Post: 2012 Presidential Election
User: Grilly
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One thing that's quickly becoming a hallmark of the Romney/Ryan campaign is just blatant and consistent lying. From lying about welfare, to medicare, to the stimulus, it seems like a right wing tactic now is simply to repeat lies, repeatedly, until they can get their base repeating them with confidence (at which point they become "facts"). Case in point:
http://www.nationalmemo.com/lol-of-t...-ryans-memory/

For the right wing in America, a fact is something that gets said enough times on Fox News in order for viewers to confidently repeat it.

That’s why it’s easy to take a lie like “the stimulus failed” and turn it into a right-wing “fact”. Start by callling it “the failed stimulus” even before the bill goes into effect. Then keep repeating that same phrase, even as we go from losing 800,000 jobs a month to creating private sector jobs for 29 months. With Fox News, AM talk radio, and nearly one billion dollars in commercials, mailings and robocalls, you can effectively transform the most effective government economic intervention since the New Deal into some bad gas no one wants to claim.

In his new book The New New Deal: The Hidden Story of Change in the Obama Era, Michael Grunwald uncovers the nearly endless list of hidden successes in the bill still called a “failure” by the Bush admirers who still think Dubya’s far more expensive and useless tax breaks and wars were a success:

“The stimulus is producing the world’s largest wind farm, a half dozen of the world’s largest solar arrays, and America’s first refineries for advanced biofuels. It’s creating a battery-manufacturing industry for electric vehicles almost entirely from scratch. It financed net-zero border stations and visitors centers, an eco-friendly new Coast Guard headquarters, a one-of-a-kind ‘advanced synchrotron light source.’ It jump-started three long-awaited mega-projects in Manhattan alone—the Moynihan Station, the Second Avenue Subway, and the Long Island Railroad connection to the East Side…”

The difference between the stimulus and the New Deal—and the reason the New Deal remains more popular—is that the stimulus was passed and implemented during the worst of the crisis. The New Deal came after two years of Hoover trying to balance the budget instead of healing the economy.

But what Paul Ryan—the ideological leader of the House Republicans—never mentioned is that while he and the GOP were bashing the stimulus, and repeating the lie, he was begging for stimulus dollars.

LOL.

Paul Ryan’s love of stimulus began back when George W. Bush was president, which was when Ryan was still in love with everything government did. In 2002, amid a slow economy that was getting almost no help from the tax breaks on which the GOP had blown the Clinton surplus, Paul Ryan called for more stimulus. “What we’re trying to accomplish is to pass the kinds of legislation that when they’ve passed in the past have grown the economy and gotten people back to work,” he said.

Cut to seven years later, after all of the failed policies supported by Ryan resulted in the worst financial crisis in half a century: then, Ryan refused to support the President’s stimulus bill. As a member of the right-wing cabal that met with Frank Luntz and Newt Gingrich on the night of the inauguration, Ryan had agreed to oppose anything the President propose. He bashed the President’s stimulus for increasing the deficit yet voted for a $715 billion alternative. Why? Because the President didn’t support it.

Ryan never opposed stimulus; he opposed the President. And this fact became embarrassingly obvious over the past few days when Ryan was forced to admit that he’d requested stimulus funds for his district in 2009.

In five separate letters signed by Ryan, the Congressman asked for stimulus funds for his district. In one of the letters, he stated that the funds he requested would create approximately 7,600 new jobs. Ultimately he was rewarded with over $20 million in funds for his district.

In 2010, he was asked directly if his district had received any stimulus funding. Ryan said, “No, I’m not one [of those] people who votes for something then writes to the government to ask them to send us money. I did not request any stimulus money.” He repeated various versions of denying the requests and not remembering them until he was faced with the actual letters.

Now he says that the requests were “treated as constituent service requests in the same way matters involving Social Security or Veterans Affairs are handled. This is why I didn’t recall the letters earlier. But they should have been handled differently, and I take responsibility for that.”

