Getty Images
Paul Krugman argued today that Mitt Romney "is running a campaign of almost pathological dishonesty." That need not be considered hyperbole.
Indeed, Greg Sargent added this morning that Romney's "falsehoods and all around dissembling" may be designed to "simply wear reporters and commentators down by trafficking in them so heavily that they throw up their hands and give up on trying to track or debunk them."
But I remain undeterred. A couple of months ago, I launched a Friday afternoon feature, highlighting the most offensive Mitt Romney falsehoods of the week. It moved to Maddow Blog a few weeks ago, so let's keep this going with another installment.
1. Romney told an audience in Arizona this week, in reference to President Obama, "He said he'd cut the deficit in half. He's doubled it. He's doubled it."
For an alleged numbers guy, Romney is either lying or he's bad at arithmetic. When Obama took office, the deficit was about $1.3 trillion. Last year, it was $1.29 trillion. This year, it's on track to be about $1.1 trillion. Does Romney not know what "double" means?
2. On health care, Romney argued, "Our bill [Romneycare] was 70 pages; his bill [Obamacare] is 2,700 pages."
This not just a dumb argument, it's also not true.
3. On foreign policy, Romney said, "[T]his president should have put in place crippling sanctions against Iran, he did not."
Actually, he did.
4. Romney claimed that Syria is Iran's "route to the sea."
Iran has 1,520 miles of its own coastline -- and doesn't share a border with Syria.
5. Romney boasted, "I also served in the Olympics, balanced a budget there."
Well, that's not entirely right. He hired lobbyists to get a taxpayer bailout for the Olympics and then balanced the budget.
6. Romney claimed, "You can't be, I don't believe, anything but a fiscal conservative and run a business, because if you don't balance your budget, you go out of business."
That's both untrue and ridiculous. Businesses operate in the red all the time, and take out loans for capital improvements, expansions, acquisitions, etc. If Romney's background is in the private sector, how could he not know this?
7. On contraception access, Romney argued, "I don't think we've seen in the history of this country the kind of attack on religious conscience, religious freedom, religious tolerance that we've seen under Barack Obama."
That's so ridiculous, even Romney couldn't actually mean that.
8. Also on contraception access, Romney said, "[The Obama administration is] requiring the Catholic Church to provide for its employees and its various enterprises health care insurance that would include birth control, sterilization and the morning-after pill. Unbelievable."
Yes, it's literally unbelievable, because he's lying: churches are exempt. (He's also contradicting his own previous position.)
9. On the Affordable Care Act, Romney said, "I will repeal Obamacare for a lot of reasons. One, I don't want to spend another trillion dollars... Number two, I don't believe the federal government should cut Medicare by some $500 billion."
One, the ACA saves money and reduces the deficit. Number two, the Medicare claim continues to be wildly misleading.
10. On Pentagon spending, Romney claimed, "This is a president who is ... cutting our military budget by roughly a trillion dollars."
That's not even close to being true.
11. On international affairs, Romney argued about the president, "He decided to give Russia their number one foreign policy objective -- removal of our missile defense sites from Eastern Europe -- and got nothing in return."
That's just not what happened.
12. Romney's new attack ad says Rick Santorum voted to confirm Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor.
Santorum left the Senate in 2006 -- three years before Sotomayor's confirmation. [Update: It looks like the Romney camp played fast and loose on this one, showing Sotomayor with President Obama in 2009 when she was nominated for the Supreme Court, but counting Santorum's vote when Sotomayor was a lower-court nominee. The implication for viewers is that Santorum backed Sotomayor for the high court, which is not true, when he and other Republicans did support her confirmation to a lower court.]
Foreign Policy columnist Michael Cohen noted yesterday that he understands that "politicians mislead and occasionally fib," but added, "[H]onestly, I've never seen anyone do it as brazenly as Mitt Romney."
With each passing week, I find it harder to disagree with such a sentiment.
Leave a Comment:
Somebody seems to have stripped a cog.
Romney probably thinks he's telling the truth.
Because the voices in his head told him so.
I actually think he's well aware that he's lying. He just thinks we serfs don't know any better. He's a total whore who will say and pay anything to win.
