“Promiscuous Fabrication”: Mitt Romney’s Lying is the Real Voter Fraud
Forget ACORN. If you really want to know who’s defrauding millions of Americans out of their right to vote it’s Mitt Romney and the Republican Party. And they’ve got lots of ways to do it.
One of the most popular is obvious enough. In those states where Republicans control both the governor’s office and state legislature a systematic effort has been underway in earnest over the past two years to erect barriers to voting by those traditional Democratic Party constituencies such as the elderly, the poor and the young who might stand in the way of the Conservative Movement’s drive for a monopoly of power.
But another form of voter fraud is less obvious. It involves stealing people’s votes by – and let us not flinch from the word – lying to them.
In a glorious eight-minute dissection (what Fox News would surely call a shrill and unhinged screed) Rachel Maddow cites chapter and verse to prove her case that “the degree to which Mr. Romney lies, about all sorts of stuff, and doesn’t care when he gets caught, may be the single most notable thing about his campaign.”
Maddow Blog editor Steve Benen has been filing regular updates to what he calls his “Chronicles of Mitt’s Mendacity.” And Benen is now up to Volume XII.
For example, campaigning in Wisconsin, Romney complained “The President put an ad out yesterday talking about gasoline prices and how high they are. And guess who he blamed? Me!”
Not true, says Benen.
Another Romney campaign ad argues that Obama “has managed to pile on nearly as much debt as all the previous presidents combined.”
Not even close, says Benen.
In the same ad, Romney claimed “President Barack Obama named himself one of the country’s four best presidents.”
That’s blatantly untrue, says Benen. And on and on and on it goes.
The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank was equally gob-smacked by the audacity of Romney’s dishonesty.
Writing about Romney’s most recent speech in Washington, Milbank judged as “incorrect, wrong, false and fictitious” Romney’s serial falsehoods that: 1.) President Obama: was responsible for the “weakest economic recovery since the Great Depression;” that 2.) eliminating Obamacare would save “about $100 billion a year;” that 3.) Obama was “taking a series of steps that end Medicare as we know it;” and that 4.) the President had created an “unaccountable panel, with the power to prevent Medicare from providing certain treatments.”
Milbank noted that Romney’s speech earned no fewer than three “Pants on Fire” ratings from PolitiFact for his bald faced lies – just some of the more than 32 times PolitiFact has flagged Romney for similar fibs, falsehoods and fabrications.
Not only does Romney’s lying seem gratuitous it’s also epidemic on the right. In his New York Times column on Saturday, for example, Joe Nocera marvels at conservative efforts to pull the plug on the growing popularity of Chevrolet’s electric hybrid Volt by flat out lying about the vehicle, which was recently named European Car of the Year and is coming off its best month yet with 2,200 cars sold.
Yet for months, the conservative propaganda machine has been mocking the Volt as “roller skates with a plug,” says Nocera.
Nocera quotes the Volt’s inventor, legendary auto executive Bob Lutz (“who is about as liberal as the Koch Brothers,” says Nocera) as dismissing as “nuts” conservative criticisms of a car that he says makes “a significant achievement in the auto industry.”
In his Forbes blog, Lutz counters what he called the “rabid, sadly misinformed right.” Nocera also says Lutz “has largely given up” on conservatives after even his conservative intellectual hero, Charles Krauthammer, described the electric car as “flammable.”
Although Lutz remains deeply conservative, Nocera said he’s “become disenchanted with the right’s willingness to spread lies to aid the cause.”
With the nation now celebrating the 50th anniversary re-release of the classic movie To Kill a Mockingbird, Mitt Romney reminds me of that loathsome pair, Bob and Mayella Ewell, the father-daughter tandem who Gregory Peck’s Atticus Finch described as “victims of cruel poverty and ignorance” who brought false charges of rape against the Negro tenant farmer Tom Robinson in “the cynical confidence that their testimony would not be doubted.”
Like Atticus’s all-white, Southern male jury, Romney seems to assume that American voters will merely “go along” with his assumption – the “evil assumption” – that all Democrats lie, that all Democrats are immoral beings, that all Democrats are not to be trusted.
It should be noted that Atticus Finch lost his case before a jury that was more receptive to its own prejudices than to the truth. And if Mitt Romney also exhibits that “cynical confidence” his falsehoods won’t be doubted, the reception he got from the Newspaper Association of America last week may explain why.
There was Mitt Romney standing before a gathering of journalists, making a series of “incorrect and dishonest accusations,” writes David Corn, and not once was Romney “hooted out of the room” by the nation’s assembled press corps. Indeed, says Corn, “he faced no penalty” at all.
