Daily Dope: Matt Drudge

When Matt Drudge Uses His Red Banner Headline, He's Probably Lying.

The New York Times reports on President Obama's just-announced nuclear weapons policy, and as usual, the hyperbolic Matt Drudge once again fails basic reading comprehension:

From the piece's second paragraph:

But the president said in an interview that he was carving out an exception for “outliers like Iran and North Korea” that have violated or renounced the main treaty to halt nuclear proliferation.

The frothing right-wing talking point incubator is clearly attempting to paint Obama as a Commie pinko peacenik pacifist who will curtsey and bow before unilaterally disarming. Drudge is nothing if not entirely predictable.

Other excerpts:

Discussing his approach to nuclear security the day before formally releasing his new strategy, Mr. Obama described his policy as part of a broader effort to edge the world toward making nuclear weapons obsolete, and to create incentives for countries to give up any nuclear ambitions. To set an example, the new strategy renounces the development of any new nuclear weapons, overruling the initial position of his own defense secretary.

It eliminates much of the ambiguity that has deliberately existed in American nuclear policy since the opening days of the Cold War. For the first time, the United States is explicitly committing not to use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear states that are in compliance with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, even if they attacked the United States with biological or chemical weapons, or launched a crippling cyberattack.

“I’m going to preserve all the tools that are necessary in order to make sure that the American people are safe and secure,” Mr. Obama said during the interview in the Oval Office.

Mr. Obama’s new strategy is bound to be controversial, both among conservatives who have warned against diluting America’s most potent deterrent, and among liberals who were hoping for a blanket statement that America would never be the first to use nuclear weapons.

The most immediate test of the new strategy is likely to be in dealing with Iran, which has defied the international community by developing a nuclear program that it insists is peaceful but that the United States and its allies say is a precursor to weapons. Asked about the escalating confrontation with Iran, Mr. Obama said he was now convinced that “the current course they’re are on would provide them with nuclear weapons capabilities,” though he gave no timeline.

The full New York Times report is here.

Joseph Goebbels Would Have Loved Today's Republican Party.

Republicans have been lying about health care reform for almost fifty years. They've always had lots of help.

Today's desperate crop of corpocrats are continuing their party's shameless ways, and their latest charade is an outright lie about a budget procedure they are blatantly mislabeling.

As such, it's not really a new era, but it is another day in 2010's Tea Bag Nation. And it's another lie from Matt Drudge.
Simply put--atomic weapon imagery and bold, red headlines aside--reconciliation is not the "nuclear option," no matter how many times Republicans and their lapdogs like Drudge repeat the lie that it is. And that's a fact.
Rachel Maddow points out the GOP's lying bullshit here:



There's more about budget reconciliation and the "nuclear option" here. And if Democrats really had balls--if they wanted to enact real reform--they'd use reconciliation to pass a single-payer health care system for all.