Mitt Romney: sinking to new lows every day
Playing off the anger generated by anti-Obama types on the right who took the President’s words out of context to make it sound like he was maligning small businesses, Mitt Romney has now gone full Breitbart in his latest attack ad. Pretty much any journalist with a pulse has written put this one in the “lying his damn ass off category”.
Not only that, Romney has doubled down and is now selling t-shirts that play on this manipulation of the truth:
The Obama campaign is hitting back, first with this television ad called “Tampered”:
The Obama Truth squad also has a new piece out, once again featuring Obama for America Deputy Campaign Director Stephanie Cutter who once again calls bullshit on this bullshit (okay, she doesn’t actually say bullshit but you get my meaning):
President Obama himself has now responded:
“Always”
I’m Barack Obama and I approve this message because I believe we’re all in this together
The fact that Romney has resorted to the Breitbart tactics used by investigative journalist wannabe James O’Keefe is very telling. It just goes to show how desperate Romney is for the country to talk about anything but Bain Capital, off-shoring of jobs, tax returns, Swiss bank accounts and overseas tax havens.
It’s desperation at its finest and the only ones buying it are people who hate the president already.
UPDATE: Greg Sargent at The Plum Line breaks down the unbelievably deceptive editing in Romney ad:
[T]he video deceptively edits Obama’s remarks to seamlessly link up two different parts of the speech, removing a chunk in order to make Obama’s remarks seem far worse than they are. Here is how Obama’s speech — which you hear in the background while pictures of the man driving flash on the screen — is represented in the video:If you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own. You didn’t get there on your own. I’m always struck by people who think, well, it must be ‘cause I was just so smart. There are a lot of smart people out there. It must be because I worked harder than everybody else. Let me tell you something. If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.
In the video, the speech is made to sound as if Obama continued straight from “let me tell you something” to “if you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that.” But here are the words that Obama said between those two sentences that were cut out (the missing sentences are in bold):
Let me tell you something. There are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there. If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that.
UPDATE 2: The dude in Romney’s ad (you can view it at the link below — I won’t link it here) is a guy named Jack Gilchrist. His company Gilchrist Metal, the one he supposedly “built with his own hands”, got a little help. From the government:
The New Hampshire Union Leader’s John DiStato today reports that in 1999 the business in question, Gilchrist Metal, “received $800,000 in tax-exempt revenue bonds issued by the New Hampshire Business Finance Authority ‘to set up a second manufacturing plant and purchase equipment to produce high definition television broadcasting equipment’…” In addition, in 2011, Gilchrist Metal “received two U.S. Navy sub-contracts totaling about $83,000 and a smaller, $5,600 Coast Guard contract in 2008…”The businessman, Jack Gilchrist, also acknowledged that in the 1980s the company received a U.S. Small Business Administration loan totaling “somewhere south of” $500,000, and matching funds from the federally-funded New England Trade Adjustment Assistance Center.
“I’m not going to turn a blind eye because the money came from the government,” Gilchrest said. “As far as I’m concerned, I’m getting some of my tax money back. I’m not stupid, I’m not going to say ‘no.’ Shame on me if I didn’t use what’s available.”
In other words, he’s a damn hypocrite.
