The Hollywood Reporter reported last week that Americans living in Europe will have an Independence Day fund-raiser for the Obama campaign. Ben Shapiro at Breitbart.com turned that into an item implying, without saying, that Obama himself would be in Europe on the Fourth of July:
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:
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.
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:
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:
On hand were disgraced former GOP Speaker, Newt Gingrich, Republican pollster/propagandist Frank Lutz, GOP propagandist Fred Barnes as well as senior Republican elected officials, including Sens. Jim DeMint of South Carolina, Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, John Ensign of Nevada and Bob Corker of Tennessee, as well as Reps. Eric Cantor of Virginia, Kevin McCarthy of California, Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, Dan Lungren of California and others. (Then-Minority Leader John Boehner was not there — he and Luntz are not speaking.)
Four months earlier, the financial markets had melted down plunging the U.S. economy into its worst freefall since 1929. As they were meeting in January, the United States was suffering its worst job losses in a month in 34 years. Over 3.5 million jobs had been lost in 2008, nearly 2 million of those losses had occurred in the three months prior to the GOP fatcats’ elegant dinner meeting. And there was no end to it in sight.
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During a discussion about women’s pay on Sunday’s “Meet the Press,” Rachel Maddow attempted to state the fact that women are paid 77 cents for every dollar men are paid, but she could barely get a word in edgewise because of interruptions by Alex Castellanos, a Republican operative, who insisted that it was not true — that women and men are paid equally:
Romney can’t stop lying.
He’s upended the traditional food pyramid, he wants you to know,
And he’s protected us from vaccinations, though not measles and polio.
He’s tackling the goal of food affordability,
He’s extolling roadkill, which is cheap — there’s plenty!
And now Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is going to have his own TV cooking show.
