Tag: Mitt Romney
¡Probrecito Mitt! Spanish-Language Commercials Rip Romney on Immigration
Priorities USA and immigrant labor union SEIU are airing a second round of Spanish-language commercials using Mitt Romney’s own words on immigration to motivate Hispanic voters in Colorado, Nevada and Florida.
Romney: “A lot of people come across the border with no skills, no education, looking for a free deal.”
Videos available here.
Romney’s Appearance on ‘Face the Nation’ Sunday Will Be His First Non-Fox News Interview This Year
Mitt Romney rushes to do interviews with Fox News any time they’ll give him air time, but this Sunday, when he appears on CBS News’ “Face the Nation,” it will be the first interview he’s given a legitimate news outlet this year.
Here are five question we wish “Face the Nation” host Bob Schieffer would ask Romney:
Here’s Why Politicians Lie
Because they can — and they know they won’t get called on it.
As Jon pointed out yesterday, Mitt Romney’s campaign has turned lying into something of a craft, if not an art form. But Mother Jones’ Kevin Drum offers an explanation why every time a politician tells a lie, he or she is likely to get away with it:
Politicians have increasingly discovered over the past couple of decades that even on a national stage you can lie pretty blatantly and pay no price since the mainstream media, trapped in its culture of objectivity, won’t really call you on it, limiting themselves to fact checking pieces like Kessler’s buried on an inside page. And because virtually nobody except political junkies ever sees this stuff, it doesn’t hurt their campaigns at all.
Big Media Can’t Be Bothered to Keep Up with the Romney Campaign’s Rovian ‘Blizzard of Lies’ Strategy
If Mitt Romney wins the presidency in November it will be because he has adopted the George W. Bush/Karl Rove “reality creation” strategy, wherein the candidate/elected official and his or her surrogates tell so many lies, day in and day out, that the overpaid but beleaguered national political media can’t be bothered to keep up.
Just as there was in the Bush years, a cottage industry is coalescing on the Interwebs around the mission of tracking the Romney team’s “blizzard of lies” strategy with fact checking and lie listings. Media Matters does a good job, of course, and there’s Factcheck.org and right-leaning Politifact, but check out Romney the Liar, at Blogspot, for starters. Here are a few other sources:
Romney’s Rules for Lying
Believe it or not, there is a method to Mitt Romney’s mendacity. Xpostfactoid has come up with 12 rules (so far) for Romney’s lying. Here are three:
1. Context doesn’t matter. Anything you say I may use against you, e.g., by making it sound like you said the opposite…
4. When confronted directly with past positions that seem to contradict current ones, I may so thoroughly bend the positions back against each other that none shall be able to penetrate my paradoxes…
10. I may lie with impunity to the American people for months and years — and be rewarded with the presidency.
The full list is here.
Fox News Propagandists ‘Disappear’ Romney’s Claim That U.S. Does Not Need More First Responders and Teachers
Mitt Romney’s latest gaffe came at the end of last week when he attacked Pres. Obama’s call to hire more first responders and educators. Pres. Obama, he said, “says we need more firemen, more policemen, more teachers. Did he not get the message of Wisconsin? The American people did. It’s time for us to cut back on government and help the American people.”
How bad was the gaffe? So bad that the Republicans’ propaganda network made it disappear, according to Media Matters:
Romney Falsely Accuses Obama of Corruption – Fact Checkers Say It’s a Lie, So Mitt Doubles Down by Using the Lie in an Ad
On May 31, Mitt Romney went to the site of the Solyndra Plant in California for the express purpose of using the failed green-energy development company as the background to lie about the Obama administration:
ROMNEY: “An independent inspector general looked at this investment (Solyndra) and concluded that the administration had steered money to friends and family—to campaign contributors.”
Accusing the president and his administration of corruption was a vicious lie. It is not true that an inspector general said anything of the sort.
Later, when pressed to cite the source for this lie, the Romney campaign was quoting a Newsweek article by Peter Schweizer, but this citation is fatally flawed. First, the piece in Newsweek was not a article, it was an excerpt from the book “Throw Them All Out,” a Coulteresque right-wing propaganda screed by Schweizer, a former foreign policy adviser for Sarah Palin (!) and speech-writing consultant for the George W. Bush administration, who is currently a fellow at the conservative Hoover Institution.
Romney’s lie about the Solyndra investigation has been disproved and disputed by every media source that bothered to look into it. However, at least in part because this fact checking has been censored by right-wing media, the Romney turned the lie into a television ad which it is running in swing states with impunity. Here is the transcript for the false ad:
