Steve Benen and Greg Sargent are trying to goad the press into confronting Mitt Romney about his campaign of complete falsehood. Today, the issue is the ads Romney is running that falsely accuse the president of stripping the work requirement out of Welfare Reform. Romney’s actually telling this lie on the stump, too. But the Welfare work requirement is actually a bit peripheral compared to the $716 billion lie that Romney and the Republicans have been telling about Medicare.
Benen makes a good point that if Obama’s presidency has really been so bad, it should be easy to attack him with truthful statements. So, why are the two biggest points of attack we are seeing right now based on complete lies?
It’s no wonder that the president can’t stand Romney:
It is Romney himself who provides a rallying point for both the candidate and his team.
Obama really doesn’t like, admire or even grudgingly respect Romney. It’s a level of contempt, say aides, he doesn’t even feel for the conservative, combative House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, the Hill Republican he disliked the most. “There was a baseline of respect for John McCain. The president always thought he was an honorable man and a war hero,” a longtime Obama adviser said. “That doesn’t hold true for Romney. He was no goddamned war hero.”Time and again Obama has told the people around him that Romney stood for “nothing.” The word he would use to describe Romney was “weak,” too weak to stand up to his own moneymen, too weak to defend his own moderate record as the man who signed into law the first health insurance mandate as Massachusetts governor in 2006, too weak to admit Obama had done a single thing right as president.
Maybe Romney is weak. But I know for certain that his arguments are weak.
So, how should the press deal with this complete departure from reality?
That f’ing ad regarding the welfare work requirement was playing NONSTOP on mlb.com for the past few days. There were some half-inning breaks where it played 3 times consecutively. It was so annoying that I actually emailed the Romney campaign and told them that I was going to donate money to Obama and House Democrats for each time that I saw it and that their advertising money was probably better spent NOT replaying the same commercial ad nauseum. I doubt that anyone actually read that email, but it’s been on a lot less tonight. I sat through it 32 times over the course of the game on 8/15. Tonight I’ve only seen it 3 times.
I’ve seen Willard ads, both from the campaign and Turdblossom’s outfit, a lot lately. Especially 6pm to 11pm.
I should add that Boo probably sees them too. If he watches any evening TV.
would you want to stop the Romney campaign from wasting their money annoying a lot of people. The more people he annoys, the better!
Believe me, I thought the same thing the first 50 times I saw the ad. There’s only so much a man can take!
Think of it as attempted brainwashing – you’ve got to resist! Can’t be as bad as waterboarding can it?
I hate living in a swing state. 5 ads in one commercial break. 3 pro-Romney Super Pacs, 2 from Obama’s campaign. Iunno wtf they were talking about, I mostly ignored them all
I WISH that requirement was gone. Welfare reform, unlike NAFTA, is one of Bill Clinton’s failures that we should disown. I mean, sure NAFTA isn’t real free-trade, but why so much focus when it was basically a wash? Welfare reform has actually destroyed thousands of lives, and it only took a severe recession to show what a dumbshit move it was.
All of these commercials really stink to high hell. Hard core porn has better production value and with both I feel a need to take a shower after watching it.
I guess there’s an upside to living in Illinois after all. I haven’t seen any ads for either side, not counting the “news” items that flagrantly repeat Romney’s lies.
in a previous post of yours covering the lying.
Unless and until the concept and standard of “agreed upon facts” is fully restored, there’s little hope for a restoration of civility in our political discourse it use to serve as a limit on, because dishonesty is the proximate cause of most of it. It was the source of the shame that is all but non-existent in the modern rightwinger, because in their morality play, the ends justify it as a means.
There’s also very little hope that the polarization will be lessened, or that we’ll be able to satisfy the needs of we the people when almost half of us are locked into an ideology that can only become more Ayn Rand-like now that her adherents have increased in numbers and are competing for the highest office.
Rightwingers as I’ve seen and argued it for a very long time now, lie so much because they know they can’t win honestly. DO you need to read this http://www.google.com/search?q=obama+least+socialist+&rls=com.microsoft:en-us:IE-SearchBox&i
e=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&sourceid=ie7&rlz=1I7GGHP_en to know or understand how it is we got to this point?
I applaud the efforts of Sargent and Benen, and understand their frustrations as well, given what they are up against. Those two are largely voices in the wilderness because the “liberal” MSM is a myth and a participant in the He said/she said, false balance lapdogisms, that stand in the way of “agreed upon facts”.