The nation’s press, like Attitus’ backward Alabama jury, has its own rigid and time-honored codes which prevent it from seeing the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. And among them, says Atlantic magazine’s James Fallows, is the “false equivalence syndrome” – that “objective-seeming” method of covering the news that unwittingly and inexcusably awards Republicans a license to lie because it compels the media to give equal credence to “both sides” in every dispute even when one of those sides just makes stuff up.
It has never been enough for a people to merely have the formal right to vote. That vote must also count for something when cast by an “informed” voter whose choice is an accurate reflection of the voter’s genuine wants and beliefs.
While it may not be possible to plant democracy at the end of a bayonet it has always been possible to create the appearance of democracy using physical threats or force. We are all familiar, for example, with the cynical charade of right wing dictators and left wing revolutionaries whose legitimacy derives from their having been “elected” in a campaign when they were the only candidates allowed on the ballot, or chosen by voters who were manipulated and coerced.
It is also possible for partisans to manufacture an artificial legitimacy through lies and distortions of the critical information voters need to make an informed judgment on the important issues of the day – the bare minimum that’s required in a democratic political system that claims to be founded on “consent of the governed.”
And a party or a candidate that seeks political power by depriving voters of their rightful connection with reality is engaged in a coup d’etat every bit as real as if the overthrow had been carried out with guns.
But let’s be clear. Lying is not merely a moral failing. In a democratic republic like ours whose legitimacy is rooted in popular sovereignty and consent of the governed the routine, almost promiscuous fabrication of basic facts by Republicans and Republican candidates like Mitt Romney is as much a theft of a citizen’s right to vote as if that citizen was prevented from ever voting at all.
By: Ted Frier, Open Salon, April 9, 2012
“No Nutritional Value”: A Farewell To Newt
It’s not easy letting him go. Not easy at all. Sort of like swearing off bedtime Ben & Jerry’s: there’s valor and the promise of self-improvement in the sacrifice, but also the sad awareness that the world just got a little less naughty. A little less fun.
No matter. It’s time to cut Newt out of our diets.
He has no nutritional value, certainly not at this point, as he peddles his ludicrous guarantee of $2.50-a-gallon gasoline, a promise that would be made only by someone with his own bottomless strategic reserve of crude. Doubly oily entendre intended.
There were calls for him to desist two weeks ago, after he lost Alabama, which abuts his home state of Georgia. But they fell on a deaf Newt.
There were fresh appeals last week, when he failed to wring even one measly delegate from Illinois on Tuesday and then Louisiana on Saturday. But Newt doesn’t need anything as prosaic as delegates, so long as there’s still pocket lint from Sheldon Adelson and the warmth of Callista’s frozen smile.
If he refuses to quit, we in the news media must quit him. Starve him of his very sustenance: attention. Exert a kind of willpower that we’ve lacked in this primary, which we turned into too much of a circus by encouraging too many clowns.
We’ve begun. As the weekend came to a close, The Times’s Trip Gabriel reported that Gingrich’s “full-time traveling press corps is down to a handful of embedded television reporters.” The Associated Press, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and even Politico had packed up their bags. I envision Newt as a larger, grayer, windier version of the little boy at the end of “Shane,” watching the last of these stubborn scribes recede into the horizon, begging them for one last sweet tweet, promising a tasty sound bite about Trayvon Martin or Robert De Niro or … “The Hunger Games!” There must be some harbinger of cultural decline to rail about there! Do “Hunger Games” contestants use food stamps? Those are always good for a diatribe or three.
I implore Fox News to pull up its drawbridge, CNN to bolt its doors. If a Newt falls in the forest and not a single news anchor listens, can he really hang around?
He says he’s propelled by a desire to promote “big ideas,” but his candidacy has devolved into ever smaller talk and ever more desperate sideshows that drag an already undistinguished debate ever lower. Late last week he actually resurrected the Obama-as-Muslim bile, saying the president’s policies raise legitimate suspicion in voters’ minds.
In truth Newt 2012 has never been a lofty enterprise. Although he loves to tout his intellectualism, he got what brief traction he did for visceral and theatrical reasons, with fits of rage and flights of fancy.
He took off when he lashed out at “the elites,” pretending not to be one of them. He soared when he savaged the news media. He rocketed to a colony on the moon.
And he illustrated a dynamic that will survive this campaign season and that we should all think about: how much the profusion of cable channels, Web outlets, other news platforms and commentary of all kinds (including this column) rewards flamboyance, histrionics and a crowded field. A brash candidate is never more than a bellow away from three minutes of air time or two paragraphs somewhere. The beast is ravenous, and I don’t mean Newt.
Yes, the serial surges of the Republican contest since August had grounding in a fickle electorate and changeable polls. But we eagerly abetted them. En route to our beige destiny of Mitt, we craved color. And showcased it.
