Spin is normal in politics, but Romney is pioneering a cynical strategy of reducing fact and truth to pure partisanship
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Pointing out that Romney is consistently not telling the truth .. risks simply falling into the category of the usual “he-said, she-said” of American politics. For cynical reporters, the behavior is inevitably seen to be the way the political game is now played. Rather than being viewed and ultimately exposed as examples of a pervasive pattern of falsehoods, Romney’s statements embed themselves in the normalized political narrative – along with aggrieved Democrats complaining that Romney isn’t telling the truth. Meanwhile, the lie sticks in the minds of voters.
…Quite simply, the United States has never been witness to a presidential candidate, in modern American history, who lies as frequently, as flagrantly and as brazenly as Mitt Romney.
My personal favorite in Romney’s cavalcade of untruths is his repeated assertion that President Obama has apologized for America. In his book, appropriately titled “No Apologies”, Romney argues the following:
“Never before in American history has its president gone before so many foreign audiences to apologize for so many American misdeeds, both real and imagined. It is his way of signaling to foreign countries and foreign leaders that their dislike for America is something he understands and that is, at least in part, understandable.”
Nothing about this sentence is true.
President Obama never went around the world and apologized for America – and yet, even after multiple news organizations have pointed out this is a “pants on fire” lie, Romney keeps making it. Indeed, the “Obama apology tour”, along with the president bowing down to the King of Saudi Arabia, are practically the lodestars of the GOP’s criticism of Obama’s foreign policy performance (the Saudi thing isn’t true either).
But foreign policy is a relatively light area of mistruth, there is Romney’s claim that “stimulus didn’t put more private-sector people to work.” According to the Congressional Budget Office, the stimulus bill created more than 3m jobs – a view shared by 80% of economists polled by the Chicago Booth School of Business (only 4% disagree).
Romney also likes to argue that the stimulus didn’t help private-sector job growth, but rather helped preserve government jobs. In fact, the Obama years have been witness to massive cuts in government employment.
Romney has accused Obama of raising taxes – in reality, they’ve gone down under his presidency, and largely because of that stimulus bill that Romney loves to criticize.
(Romney) has accused the president of doubling the deficit. In fact, it’s actually gone down on Obama’s watch.
Romney took credit for the success of the auto bailout – even though he wrote an op-ed for the Washington Post titled “Let Detroit Go Bankrupt”.
Then, there is the recent Romney nugget that the Obama administration passed Obamacare with the full knowledge that it “would slow down the economic recovery in this country” and that the White House “knew that before they passed it”.
Also of Obamacare, Romney has said that it will lead to the government taking over 50% of the economy (not true) –…; that it will create to “a massive European-style entitlement” (many liberals wish this were true, but alas, it is not); and that it will lead to a government-run healthcare system (a lie so pervasive that it’s practically become shorthand for Republicans – yet it too, like the infamous made-up death panels of the health care debate, is simply not accurate).
Romney actually has a telling rejoinder for this. When a reporter challenged his oft-stated assertion that President Obama had made the economy worse (factually, not correct), he denied ever saying it in the first place. It’s a lie on top of a lie.
As MSNBC’s Steve Benen told me:
“Romney gets away with it because he and his team realize contemporary political journalism isn’t equipped to deal with a candidate who lies this much, about so many topics, so often.”
Romney is charting new and untraveled waters in American politics. In the process, he is cynically eroding the fragile sense of trust that exists between voters and politicians. It’s almost enough to make one pine for the days when Sarah Palin lied about “the Bridge to Nowhere”.
Read more at Jonathan Chait, the acerbic political columnist for New York Magazine, Romney is “Just Making Stuff Up Now”.
Steve Benen, a blogger and producer for the Rachel Maddow show compiles a weekly list of “Mitt’s Mendacity”