06.22.12
Unprincipled lying as an asset
Mitt Romney has been able to turn being an unprincipled liar into an asset. He’s done it because the mainstream media finds the sheer volume of his mendacity too complicated to explain. It’s just easier to publish it without comment than come to an editorial decision that would sever the Gordian knot — the equivalent of a tag-line stating “Readers and viewers are warned that everything Mitt Romney says is untrue including the words ‘a,’ ‘and’ and ‘the.'”
And Mitt Romney is not a stupid man. He’s surely noticed which is why he’s not deterred. He has total of control of a tactic that can put him in the White House.
Pine View Farm tipped me to a piece on the Guardian on the matter:
What is the proper response when, even after it’s pointed out that the candidate is not telling the truth, he keeps doing it? Romney actually has a telling rejoinder for this. When a reporter challenged his oft-stated assertion that President Obama had made the economy worse (factually, not correct), he denied ever saying it in the first place. It’s a lie on top of a lie.
Now, it’s certainly true that on the campaign trail, facts can be stretched in many different directions – and both parties, including President Obama, frequently make arguments that are misleading, lacking in context or simply false. But it is virtually unheard of for a politician to lie with such reckless abandon and appear completely unconcerned about getting caught …
Romney has figured out a loophole – one can lie over and over, and those lies quickly become part of the political narrative, practically immune to “fact-checking”. Ironically, the more Romney lies, the harder it then becomes to correct the record.
It’s also true that one can repost such Guardian comment columns ten thousand times in social media and it won’t make a bit of difference.
Mitt Romney could be president because we deserve him.