Newt is one of the few surviving peacocks, especially if you discount Ron Paul, who’s less peacock than emaciated ostrich — never airborne, head in the sand — and so consistently discounted that no one even bothers to implore him to fold his tent. No one can remember that he pitched one.
It’s time to forget Newt as well. His delegate count is closer to Paul’s than to Rick Santorum’s. His strategy — a generous noun — hinges on a replay of the 1920 Republican convention, which picked Warren G. Harding on the 10th ballot.
The 10th ballot? That’d really send the Republican nominee into the general election with a head of steam. I can see the bumper stickers now. Newt: Battle ready. Ballot hardened.
Great politicians are memorialized with holidays, monuments, libraries. For Newt I think an ice cream flavor is in order, something in the clogged vein of Chubby Hubby or Chunky Monkey, although not so physique-focused. Nutty Professor is too obvious a suggestion, though it opens the door to pralines, aptly Southern.
Maybe Peaches ’n’ Scream? That would honor the state he comes from while acknowledging the state he’s been in — unsubtle, overwrought. Not qualifying for the Virginia primary was a blow akin to Pearl Harbor. The Palestinians are “an invented” people.
Newt is empty calories. A pointless pint of them.
By: Frank Bruni, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, March 26, 2012
“Keeping Things In Tumult”: Newt Gingrich Is Mitt Romney’s Secret Weapon
For someone who thinks the “elite media” has “anointed” Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich is doing a pretty good job of helping the former Massachusetts governor get the nomination.
Gingrich, a former House Speaker, has virtually no real hope of amassing the number of delegates needed to sew up the GOP nomination ahead of the convention in Tampa. His only chance is to keep things so in tumult that the party doesn’t know what to do, and then—well, anoints Gingrich at the convention. But staying in the race is arguably having the opposite effect, since Gingrich’s presence in the race serves largely to divide the anti-Romney vote. That deprives former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum of delegates in many states, especially southern states where evangelicals and social conservatives are wary of Romney. Santorum won both Mississippi and Alabama, with Gingrich second and Romney a close third in both states. But if Gingrich hadn’t been in the race, it’s likely that the votes—and the delegates proportionately assigned—would have gone to Santorum.
Santorum, too, is highly unlikely to get the delegates needed to secure the nomination. But if he was established as the single, conservative alternative to Romney, he’d be picking up more votes and delegates. And the more he gets, the more he can try to convince people that Romney’s biggest political asset—his electability—is not unique to him in the field.
It’s frustrating for candidates when the media calls someone a “front-runner” early on, because it makes it harder for so-called back-benchers to get taken seriously. It’s particularly irritating when the moniker is assigned before a single vote is cast. Hillary Clinton, for example, was deemed the “front-runner” for the Democratic nomination in 2008 even before a single primary was held. The determination was based on early polls, which themselves were driven a good deal by name recognition. But Barack Obama overcame early expectations and won both the nomination and the presidency.
Gingrich, perhaps, had a legitimate gripe about the way his chances were described last year—though staff exoduses and bad judgment (that Tiffany’s revolving line of credit? The luxury cruise vacation in the middle of a campaign?) had something to do with it, too. But Republicans are now halfway through their primary campaign, and Gingrich has won only two states—his home state of Georgia and the neighboring state of South Carolina. That’s not the fault of an “elite media” bent on nominating Romney. That’s what GOP voters are deciding.
Gingrich seems to want to stay in the race, and as long as he can do so financially, why not? But if he doesn’t make it, he should look at the primary results—not the newspapers.
By: Susan Milligan, U. S. News and World Report, March 14, 2012
“Sowing Confusion”: Is There Any Limit To Mitt Romney’s Dishonesty?
The other day, David Bernstein argued that there’s been an “important tipping point” where many national media figures have come to understand that “in the Romney campaign, they are dealing with something unlike the normal spin and hyperbole.” Bernstein suggested they are realizing Romney has crossed into groundbreaking levels of dishonesty.
I wish I were as optimistic. I’d argue that much of the national media is still treating Romney’s nonstop distortions, dissembling, and outright lying as par for the course, as business as usual.
Here’s a test case: The debate over Medicare — and Romney’s embrace of the Paul Ryan plan — is about to dominate the conversation. Romney is moving to get ahead of the story by accusing Obama of being the one who would “end Medicare as we know it.” Here’s the Romney campaign’s statement this morning:
“There are two proposals on the table for addressing the nation’s entitlement crisis. Mitt Romney — along with a bipartisan group of leaders — has offered a solution that would introduce competition and choice into Medicare, control costs, and strengthen the program for future generations. President Obama has cut $500 billion from Medicare to fund Obamacare and created an unaccountable board with rationing power — all while America’s debt is spiraling out of control and we continue to run trillion-dollar deficits.