CA
"Because the voices in his head told him so."
maybe it was the magic underwear speaking though his 4th point of contact.
I think from time to time Romney slips up in a question and answer situation. He reveals what he really thinks because it's too hard to remember all the distorted facts in a quick response situation. He will probably have a meltdown during a debate with Obama.
no, it's easier for him to lie a lot. he won't slip up and Obama will be so surprised by such brazen lies, he won't know what to do. Rmoney will attack, attack, attack, like Sarah palin and he won't pay ANY ATTENTION to what Obama says or does.
I can not wait for the " I bet you 10K" reply to President Obama in a debate.
Why is everybody blasting Romney for being honest?
When he was asked what the biggest misconceptions about him were he answered that these were that he would create jobs and reduce the deficit.
Why doesn't the Lamestream Media give him the benefit of the doubt?
Also he's throwing Grandma under the bus to pay for taxcuts for his fellow tenth of a percenters, higher Medicare age. Yay!
No one could remember all of those lies. That is why he is robotic and contradicts himself.
The sheeple that support him believe, therefore it's true.....No one else counts right now....
I doubt that any of the people who support him care in the least whether he's lying or not. All they care about is beating Obama, and on that score Romney is still the best of a bad lot.
Sadly, I'm afraid you hit it on the nose.
What has happened to Republicans that winning trumps national good, and condoning a lying conservative is so much better than merely facing up to the fact the President from the other party is actually helping us and our nation get back to normal or better.
Too many true colors showing in this campaign cycle and thank heavens, bloggers are keeping track of it.
THAT says all I need to know about "conservatives" who go on and on about "traditional values". It's exactly the same as when conservative adulterers talk about "defending traditional marriage". Pure hypocrisy, blatantly fueled by racism & bigotry.
No wonder Mitt stopped taking questions from the audience at his campaign events: Eventually, someone will ask him about his lies, half-truths and distortions and he'd be caught fumbling around, or saying something idiotic, or shouting "Go to North Korea!" at somebody.
But don't reporters travelling with him get one or two chances a day to speak with him on the plane or a bus? Why isn't this stuff being raised then? Or is he locking out journalists, as well?
Meanwhile, Andy Borowitz summed up the Santorum campaign strategy today when he wrote that the candidate is stumping in the 17th century.
Who are you going to believe, Mitt or those lying videos?
If anyone needs to be pied, it's Santorum. The only Holy Trinity he projects is Me, Myself, and I.
Santorum is running for Pope and POTUS at the same time....this just gets crazier by the minute.
Re the attacks on religion, perhaps someone should ask Mitt if he knows who Joseph Smith was. Surely he knows about that.
Romney learned this whole flip flop game from Joseph Smith. Don't take my word for it..compare the two. I'm not attacking The Mormon Church, just false prophets.
then try a different church
Bennen, if you can come up with 10 truths on 10 lies Romney has claimed each week without repetition, this supports the concept of pathology. When this election is over you will have a book of Romney lies.
Isn't there one already?
Romney's lies and the relentless negativity are taking their toll on him with right-wing populists as well as Independents. Here are excerpts from three different conservative bloggers at redstate:
"Romney has watched candidate after candidate rise above him with limited to almost no resources, and his team’s reaction has been predictable; destroy anybody that gets in the way. This scorched-earth campaign policy has driven down Romney’s general-election poll numbers and his uneasiness within his own skin on the debate stage and on the campaign-trail has exposed his vulnerabilities as a general election candidate."
"[Romney's] victories, such as they are, are achieved through destroying his competitors' reputations and character assassination and by extension voter turnout...At what point do we call for Romney to end his campaign and with it the politics of destruction?...These tactics only serve to weaken our position and lessen our odds in the general. It’s time for Mitt and his campaign to be asked to leave while we still have time to correct our course."
"...at one point [Romney] made more sense than Santorum or Gingrich to me. But when it all came down to it, just because he was an outsider, did not mean he was outside the norm of Washington politics. Romney has really turned me off with his scorched Earth policy. He has made it so that if he cannot win, no one else can either."
