Steve Benen, Chronicling Mitt’s Mendacity, Vol. XLI:
In a way, I blame my friend Greg Sargent. In the first week in January, he noted, almost in passing, that Mitt Romney seemed to be making a lot of false claims, and someone “really should document them all.” That struck me as a good idea, so I decided to tackle this on my own.
After all, I thought at the time, how hard could this be? Once a week, I’d let readers know about Romney’s whoppers, which I assumed would total about a half-dozen a week, and maybe after the election, I’d do a top 20 list of my favorites. The project would be a nice little Friday-afternoon feature.
Little did I know at the time that Romney would become an ambitious prevaricator, whose rhetoric would come to define post-truth politics. Nearly 11 months after Greg Sargent’s harmless suggestion, I’ve published 40 installments in this series, which, before today, featured 884 falsehoods. (If you include today’s edition, the new total is 917 falsehoods for the year.)
I wish that were a typo. It’s not.
On track for an even 1000 by election day?
And how many falsehoods is that for Obama? He never lies? Don’t you get tired of being so partisan? I had you as a professor and I’m sorry but this kinda nonsense is way beneath you.
I tell you what, Michael. Give me 100 Obama lies. Wait, I’ll make it easy for you….give me 50. Go ahead.
The fact of the matter is that Romney has created a campaign that lives and breathes lies. It exists because of them. It’s the only reason why he’s polling in the same zip code as Obama these days.
Until that Obama makes his campaign one big lie, how about saving your false equivalencies for those who don’t know any better.
In the meantime…go ahead and share those 50 with us.
.
@Michael [who is not the Michael who runs this blog!]
Actually, the problem with Obama is that he mostly does what he says. (Grand Bargain, here we come. Sigh.)
I also can’t think of any important Obama lies – in the sense of saying something that I believe he knew or should have known was false. I think, or example, that he believed the stimulus was big enough; I’d be prepared though to entertain an argument that he should have known better.
I can think of some key broken promises from the campaign (e.g. closing Guantanamo, although Congress is also to blame for that). But mostly Obama governed how he campaigned — as a liberal Republican — which is why he was never my first choice four years ago. I certainly can’t think of any issues where Obama flipped and flopped and flipped and then took both sides, as Romney has done on taxes and abortion.
This absolutely isn’t a situation in which both sides are anywhere similar when it comes to their relationship with the truth. I note your comment was fact-free. And assuming you are one of those people who thinks Obama is lying about not being Kenyan or a Muslim, you won’t find much to populate a list of his falsehoods. (Now, incomplete truths, accentuating the positive, all that, for sure – he is a politician after all.)
Even the ever-more-right-wing Washington Post basically agrees that Romney’s campaign is exceptionally mendacious.
To quote a movie: “You keep using that word…but I don’t think it means what you think it means…”
The vast majority of these (if not arguable all) are not “lies” but misleading, shading of the truth, interpretations that might be arguable, etc.
Lying is when you claim to have said or done something on a certain date, and you in fact, did not and know that when you claim it. Sort of like…