Just revisit their conduct during the lead up to the war in Iraq, and ask yourself where their interests lie.
If the press was full of watchdogs as the 1st Amendment grants them protection for and as the founders saw the quasi-constitutional fourth branch, answering your question would be easy. Since they aren’t, well, the answer is they should simply start being that.
otherwise, a repetion of this is always possible http://www.worldpublicopinion.org/pipa/articles/brunitedstatescanadara/671.php but I’m inclined to think that there are limits to how much cover they can provide to the rightwing psychopaths this time around.
“There’s an old saying in Tennessee – I know it’s in Texas, probably in Tennessee…that says, fool me once, shame on…shame on you. Fool me…you can’t get fooled again.”
billbill George W. Bush quotes (American 43rd US President since 2001. b.1946)
There are right-wingers who know they are lying, and then there are right-wingers who sincerely believe their lies are true. It’s the latter group that fascinate and worry me. Is it a product of their faith-based politics?
The true believers running for national office might prove to be our salvation. Their sincere lying is going beyond the point of diminishing returns, and they’re giving the game away.
True Believers live in a very strange and scary world. Everything they believe is predicated on something else that is equally important. It is a house of cards. If ANY piece of their belief is proven false, then ALL of their belief is false.
Fundamental Protestants who profess the inerrancy of the King James Bible are perhaps the best example. If ANY piece of the bible is EVER admitted to being wrong, their whole world DOES end. It is a very scary thing. I spent a significant amount of time climbing out of the whole I dropt into when I lost my faith. I was a Free Will Baptist lay minister when I was 16. A raving lunatic when I was 19. Luckily, I managed to join the Marines and was given the structure to come back to reality.
If any true believing R ever concedes that Mitt lied about anything, then the whole house of cards falls down. It isn’t a game. And it won’t be fun when the end does come. These people are unhinged now. When the sky does fall, they will be uncontrollable. We are looking revolution in the face. It isn’t pretty.
I don’t care if true believers ever admit their beliefs are lies or not. I just want them to lose elections.
well said dude
this is why I’ve long thought that only something of the magnitude of global warming can shake their stupid tree hard enough to effect substantive change in their world view.
agreed
that comment is to be exclusively limited to the rightwingnut masterminds and their mouthpieces behind the lie-fest Mutt and Pal are currently employing.
Their minions that have long voted against their own self-interests in some ways, are every bit the victim (albeit self-victimized using choice)the country at large is and has been, because of the faith-based v reality-based politics you noted.
It has long been my pov, that the minions have been locked into their faith-based ways because of the cost associated with “breaking those shackles”. Like any common cult victim, they have to give up the self-identity and world view belonging to such cultivated, which necessarily involves a dip into the Sea of Shame. If you look at their party historically, it has been on the wrong side of history on everything that moved this country forward, and more recently, the things that took it backwards, like Iraq, torture, islamophobia and the racism that imo, their islamophobia helped bring back from the fringes of our society, or even the insanity of “trickle down” economics, and most importantly imo, AGW denial, etc, etc, etc, they all have human costs and are in violation directly or indirectly, of the bible they only pay lip service to.
Their confronting, accepting, and acknowledging all that is the challenge for those in the faith-based community and for those of us in the reality based community. Their denials are nothing more than a measure of the lengths they are willing to go to to preserve their egos and self-identity.
That’s why so many of them for example, can still believe that wmd were in Iraq when we invaded, even though Bush himself has said otherwise. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/06/21/iraq-wmd-poll-clueless-vast-majority-republicans_n_1616012.
html
I see their “faith-based” nature as being one more about their “faith” that they are good and moral people, than the up is down product of it. That’s why they see no disconnect or incongruity associated with granting their pols and pundits a license to lie with impunity, and the moral paragon status they attribute them with. As their Saint Raygun dictated, politics and morality are inseparable, and they simply must deny that many/most of their political pursuits are immoral.
This is why I’ve long argued as well, that the disgust they can’t contain for lefties, is really just the only means by which they can avoid the disgust they should be directing at themselves for all the aforementioned reasons.
All this imo, gets to the better question to be asked of our “press”, which is when are they gonna make it clear that one party is plainly and simply, batshit crazy?
