Consider a brief series of events. Step One: Mitt Romney lies in an attack ad, falsely claiming that President Obama “gut welfare reform by dropping work requirements.”
Step Two: Romney watches fact-checkers go berserk, condemning the ad for being demonstrably false.
Step Three: Romney expresses amazement that President Obama “keeps on running” ads, even after “the various fact-checkers” deem the spots “inaccurate.”
Step Four: Romney launches a new attack ad accusing Obama of “quietly ending work requirements” in the welfare law — an accusation that has no connection to this plane of reality.
Look at this quote from Friday again: “You know, in the past, when people pointed out that something was inaccurate, why, campaigns pulled the ad,” Romney said on Bill Bennett’s radio show. “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.”
If Lewis Carroll wrote a script for a presidential candidate, it’d look an awful lot like Mitt Romney’s.
Keep in mind, this isn’t some tangential point for Team Romney. With Mitt Romney in Florida, Paul Ryan will hit the trail in Iowa on Monday where he will attack President Obama over welfare, Politico reports. Ryan will attend the Iowa State Fair in Des Moines, and will speak at 1:30 p.m. CDT. The Romney campaign is still pushing the welfare narrative this week with a new ad that, like the first, falsely claims Obama has taken the work requirement out of welfare. The Romney campaign is building its entire message around a blatant, shameless lie — and then it’s attacking Obama for being sleazy and lacking in character. This is genuinely twisted. And 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?
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