Apparently, Bain Capital was considered as the most ethically challenged company because it routinely lied in its application to be selected to 'turnaround' companies, making the lowest bid, then turning around and charging more: a no-no, even on Wall Street. So why should this be any different to Romney?
You can practically hear Mitt thinking to himself "I know the sky is blue but Must...Say.....Sky.........Green."
NPR has a thing on the good side of Bain. They casually swept a lot of dirt under the rug to showcase some contact lense company that Bain took to the top via restructuring. What I got from the whole mess was apparently NPR endorses Bain activities, and Mitt by association.
"7. On contraception access, Romney argued, 'I don't think we've seen in the history of this country the kind of attack on religious conscience, religious freedom, religious tolerance that we've seen under Barack Obama'."
I even heard a Romney surrogate say that this comment was a big mistake given the fact that at one time people in this country were compelled by law to return African American human beings to slavery.
It is very fitting that Mitt be the leader of the republican party. Every leader in that party seems to ecxel at telling lies, hence, their leader should be the best at it. It's the rest of us in the nation who are having a hard time with this "lie" thing.
The Party was traumatized by Barry Goldwater: he spoke his mind, and the result was the worst loss in US Presidential history. From this, Republican politicians acquired a mortal fear of honesty.
Pants on four-alarm fire, with no hint of shame. These people scare me, and that's not easy to do in broad daylight.
The fatigue from the endless battering by lies from the political right is dangerous, so I'm grateful for Mr. Benen's taking on this awesome task for at least Romney's part of the problem. I gave up on politi"fact" months ago, so thanks for stepping into the gap.
Romney's current status as seemingly impregnable frontrunner says more about the complete ineptitude of a historically weak GOP presidential field than it does about Mitt as a strong candidate. Romney is a gaffe machine with a real problem connecting to the core base of his own party. He is on a road to potential disaster in the general election, presenting himself as a tone deaf rich guy who can't seal the deal with conservative voters that will be vital to any GOP victory in November. Mitt has Newt and Santorum and the other hapless Republican contenders to thank for missing such a fine opportunity to knock him off. http://ww.sunstateactivist.org
And still he draws 1200 to a rally. And disposes of rivals with "mostly true" claims. And has a normal sized nose. Amazing.
ssssh! don't tell kathleen parker, resident ditz of the washington post (jennifer doesn't count--she's been that way ever since somebody dropped a house on her sister). only two weeks ago kathleen pronounced willard the "too perfect candidate", too good to believe. she got the last part right-he's unbelievable.
There was a time you could turn to any network and get unbias reporting....not anymore now you get the host bias and extreme political views shoved down your throat. Candidates speeches on both sides are taken out of context. Hosts speak disrespectfully of presidential candidates and the President. They make fun of them or show them in the most unflattering light. It is getting harder and harder to know what the candidates stand for. Who would want to run for President....they must be a gluten for punishment.
Who would want to run for President....they must be a gluten for punishment
Well, you certainly need to amass a lot of bread... mostly from the upper crust...
Come on, someone had to rise to the occasion.
Yes, Lodger - it's the yeast you could do.
You do have to have a lot of dough...
Just thought I'd rise to the occasion...
Enough with the half-baked comments...
there was clearly a knead to
Item 12 is technically correct. Santorum and Specter both voted to confirm Sonia Sotomayor's nomination (by President Clinton) to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals.
I noticed that too, Law Guy, but I think the way Mitt is stating it is disingenuous. Would he be mentioning it at all if Sotomayor had not subsequently been appointed by Obama to the SC? I doubt it.
I have no doubt it was intended to confuse the audience, but the statement still seems defensible to me. It is literally true, after all. It's even defensible in the context of the photo with Obama, since Sotomayor's nomination to the Supreme Court in 2010 almost certainly would not have happened if the Senate hadn't confirmed her nomination to the Second Circuit in 1998. Even the subject matter strikes me as fair game -- why shouldn't Santorum be forced to explain why he once approved the nomination of a moderate-to-liberal judge?
None of that, of course, excuses Romney's staggering overall dishonesty and hypocrisy. But a slavish devotion to accuracy is kind of necessary in a post dedicated to the other side's blatant lies.