“If President Obama’s plan is to end Medicare as we know it, he should say so. If he has another plan, he should have the courage to put it forward.”
The claim that Romney supports a solution favored by a “bipartisan group of leaders” is a reference to the plan authored by Ryan and Dem Senator Ron Wyden. The idea that this represents “bipartisan” suppport is laughable. But this type of claim is made on both sides, so put it aside.
More interesting is the assertion that Obama has “cut $500 billion from Medicare” and created an “unaccountable board with rationing power” even as the deficit is “spiraling out of control.” That’s a reference to Obamacare’s efforts to curb spending with $500 billion in savings that are actually wrung from health care providers, not Medicare beneficiaries. That “unaccountable board,” meanwhile, is a reference to the Independent Payment Advisory Board, which is designed to make recommendations for reducing Medicare costs, and explicitly cannot recommend rationing.
Get the trick here? The Romney campaign is accusing Obama of slashing Medicare, and hence “ending Medicare as we know it,” while simultaneously accusing him of failing to curb entitlement spending in ways that pose grave danger to the nation’s finances. This, even as Romney has endorsed a plan that would quasi-voucherize Medicare and end the program as we know it.
This is all about muddying the waters in advance of a debate that could cut badly against Romney. The GOP primary forced him to embrace Ryancare; Dems are going to hammer him over it. So the Romney camp is trying to get out front by blurring lines and sowing confusion over who actually is defending traditional Medicare and who would end the program’s fundamental mission as we know it. The question is whether this, too, will be treated as just part of the game.
By: Greg Sargent, The Washington Post, The Plum Line, March 12, 2012
“Bitchy Opinion”: Rush Limbaugh, Media Victim
Don’t you just hate it when someone in the media reports something about you without checking the facts first? Isn’t it a cheap shot when you’re inaccurately depicted as some kind of opportunistic jerk? My God, isn’t that just the worst? No wonder poor, misunderstood Rush Limbaugh is upset. No wonder he had no recourse but to take to what’s left of his airwaves Thursday to clear his name after Washington Post writer Alexandra Petri erroneously stated that his show “targets jerks.” And did you see how the guy with a bit of an image problem with the ladies was forced to bust out the “B word”?
Writing about the way advertisers have been dumping Limbaugh’s show like it’s toxic waste – exactly like it’s toxic waste, really – Petri had reported that among his new sponsors, “So far, he’s picked up AshleyMadison.com, the site where you go to cheat on your wife, and another web site that is explicitly for sugar-daddy matchmaking.” Except that Limbaugh had done no such thing. Why, it’s as if Petri thought Limbaugh had no integrity or something.
So horrified was Limbaugh at this besmirching of his character that he addressed it at length on his show Thursday, explaining, “We do not sponsor companies that help people cheat on their spouses.” He then added, “It’s an out and out lie complete with your b-i-itchy opinion in it and it is untrue.” He then condemned Petri’s “snarky, lying, full-of-holes” reporting by vowing, “I guarantee you, she’ll run another story tomorrow saying I made this all up.” He guaranteed it! In a totally non-snarky, non-lying, non-full of holes way.
On Friday, Petri did not, in fact, accuse Limbaugh of making things up. Instead, she penned a mea culpa to the noted Viagra aficionado, saying, “In the age of instant deadlines, when the correct time to have written about something is yesterday at 3 a.m., it’s easy to make mistakes, and the thing to do is admit them, fix them and do better.” She even offered to buy Limbaugh a conciliatory sandwich, which proves she may just have the strongest stomach in the Beltway.
What a harrowing ordeal it must have been for Limbaugh — a man who prides himself on being “huge on personal responsibility and accountability” — to have his reputation so falsely tainted. What an awful thing for a human being to endure. It’d be like, oh I don’t know, being called a slut and a whore and prostitute from some whimsical blowhard’s personal sniper tower for three days in a row. It’d be like having someone declare that you’d testified before Congress that you were “having so much sex” that you were “going broke buying birth control,” that you “must be paid to have sex,” and that you “want to be paid to have sex,” even when, of course, nothing could be further from the truth. Isn’t it disgusting when people use their platform to spread misinformation? Isn’t it vile when they brag about their blatant character assassination, and then try to act like it never happened? Keep calling it like you see it, Rush, and don’t let the b-i-itches get you down. We’d hate for anybody to get the idea that you’re some kind of whiny, dish-it-out-but-can’t-take-it d-i-irtbag.
By: Mary Elizabeth Williams, Staff Writer, Salon, March 9, 2012
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