Illegal and Mendacious

Turns out those campaign ads against Democrats aren't just funded by anonymous corporations and illegal foreign donations; they're also full of proven lies.

Steve Benen:

And if that was all, it'd be pretty awful. But Greg Sargent reminds us today that Rove isn't just lying to the public and the media about campaign financing, he's also lying to voters in the ads he's helping finance.

Here's something important that's getting lost in the firefight over the money funding the ads by the U.S. Chamber and Karl Rove's groups: Many of the ads themselves have been debunked by independent fact checkers as false, grossly misleading, or marred with distortions.

I've compiled a list below, and the totality is striking. Thus far the media focus has understandably been on the flap over the White House's foreign money charges. But there's another big part of the story that's going undercovered: The scope of the dishonesty and distortion that's flowing from the conservative side of this debate.

Not only are the ads themselves getting widely debunked, but the justifications the groups are offering for the ad onslaught (that liberals and labor do this too) are also demonstrably false or misleading. We're witnessing a massive disinformation campaign flooding airwaves across the country that could change the outcome of major races and shift the balance of power in Congress, funded by money from undisclosed sources, justified with still more falsehoods and disinformation.

Greg ran a list of Senate campaign ads -- some financed by Rove's attack operations, some by the Chamber -- and literally all of them include demonstrable falsehoods.

The layers of deception are getting tough to keep up with. But the bottom line remains the same: Karl Rove and his fellow GOP hatchetmen are raking in obscene amounts of undisclosed money, using it to lie to voters, all the while lying about the campaign finance fiasco that's allowing them to buy an election cycle.

Greg concluded, "[T]he sheer scale and dimension of dishonesty and distortion coming from the conservative side of this debate is a very big part of the story. And it's largely going untold."

Have you made calls for your Democratic Congressional candidate today?