Sam Stein noted yesterday that Mitt Romney, on the campaign trail, told voters it “just broke my heart” when he saw President Obama “go around the world apologizing for America.”
Romney’s lying. He knows he’s lying. And yet he keeps telling this lie anyway.
This particular lie is troubling because of how old it is. In Romney’s campaign kick-off speech last June, he told supporters, “President Obama sees a different America, and he’s taken us in a different direction. A few months into office, he traveled around the globe to apologize for America.”
This was immediately fact-checked, and it was immediately proven false, but that hasn’t stopped Romney from repeating this claim nearly every day since.
If Romney had said it once and then walked it back, it would have been merely offensive. He might even be able to feign ignorance after telling the lie a single time. But if someone makes a dishonest claim, learns that’s it’s not true, and then chooses to repeat it countless times anyway, that person is no longer simply mistaken — that person is lying. And as we talked about on the show last night, it’s part of an unnerving pattern of dishonesty that deserves more attention.
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