Sorry. I guess I've finally lost it. I wish I knew more swearwords.
Romney's first ad against Obama was egregious enough, taking the president's words and flipping the context one-eighty. There was some blowback, about ten seconds' worth, but Romney defended it because the words they decontexted had, indeed, begun life in Mr Obama's larynx. And the dishonest ads have kept coming, one after another, as if truth has no meaning or value to him, as if he's -- and he is! -- mortally afraid of the truth, like it's garlic, or a wooden stake. This latest one, though, is a flat-out, surpassing lie of the first magnitude (if that means the most egregious the human mind can imagine). Even the R architect of welfare reform agrees. And what makes it so much worse than usual (except to a teabagger, to whom it's apparent that no transgression in the name of beating the black guy is too much to countenance) is not just that it (per usual) falsely blames Obama for doing something he didn't do; but that what he did do was, as has often been the case, to accede to a request from a bunch of Republican governors, including Mitt Fricking Romney himself, back then.*
Romney's lying. He's not spinning the truth to his advantage; he's not hiding in a gray area between fact and fiction; he's just lying. The law hasn't been "gutted"; the work requirement hasn't been "dropped." Stations that air this ad are disseminating an obvious, demonstrable lie.
All Obama did is agree to Republican governors' request for flexibility. That's it. Indeed, perhaps the most jaw-dropping aspect of this is that Romney himself, during his one gubernatorial term, asked for the same kind of flexibility on welfare law that Obama agreed to last month. Romney, in other words, is attacking the president for doing what Romney asked the executive branch to do in 2005.
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The Republican nominee for president is working under the assumption that he can make transparently false claims, in writing and in campaign advertising, with impunity. Romney is convinced that there are no consequences for breathtaking dishonesty.
And, so far, there have been none. Not from the press, not from his supporters, who evidently have no more morality than he does. If they don't give a shit; if they don't really care that they have a candidate who lies about everything; if they don't find that disturbing; if it doesn't cause them to question his qualifications to be our leader (or to call himself a decent human being) or worry what he'd do if elected, then why should he stop? He assumes his voters don't care or have been made too dumb to, and, from everything we see, he's sadly, sickly, depressingly, disappointingly, disgustingly, destructively, damnably right.
Absent believing -- against all evidence -- that Barack Obama is a Muslim terrorist who hates capitalism, there's literally no justification for voting for a guy who's this egregiously mendacious. Even then, you have to swallow a lot to vote for the unprecedented liar that is Mitt Romney. He's -- demonstrably, based on everything he says -- the most dishonest candidate a major party has ever offered up, and it says much about what they think of their voters, of how confident they are that they've dumbed them into obedient submission.
