided.

On any other occasion, Republicans would laud a guy making out on the free market.

Meantime, the Democratic Governors Association comes in to do hatchet-man duties for Ross against Republican Asa Hutchinson.

The Democrats’ ad calls Hutchinson a “tax cheat” for claiming, for a time, homestead property-tax credits on both his main residence and a condominium in Little Rock.

That is overly incendiary under the circumstances.

It is entirely possible, even probable, that Hutchinson didn’t mean to take two credits. That would render his transgression not a matter of being a “cheat,” but of being less responsible and vigilant than we’d have a reasonable right to expect our next governor to be.

But a measured and nuanced allegation doesn’t work as well as incendiary defamation in a 30-second television commercial.

Finally, there’s one other recent television commercial that transcends simple dishonesty to enter a twilight zone of emotional instability.

From a group called “Conservative War Chest,” the commercial charges that Pryor conspires with a sinister “Gang of Five” to turn Arkansas into either Detroit or Hollywood or, somehow, both.

Since money is speech under Citizens United, the crazed rich have just as much right to infest the airwaves as the merely dishonest rich.

John Brummett’s column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at [email protected]. Read his blog at brummett.arkansasonline.com, or his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.

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