BTW, Santorum claims that he supported Specter against a Tea'r primary challenger because Specter agreed to support conservative judges. Specter has recently stated there was no such deal.
So who do you believe? I know, tough call. But Specter isn't running for anything.
(A propos of the above, notice how EX-senators and reps., like Bob Barr and Alan Simpson, suddenly become positively reasonable and thoughtful once they leave office!)
How standards have changed. #4 is really no better than, say, Gerald Ford's Poland gaffe, or to use a more recent example the Palin/Bachmann/Perry displays of ignorance that made their campaigns (or, in Palin's case, tease about a campaign) laughingstocks. (or an older example: George Romney saying he was "brainwashed" by military officers and Johnson administration officials.) There is no reason the media should not rise up as one and declare him unfit based on that response alone -- they've done it before.
And on the contraception access policy being the "worst attack on religion in America's history," I would think he'd start losing Mormon votes after that one.
Actually George Romney was telling nothing but the truth. They were trying to brainwash everyone. George Romney was a principled man.
Yeah, I'd probably vote for George Romney. Sounds like a decent guy. How the hell did Mitt turn out the way he did? Maybe George was a great politician but a really bad father.
DO go listen to Jeb Bush today on his statement 'I use to be a conservative...'
http://swampland.time.com/2012/02/24/did-jeb-bush-actually-say-that/
Krugman thinks Romney automatically lies to cover up his true positions and get elected.
But it looks to me that he is utterly indifferent to the truth. Benen has been running this mendacious Mitt rundown for months, and each Friday he comes up with ten NEW lies Mitt has told the previous week.
A person who lies so uninterruptedly is someone who has something else on their mind. I would venture to guess, as Frank Rich mentions, that it has to do with his absolute commitment to his religion, which apparently for Romney is THE ONLY TRUTH that counts. The rest is meaningless and indifferent to him.
What he knows to be true is that he will rise up after death and become the ruler of his own planet. I guess he is thinking of the presidency as just practice for that.
Politicians that lie, stop the presses. And a Republican at that, oh my, what is the world coming to.
/snark off
#6 is a way bigger lie than you suggest. As a private equity king, Romney began every transaction by taking on substantial debt to purchase businesses. Those budgets were massively unbalanced from the first minute of Bain's ownership of them. This debt load (leverage) is what enabled huge gains in successful companies and led to the notorious bankruptcies in weaker ones.
Good point, DRN. Everyone in the business world knows that too low a debt-to-equity ratio is considered a bad thing. Without debt, your cost of capital is way too high.
Romney's lies are making Nixon look good.
Hey, a little respect for Nixon. He was someone who should never have been trusted with power, but he was a brilliant observer and analyst of both national and world politics. From the Carter Administration until his death, every President consulted with him because he had unmatched insight and (to his credit) was more interested after leaving power in serving his country (and perhaps making atonement?) than anything else. Or maybe it was just the only way he had left to play the game.
Can anyone seriously imagine any of the current crop being sought for advice ten years from now?
I thought that never in my lifetime I would see someone worse than Nixon. Then Bush happened.
I may be wrong but I think the Clean Air and Water Acts were done during the Nixon years. I can't comprehend the republicans doing something like that now. Amazing how their thinking has changed.
Given that his audiences - and voters- are composed of people of which a majority believe the earth is less than 10,000 years old and that the Flintstones was a documentary, as well as a sizable minority who believe the sun revolves around the earth, he can lie with impunity because they can't tell, and they don't change their beliefs (I was going to say "minds" but the if they possess one that is "a fact not in evidence") even when the lie is proven to them.
To Jada5251. Once upon a time the press did not dig too deep because people had few independent sources of news so the party in power was not seriously challenged. The reason you are not getting a good idea of where the candidates stand, is because they won't tell you since then you would not vote for them. You will have to figure out for yourself which side makes more sense. I am 63 and the first good investigative reporting I remember was on Watergate.
and there hasn't been much good investigative reporting since
Is that like serving in the Marine Corps, Mitt? Did you ride that pommel horse into battle against those North Korean gymnasts?