So he’s basically blaming his staff for not pointing out that the letter he was signing was allegedly against everything he believed in. But Paul Ryan’s staff knew something Fox News viewers don’t: Paul Ryan loves stimulus spending, as long as it doesn’t help the President.
The same gall from Romney;
http://maddowblog.msnbc.com/_news/20...ues-apace?lite

Last week, Mitt Romney pretended to be amazed. "[I]n the past, when people pointed out that something was inaccurate, why, campaigns pulled the ad," Romney said. "They were embarrassed. Today, they just blast ahead. You know, the various fact-checkers look at some of these charges in the Obama ads and they say that they're wrong, and inaccurate, and yet he just keeps on running them."

It was among the more ironic complaints ever registered by anyone.

Romney launched a ridiculous welfare lie two weeks ago. People pointed out that it's inaccurate, but instead of feeling embarrassment and pulling the ad, Romney just blasted ahead, even after the various fact-checkers proved the smear isn't true. Today, the post-truth campaign continues apace.



In this new spot, released this morning, Romney once again accuses President Obama of "gutting welfare reform," by ending the work requirement in the law. While the Romney-Ryan ticket has been talking a lot about Medicare, the advertising focus has been on welfare -- this is the third ad Team Romney has released on the subject in the last 11 days.

For those who still care about reality, Romney's lying. Two Republican governors asked the Obama administration for some flexibility on the existing welfare law. The White House said that'd be fine, so long as the work requirement isn't weakened. It's consistent with the policy endorsed by many Republican governors, including Mitt Romney himself, just six years ago.

Indeed, with reality in mind, just about everyone -- Democrats, Republicans, reporters, editors, fact-checkers, policy wonks -- is well aware of the fact that Romney's blatantly lying. It is as demonstrably dishonest as any claim ever aired by a major-party presidential candidate -- it's not spinning details; it's not hiding in gray areas; it's just making up garbage to deceive the public. Worse, the racial subtext of the disgusting smear only adds insult to injury, raising questions anew about Romney's character and just how far he'll go to acquire power.

What's more, to reiterate a point from last week, if Obama were as awful a president as Romney claims, the Republican attack machine wouldn't have to make stuff up -- the truth would be so brutal that voters would recoil and flock to the GOP candidate naturally. What does it say about Romney's strength as a candidate that he has to make up garbage and hope voters don't know the difference?

And then there's an even larger question: shouldn't this be a scandal?

I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around the political world's strange standards. If a super PAC puts a video online with a dubious timeline, it's a multi-week scandal, and evidence of a campaign stuck in the gutter. If Vice President Biden uses a poorly-worded, off-the-cuff metaphor, it's a multi-week scandal, and proof that 2012 has become excessively ugly.

But if Mitt Romney gets caught repeatedly making an unambiguous, racially-charged lie, it's seen as somehow routine.

Why do gaffes and unaired web ads dominate the political world's attention, while shameless lying leads to shrugged shoulders?

Look, I realize politicians, especially those seeking national office, are known for stretching the truth, and the elasticity of our standards accommodate quite a bit of "spin." But the welfare smear is based on a clear falsehood -- Romney is saying a work requirement was removed that was not removed. When campaign officials and surrogates have been asked to defend the claim, they've come up empty.

So why does Romney keep repeating the lie? Because he thinks voters are idiots and he's certain political journalism isn't equipped to deal with a campaign predicated entirely on falsehoods.

This remains, in other words, a test. The fact that Romney feels confident in his ability to lie with impunity -- effectively taunting reality -- suggests the American political system is failing this test badly.
Romney's attacks on Obama and welfare? FALSE according to fact-checkers.

Just a reminder, the right's candidate is the equivalent of a prostitute; more than willing to change up positions as often as is required. So long as the client keeps paying.



It's okay though - just keep plugging those ears and saying, "LALALALALALA CAN'T HEAR YOU GO AWAY PLZ!" It continues to driving people further away from the right when they see who is having intellectually honest debate and which is running on a platform entirely made of lies