Running hog wild into malicious deception and prevarication
Lies, Damned Lies, and Mitt Romney's Ads
Robert Schlesinger
U.S. News & WR, August 8, 2012
What happens to political and journalistic norms when a national campaign decides to blow past the run-of-the-mill cherry-picking of facts, distorting of policies, and playing in the gray area between truth and untruth, and instead simply runs hog wild into malicious deception and prevarication? We're going to find out.
Mitt Romney's presidential campaign has displayed a special level of shamelessness in its ads and attacks since its very first one, when it ran a clip of Barack Obama saying "if we keep talking about the economy, we're going to lose"—a clip from 2008 when Obama was quoting an aide to then GOP nominee Sen. John McCain. His campaign has also taken other Obama quotes out of context ("you didn't build that" and "it worked") to portray the president as having said things he flatly didn't say.
More recently they accused the Obama campaign of trying to curtail the voting rights of members of the military (a thoroughly debunked accusation—USA Today, for example, called it "a falsehood").
But the Romney campaign's latest line of attack, highlighted by a television ad accusing President Obama of attempting to "gut" President Clinton's 1996 welfare reform law, is a new level of—what's the phrase?—making stuff up. (Or as I put it in my column today, the ad is "grotesquely, pants-on-fire, Pinocchio's nose just punched a hole in the wall misleading.") The facts of the matter are that the Obama administration did signal a willingness last month to extend welfare law waivers (an act allowed in the law) to states if they come up with new, promising ways to improve the law's goal of getting people into jobs. Oh and the governors who specifically asked for these waivers? They were Republican. And they're not rogue Republicans either—the idea of giving states greater flexibility to deal with welfare programs is a very traditional one in the GOP, endorsed by many, many Republican officials over the years (including, by the way, then-Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney in 2005).
(More here.)
Robert Schlesinger
U.S. News & WR, August 8, 2012
What happens to political and journalistic norms when a national campaign decides to blow past the run-of-the-mill cherry-picking of facts, distorting of policies, and playing in the gray area between truth and untruth, and instead simply runs hog wild into malicious deception and prevarication? We're going to find out.
Mitt Romney's presidential campaign has displayed a special level of shamelessness in its ads and attacks since its very first one, when it ran a clip of Barack Obama saying "if we keep talking about the economy, we're going to lose"—a clip from 2008 when Obama was quoting an aide to then GOP nominee Sen. John McCain. His campaign has also taken other Obama quotes out of context ("you didn't build that" and "it worked") to portray the president as having said things he flatly didn't say.
More recently they accused the Obama campaign of trying to curtail the voting rights of members of the military (a thoroughly debunked accusation—USA Today, for example, called it "a falsehood").
But the Romney campaign's latest line of attack, highlighted by a television ad accusing President Obama of attempting to "gut" President Clinton's 1996 welfare reform law, is a new level of—what's the phrase?—making stuff up. (Or as I put it in my column today, the ad is "grotesquely, pants-on-fire, Pinocchio's nose just punched a hole in the wall misleading.") The facts of the matter are that the Obama administration did signal a willingness last month to extend welfare law waivers (an act allowed in the law) to states if they come up with new, promising ways to improve the law's goal of getting people into jobs. Oh and the governors who specifically asked for these waivers? They were Republican. And they're not rogue Republicans either—the idea of giving states greater flexibility to deal with welfare programs is a very traditional one in the GOP, endorsed by many, many Republican officials over the years (including, by the way, then-Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney in 2005).
(More here.)
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1 Comments:
Who knows, Romeny might stoop so low as to run false ads suggesting Obama caused cancer deaths...
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