Mitt Romney said Thursday that President Obama and his allies should be embarrassed over a controversial ad from a super-PAC supporting the president that links the death of a cancer patient to the GOP contender’s tenure at Bain Capital.
“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.”
Look, I know the Priorities USA Action spot is provocative. The spot, which hasn’t actually aired anywhere, is borderline on the fairness scale (even if the ad’s detractors haven’t pointed to specific inaccuracies). I get it.
But the ad was released the same day as Romney’s welfare smear, which was as dishonest a national ad you’ll see in this campaign cycle or any other. Paul Waldman wrote this week, “I’ve been paying very, very close attention to political ads for a long time. In my former career as an academic I did a lot of research on political ads. I’ve watched literally every single presidential general election campaign ad ever aired since the first ones in 1952…. But I cannot recall a single presidential campaign ad in the history of American politics that lied more blatantly than this one.”
Romney wants to talk about politicians who’d get “embarrassed” when “people pointed out that something was inaccurate”? He wants to talk about “the various fact-checkers”? As Greg Sargent noted, “[I]t remains puzzling that Romney would go here. After all, fact checkers have called out his ads as wrong, inaccurate, misleading or false again and again and again and again and again and again and again. If Romney pulled any of those ads, I’m not aware of it.”
Ultimately, I’m having a hard time understanding how Romney’s brain works. When he gets caught lying, he brazenly repeats the lie. When he runs dishonest ads, and gets called out by fact-checkers, he keeps airing them. And yet, Romney then whines in Republican media about his amazement that Democrats aren’t “embarrassed” by “inaccurate” claims.
I want to understand the mindset that makes such cognitive dissonance possible, but I’m coming up empty.
Consider another example from yesterday.









