Mitt Romney is a shameless liar.
Mitt Romney is a blatant liar and he is running for president of the United States.
Let’s look at that again: Mitt Romney is a blatant liar and he is running for president of the United States.
What was once just “flip-flopping” has now become full on, in public, repeated without shame or any concern that anyone will care, lying about President Obama. I’m not talking about the standard fair bending of the truth that we have come to expect from nearly ANY political campaign. I’m talking about make-shit-up, completely fabricated and provably so LYING.
Romney has been picking around the edges of the LIAR scab for a very long time but this past week showed us in no uncertain terms that Mitt Romney is making up lies about President Obama and repeating them over and over again in front of cameras. It’s now time for every major media outlet to acknowledge what is clearly obvious to thinking people:
Mitt Romney is a blatant liar and he is running for president of the United States.
The first blatantly egregious lie, one that is easily, demonstrably and unequivocally provable as a lie, was Romney saying that President Obama is trying to disenfranchise Ohio members of the military.
At the time, Bob Cesca called it his “biggest lie so far”:
In addition to sounding like a Patrick Bateman speech, that’s arguably the biggest Romney lie so far. There’s nothing here that’s even remotely close to the truth. The Obama administration is absolutely not doing what Romney says its doing — in any way. The president is actually trying to extend weekend voting to everyone, including the troops. Romney has used twisted Orwellian Karl Rove style backwards logic to trick his supporters into buying this hooey while reinforcing the myth that the president — the commander in chief of the armed forces — hates the military. At the same time, he’s reversed the Voter ID debate by making it seem as if the Democrats are trying to disenfranchise voters.
Get that? The Obama administration is suing Ohio to force them to extend weekend voting privileges to EVERYONE. Everyone INCLUDING military members. Military members already have that privilege. If the Obama administration is successful in their suit, everyone in Ohio will. In fact, if this lawsuit succeeds, nothing at all changes for members of the military.
Mitt Romney is a blatant liar and he is running for president of the United States.
Here’s what Obama for America Veterans and Military Family Vote Director Rob Diamond had to say about this blatant and provable lie:
Mitt Romney and his campaign have completely fabricated a claim that the Obama campaign is trying to restrict military voting in Ohio. In fact, the opposite is true: the Obama campaign filed a lawsuit to make sure every Ohioan, including military members and their families, has early voting rights over the last weekend prior to the election. The case filed with the court could not be clearer on this point.The real story of what is happening in the Buckeye State is that Mitt Romney supports the Republican effort to stop people from voting by restricting their access to the polls. In 2008, more than 93,000 Ohioans utilized early voting in the three days before the election. In complete disregard of the will of Ohio voters expressed last year through the referendum process, the Republican legislature is attempting to remove from the vast majority of voters — including veterans of our armed services — the early voting rights they enjoyed in 2008. This latest Republican attack on rights of voters is shameful — and so is Mitt Romney’s endorsement of it.
“Completely fabricated” is probably as close to “lie” as we’re likely to get. But it is saying, loud and clear:
Mitt Romney is a blatant liar and he is running for president of the United States.
The second lie, and clearly Bob Cesca’s piece came out before this lie was trumpeted across the country because THIS is Mitt Romney’s most astonishing lie yet, started with an ad that literally said that President Obama had secretly removed a requirement that people on welfare try to find jobs and work. It is a clear perversion of a response by the Obama administration to requests REPUBLICAN GOVERNORS that they be given more freedom to design their own welfare programs. The Obama administration agreed to their request as long as the new programs generated 20% MORE jobs. Romney’s lie is that they actually REMOVED the requirement to work. It is very literally the exact opposite of what the Obama administration did. And it was something that he himself asked for when he was governor of Massachusetts.
Here’s Steve Benen at The Maddow Blog (where you can watch the odious ad if you wish):
It’s important to realize this is as dishonest an ad as you’ll ever see — in 2012 or in any other campaign cycle. {…}Romney’s lying. He’s not spinning the truth to his advantage; he’s not hiding in a gray area between fact and fiction; he’s just lying. The law hasn’t been “gutted”; the work requirement hasn’t been “dropped.” Stations that air this ad are disseminating an obvious, demonstrable lie.
All Obama did is agree to Republican governors’ request for flexibility. That’s it. Indeed, perhaps the most jaw-dropping aspect of this is that Romney himself, during his one gubernatorial term, asked for the same kind of flexibility on welfare law that Obama agreed to last month. Romney, in other words, is attacking the president for doing what Romney asked the executive branch to do in 2005.
The entire line of attack is simply insane.
Benen and other commentators (including Rachel Maddow in an amazing piece last night) have pointed out the equally blatant racist angle to this attack. It’s no secret that “welfare recipient” is Republican codespeak for “black people”. There is a long and hideous past full of examples of this. If you need to be reminded, click The Rachel Maddow Show link.
Here’s the Obama campaign’s simple response:
“It’s false.” “Flexible on the truth.” What they are saying is:
Mitt Romney is a blatant liar and he is running for president of the United States.
Bill Clinton who is featured in Romeny’s ad in a favorable way responded with this:
Governor Romney released an ad today alleging that the Obama administration had weakened the work requirements of the 1996 Welfare Reform Act. That is not true.The act emerged after years of experiments at the state level, including my work as Governor of Arkansas beginning in 1980. When I became President, I granted waivers from the old law to 44 states to implement welfare to work strategies before welfare reform passed.
After the law was enacted, every state was required to design a plan to move people into the workforce, along with more funds to help pay for training, childcare and transportation. As a result, millions of people moved from welfare to work.
The recently announced waiver policy was originally requested by the Republican governors of Utah and Nevada to achieve more flexibility in designing programs more likely to work in this challenging environment. The Administration has taken important steps to ensure that the work requirement is retained and that waivers will be granted only if a state can demonstrate that more people will be moved into work under its new approach. The welfare time limits, another important feature of the 1996 act, will not be waived.
The Romney ad is especially disappointing because, as governor of Massachusetts, he requested changes in the welfare reform laws that could have eliminated time limits altogether. We need a bipartisan consensus to continue to help people move from welfare to work even during these hard times, not more misleading campaign ads.
Perhaps the most maddening part of this is that mainstream media organizations seem incapable of calling Mitt Romney a LIAR when it is some demonstrably true that he is. CNN’s headline on this? “Romney hits Obama for welfare changes”. (By contrast, their headline for what they say is a false Obama ad is “Ad linking Romney to death of the wife of a laid off steelworker not accurate”.)
Even if they won’t call him out as the LIAR he is, CNN is still reporting on this issue. When he was asked about Clinton’s rebuke today, he clammed up and wouldn’t answer the question:
Mitt Romney is a blatant liar and he is running for president of the United States.
What’s unclear at the moment is whether or not he is going to get away with it. Are American voters so uninformed that they don’t know he’s a blatant LIAR? Are they so jaded that, with help from a pathetic media environment, they think ALL politicians lie this blatantly? Is Romney, as some have suggested, lying so much that journalists simply can’t keep up with the debunking?
What IS clear is that Romney is cleaning Obama’s clock in the fundraising department. Check out this frightening chart:
He’s getting killed in the fundraising department. Sure it’s mostly from wealthy individuals and Super PACs, but it’s still a hell of a lot more money than Obama is raising.
Will it make the difference? Can Mitt Romney overcome being the most dishonest politician ever to run for president by simply buying the election?
Mitt Romney is a blatant liar and he is running for president of the United States.
Will we let him win?
