At a campaign event on Monday, a Republican voter asked Mitt Romney about falsehoods pushed by “leftists” and what he intended to do about it. The candidate replied, “It seems that the first victim of an Obama campaign is the truth.”
As it turns out, the first victim is actually irony.
Michael Tomasky had a good piece this week, explaining what many have been reluctant to acknowledge: “The distinguishing fact of the Romney-Ryan campaign thus far is the extent to which it is built on outright lies in a desperate attempt to avoid honest debate at all costs.” The GOP ticket, Tomasky argued, “lies as much as possible.”
Just making stuff up about the other guy is bad enough. But it is in terms of past and future positions that what Romney-Ryan are doing really plows new and dishonorable earth. […]
They know that the truth would crush them electorally. And so it follows that they know they must lie. They must lie about their Medicare plans. They must lie about the effects of their tax plans on average people and rich people. And they must tell a number of lies about Obama, all the better if they involve race, as the welfare lie does.
So this will be the entire point of the Romney-Ryan campaign. Lie lie lie. Muddy the waters. Turn day to night, fire to water, champagne to piss. Peddle themselves as the precise opposite of what they actually are. That is clearly the m.o.
It’s always something of a relief when others notice this, but it’s a dynamic much of the political world resists. Perhaps these stragglers could take a few moments to consider the 31st installment of my weekly series, chronicling Mitt’s mendacity. (This week is the biggest list since I started the project in January.)
1. Referencing the money he gives to his church every year, Romney said, “This is done entirely privately. One of the downsides of releasing one’s financial information is that this is now all public, but we had never intended our contributions to be known.”
This is ridiculously untrue.
2. In an interview with Time magazine, Romney said of the recent Tax Policy Center analysis, “The basic foundation and premises of my plan are … we don’t reduce taxes or the share of taxes paid by the highest-income individuals. The highest-income individuals will get to pay the same share of taxes they pay today.”
At a minimum, this is ridiculously misleading. Under Romney’s plan, high-income people would get an enormous tax break.
3. In the same interview, Romney added, “I know that many in the modeling community do not want to assume growth with changes in tax policy. I do.”
Actually, the Tax Policy Center, which Romney was criticizing, gave him the benefit of the doubt on growth assumptions, and found that his numbers still didn’t add up.
4. On Twitter, Romney claimed President Obama “gutted bipartisan welfare reform by ending the work requirement.”
5. Also on Twitter, Romney argued that the Affordable Care Act, “raises taxes on families making less than 120k. I will repeal it.”
He’s referring to an individual mandate that would apply to 1% of the population. And if President Obama’s health care policy raised taxes on families making less than $120,000, then Romney raised taxes on families making less than $120,000.
6. In a campaign ad, Romney says Obama is “raiding $716 billion from Medicare.”
7. The same ad accuses Obama of “taxing wheelchairs and pacemakers.”
At a minimum, this is wildly misleading.
8. The ad concludes, “The Romney/Ryan plan will restore Medicare funding, and protect and strengthen the program for the next generation.”
As it turns out, that’s the polar opposite of the truth.
9. At a campaign event in Hobbs, New Mexico, Romney said, “Sometimes I have the impression that the whole regulatory attitude of the administration is trying to stop oil and gas and coal, that they don’t want those sources.”
In reality, coal production is up; we have more natural gas than we know what to do with; and oil production is up.
10. In the same speech, Romney said of Obama, “He’s taken federal dollars, your money, to invest in companies — solar companies, wind companies — about $90 billion in so-called green jobs.”
The details matter: much of the $90 billion was appropriated by George W. Bush, not Obama.
11. On welfare policy, the Romney campaign said this week that all the administration needs to do “is have HHS send out a hard letter making sure that the only things that will qualify under the work requirement is hard training and the cooperative programs with employers and define it in such a way that what was allowed before is all that’s allowed in the future…. That’s all that’s required.”
The administration already did this two months ago.
12. On the budget sequester, the Romney campaign argued this week, “It was the president who insisted on this makeup, this formula. Defense spending is not half of all federal spending, but it’s half of the cuts approximately in the sequester. We disagreed with that then, disagree with it now.”
That’s a lie. Democrats wanted the other half of the sequester to be tax increases. The defense cuts were proposed by House Republicans.
13. The Romney campaign also said it can create a “debt-free nation just like our parents.”
For one thing, the Romney campaign isn’t proposing to eliminate the debt, just the deficit. For another, I don’t know how old most folks’ parents are, but the U.S. has maintained a debt every year since 1836.
14. At a campaign event in Bettendorf, Iowa, Romney argued, “We’ve now had four years in a row with a president that’s built trillion-dollar deficits.”
That’s not true. Obama inherited a $1.3 trillion deficit from Bush; it wasn’t something the president “built.”
15. In the same speech, Romney said, “Now, the president promised that he was going to cut the deficit in half. Yeah, it didn’t happen, did it. He’s more than doubled it.”
Maybe Romney doesn’t know what “double” means. The deficit on Obama’s first day was $1.3 trillion. Last year, it was also $1.3 trillion. This year, it’s projected to be $1.1 trillion. When he says the president “more than doubled” the deficit, as he has many times, Romney’s lying.
16. Romney added, in reference to the president, “He’s added almost as much debt held by the public, $5 trillion, as all the prior presidents of the country combined.”
Romney has said this before. It’s still a blatant lie.
17. Romney went on to say, “One out of six people’s fallen into poverty under this president.”
That only makes sense if we count Obama’s first year in office, which relies on a standard Romney believes is fundamentally unfair.
18. Romney also said, “What [Obama] said was not a gaffe. It was not a slip of the tongue. What he said was his philosophy. He said that if you have a business you didn’t build it, someone else did that.”
That’s not even close to being true.
19. Romney said his economic plan “creates 12 million jobs in four years.”
If we do nothing, we’re on track to create 12 million new American jobs over the next four years anyway.
20. At an event in Manchester, New Hampshire, Paul Ryan, standing alongside Romney, said, “Now, let’s be very clear and fair. The president inherited a difficult situation, no two ways about that. Problem is, he made things worse.”
21. Ryan also said of Romney, “He took struggling businesses and turned them around — an 80 percent success rate. That’s astounding.”