The word he would use to describe Romney was “weak,” too weak to stand up to his own moneymen, too weak to defend his own moderate record as the man who signed into law the first health insurance mandate as Massachusetts governor in 2006, too weak to admit Obama had done a single thing right as president.
While PBO is 100% correct about the second half of his statement, he might want to look in the mirror re: the first part.
Good for Benen and Sargent. But pardon me for taking writeups (columns or books) from Politico with a grain of salt.
Too weak to be president — ouchie. If that meme catches on, and it very well might, it’s bye-bye Romney.
You have to hand it to team O — they know how to slip the shiv between the ribs better than any dem operation I’ve seen in a long time.
I have thought for a while that this is the strongest Democratic Presidential re-elect campaign in a long time and this bears that out. I mean Clinton’s ’96 campaign was complete mush. I’m actually looking forward to the convention speech. Really, really, really hope he buries the ’04 red state, blue state stuff for good. It was naive then, it will be insane now.
I doubt he’ll give up on the blue state, red state stuff. More than likely he’ll just go after the fraud that Willard is.
I don’t want him to give up on the blue state red state stuff. If you look at the map of the US broken down by precincts, you will understand.
That Politico piece is a smarmy beltway hitjob on Obama if I ever saw one and represents everything that I loathe about our political “journalism”. Best of luck to them and their BS eBook.
Actually, I think Obama is being too kind to Romney. He isn’t weak, he is, to put it as simply as possible, a frigging coward.
It apparently will never happen, but they should simply note the chronic pattern of misinformation and correct the record for each new lie.
Lulz.
God bless America. Just once I’d like to see the librul media be straight on something, anything. How great would it be if they stopped giving Republicans more-than-equal time on tv and started treating them with the dismissiveness their policies and track record dictate?
Then I remember that they largely do this on MSNBC’s primetime lineup, and I can’t eyeroll enough at every one of those people except for Maddow, and then I shrug and become instead grateful that white supremacist politics are naturally failing in the face of changing demographics anyway, even without a functioning media. It’s a reassuring safety net to have in these fucked up times.
Not that he shouldn’t despise Romney but he should hate Ryan even more.
Nobody thinks Hitler was insincere or weak or stood for nothing.
He is and was and deserves and deserved to be hated because of what he really did frankly and firmly stand for.
All too frankly and firmly, no?
Likewise Ryan, though of course not quite so much.
Not quite.
I know people’s eyes glaze over when the Hitler discussion starts but bear with me because I think this deserves some comment.
You have the wrong person in your sights for whom to compare Hitler. That person should be Mitt Romney. Hitler stood for absolutely nothing and I think he never had an original thought of his own. Hitler rose to power riding on a right wing wave due to the collapse of the German economy in the aftermath of the Treaty of Versailles. None of the things Hitler said were original but parroted from others. Just like Mitt, he would say anything to get into power, constantly figuring out which way the political wind was blowing. When Hitler did get into power everything he did came from others, his economic vision from Mussolini, his politics from the Thule Society, even his symbols were from fringe groups that had been around for more than a hundred years. He tried to make himself the darling of the German Tea Party and succeeded. The industrialist liked him because, you know, pliable, with five working digits to sign the laws. He did manage get labor costs down, way down for them.
Hitler was certainly weak. He was, in fact, so weak that he was unable to govern. This is what made things so bad. Because he was unable to make any decisions, he put competing factions in power and let them fight it out, sort of political Darwinism. There was indeed no shortage of truly evil people to do horrible things in his name, but stand for something? No, he would do whatever he could to increase his power. This is what happens when a powerful modern country gets run by a bunch of right wing nut cases with a weak leader. Sure, he could be a bully, but like most bullies, that was sign of weakness as well. Haircuts for blond boys, anyone?
On the military front, every time an important military decision was to be made, he would hesitate because he was weak. It turns out that the Soviets, among others were planning to assassinate him but they changed their mind because he was such a weak bungling leader. He was more valuable to them alive. If Hitler hadn’t been so weak, was a little less of a sociopath, he could have done a lot more damage we could still be dealing with today, maybe for a thousand years.
What I worry about is if Mitt does get in with the Senate and the House, their policies certainly will take down our economy, then like Germany, the people could turn on Democracy itself, just like our emergency manager laws, if you have any doubts about where this thing is going. A lot at stake here.