Romney Jeep ad picks up Pants-on-Fire from Politifact to go with its Four Pinocchios from Glenn Kessler and “simply not true” from Factcheck.org.
Romney’s Jeep ad picks up a coveted Pants-on-Fire award from Politifact to go with its Four Pinocchios from Glenn Kessler and its “simply not true” from Factcheck.org.
The Triple Crown of mendacity! That will be something Mitt can look backward to with pride during his long years of retirement and disgrace.
Lesser honors came from Des Moines Register and the Indianapolis Star (“neither is true,” of the two claims in Romney’s ad) and the Nashville Tennessean (“Romney Repeats False Claim”).
Update This just in: the RBC gives the ad its four-star “So Full of It His Eyes are Brown” rating. That completes Romney’s Grand Slam of Lying.
Footnote Yes, I know I’m making a big fuss about a fairly trivial lie. But Romney’s habit of lying - worse, his utter indifference to the difference between truth and falsehood - is as central to this campaign as racism, nativism, misogyny, and economic feudalism. Lying isn’t just what Romney does; it’s who he is.
Author: Mark Kleiman
Professor of Public Policy at the NYU Marron Institute for Urban Management and editor of the Journal of Drug Policy Analysis. Teaches about the methods of policy analysis about drug abuse control and crime control policy, working out the implications of two principles: that swift and certain sanctions don't have to be severe to be effective, and that well-designed threats usually don't have to be carried out.
Books:
Drugs and Drug Policy: What Everyone Needs to Know (with Jonathan Caulkins and Angela Hawken)
When Brute Force Fails: How to Have Less Crime and Less Punishment (Princeton, 2009; named one of the "books of the year" by The Economist
Against Excess: Drug Policy for Results (Basic, 1993)
Marijuana: Costs of Abuse, Costs of Control (Greenwood, 1989)
UCLA Homepage
Curriculum Vitae
Contact: Markarkleiman-at-gmail.com
View all posts by Mark Kleiman
Fact-check: It’s not the Nashville Tennessean. It’s The Tennessean, a daily newspaper published in Nashville.
Corrected.
Mark, I totally disagree with your characterization of “a fairly trivial lie.”
The reaspon it’s important is not that it’s a particularly big lie, but that it’s a cover-up of a position that’s central to Mittster’s entire philosophy of government, and which was proved absolutely, totally, without any redeeming values, to be totally wrong and inappropriate in the auto company crisis.
President Obama (and many of the Dems) pushed hard to save the auto companies. Not from bankruptcy, but from annihilation. Bankruptcy was temporary. Romney was totally and bitterly opposed to the action that saved the companies, and said so unambiguously. Having painted himself into a corner with statements that completely defined his unrealistic and counterproductive vision of proper government action in an economic crisis, he now lies to paint President Obama with the brush he himself dipped unilaterally into the tar back then.
So when he makes such bullshit statements it’s not a “relatively trivial lie,” it’s a coverup of his central, bankrupt, theme of [proper] government inaction.
Agreed. Then there is this:
This isn’t close to trivial given the context (Nate Silver claims Ohio has a 49% chance of being the decider).
Everybody with a soapbox should be standing and screaming “liar”.
Team Blue appears to be blowing this back quite well…
And frankly, that’s damn sweet to see.
It portends a great ground game in Ohio next Tuesday.
Fair enough. It’s a lie about facts fairly trivial in themselves; if Jeep were moving jobs to China that wouldn’t really discredit the auto bailout. But the lie, as a lie, is not trivial at all.
Romney: salesman
Romney: sociopath
Both
Guess they’ll just have to rely on unbridled voter suppression. I’m sure the R’s didn’t want it to come to that but we left them no choice.
Stir in a goodly dash of computer vote hacking and bake well in the SCOTUS oven and you have a perfectly cooked election to serve up in january.
For simply standing athwart the tracks of history as the GOP vote-rigging machine bears down on them, Obama and Holder deserve what they’re about to get, and perhaps worse. The people whose interests they swore to represent, however, deserve better, much better.