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March 29, 2015 09:40 AM UTC

Steve House's First At-Bat: Swing and a Miss

  • 7 Comments
  • by: Colorado Pols
Steve House.
Steve House.

As the Denver Post’s Lynn Bartels reports, newly elected Colorado Republican Party chairman Steve House got right to work last week, firing up the Republican faithful to oppose the rascally agenda of those villainous “Denver Democrats” in the state legislature.

The problem is, House’s appeal for donations to the Colorado GOP to stop the “Denver Democrats” appears to rely on making stuff up.

House, who beat Ryan Call for the chairman’s post earlier this month, outlined the “common sense conservative bills” that “Democrat obstructionists” in the state House have killed. (Republicans control the Senate; Democrats the House.) The chairman included in the list of dead bills Senate Bill 1 from Senate President Bill Cadman, R-Colorado Springs, “which puts TABOR money into the pockets of the working families.”

Really? That’s news to everybody else at the Capitol:

Senate Republicans are waiting until the legislature passes the budget before taking up the measure which, by the way, the left-leaning Colorado Fiscal Institute actually likes. [Pols emphasis]

Got that? Not only is Senate Bill 15-001 still alive, there’s bipartisan support for it. That means not only does Steve House look foolish to mourn the bill’s death prematurely, he could be making it harder to pass by needlessly injecting partisanship into the debate over the bill. Either way, it’s an inauspicious start for the man who just kicked Ryan Call to the proverbial curb on a wave of “we can do better.”

Because “better” should include having your facts straight.

Comments

7 thoughts on “Steve House’s First At-Bat: Swing and a Miss

    1. “People think that a liar gains a victory over his victim. What I’ve learned is that a lie is an act of self-abdication, because one surrenders one’s reality to the person to whom one lies, making that person one’s master, condemning oneself from then on to faking the sort of reality that person’s view requires to be faked…The man who lies to the world, is the world’s slave from then on…”

      ― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

      oh, what a tangled web the party has woven…

  1. Look … I am sure that House knows that what he is saying is not true.  This isn’t about reality or facts.   House is doing this for calculated political effect, and to score easy political points.  Note the “common sense solutions” and “Denver Democrats” boilerplate language?  This comes straight out of the GOP’s standard message book.  This is all deliberate.  House isn’t shooting from the hip.

    And as a tactic, this comes from a party that has decided that aggressive and coordinated lying on an ongoing basis from day-to-day is good politics.  

    House is counting on the fact that the GOP faithful that will hear this message will either never hear the facts or won’t care.  

    So this isn’t about looking foolish or being embarrassed.  That’s the wrong way to frame this. The only embarrassment that comes is when one of those things blows up in the GOP’s face. And that sort of setback doesn’t happen very often, or last very long, due to the lack of push back from the media or coordinated outrage.  When this stuff happens on a daily basis, in all directions, on all different topics, who can keep up?

    The real story about what we are seeing is that House seems more enthusiastic about using this propaganda tactic than Ryan Call was.  This is House’s opening move.  House is announcing who he is, and what he is going to do.  

  2. Unfortunately and as usual, Ayn Rand didn’t know WTF she was talking about. Lies have worked remarkably well for the right. Fox News is a widely trusted “news” network. The same majorities who poll for various gun control solutions are against gun control legislation because they buy the rightie lies about what’s in it. O’Really’s books of lies and incorrect history are perennial best sellers.

    Maybe if Dems had the balls to call them out for their lies instead of being afraid people will think they’re commies if they’re mean to conservatives things would be different. But during the past 3 decades or so it’s been pretty much the opposite. It’s been…. please don’t hate us. We’re pretty conservative too and just want to hold hands and sing with all those sensible, fiscally responsible conservative Rs (now redundant. Elected Rs range only from very conservative to wacko rightie) and be as much like them as possible.

    And I’ve just got to say, like most ponderous, clumsy fiction written by ideologues to teach lessons, Atlas Shrugged, which I had to read in school or would never have gotten past the first dozen stupid pages, is a completely mediocre piece of dreck from a literary point of view. War and Peace it ain’t.

  3. This just reminds me of a truth that I, and many, many others, have learned as we’ve moved through our adulthood: most – and I mean the vast majority – of politicians and political wanna-bes like House are fundamentally dishonest people. They lack an ethical core, any sense of decency, compassion, kindness, or respect for others. In other words, your average politico has about the same moral fiber as your average criminal.

    Lying is never, never, never justified as a tool to gain political advantage or demean an ideological adversary. Lying only reveals the liar as a person who should not ever be trusted.

    It is so sad that the problem is getting worse all the time in our political system, as this diary indicates. Our society is coming apart, our democracy failing, because people like this House character and those like him consider dishonesty to be an acceptable price to pay in their egotistical, money-motivated, never-ending grasp for power.

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