Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire:Romney-Ryan Campaign

The Daily Beast columnist Robert Shrum comments on  the Romney-Ryan Campaign, called by some "the lyingest campaign ever".

Reckless disregard for the truth is a habit at the heart of the Romney enterprise. From the beginning, the entire campaign has been a calculated exercise in deceit. Its central rationale was conceived in a falsehood, that Romney the financial manipulator at Bain was a prolific job creator. The suspiciously round number was 100,000 jobs. The evidence? Romney never did disclose any records to back up his boast, and he took credit for hiring at companies long after Bain was gone from them—and he was gone from Bain.
 

Then, when the Obama campaign’s Bain ads hit, similar to the ones that upended Romney in a Senate contest with Ted Kennedy in 1994, the former governor was still unprepared, presumably unable to disprove the criticism or prove his self-defining claim. He retreated first to bromides about free enterprise, and more recently to a cop-out plea for an “agreement between both campaigns” to declare that attacks on “business or family or taxes” are off-limits. What’s family got to do with job-crushing profiteering, offshore tax havens, or Swiss bank accounts? It was Romney who ran on his business experience. Suddenly it’s unfair to talk about it.
 

Shrum points to Romney's most recent lie about President Obama gutting welfare, eliminating the work provisions of the program.  Romney says "Under Obama’s plan (for welfare), you wouldn’t have to work and wouldn’t have to train for a job. They just send you your welfare check." PolitiFacts.com rates his claim as a "Pants on Fire" lie designed to inflame old resentments.

Govenor Mitt Romney

Shrum concludes that "We ought to reject any false equivalence between the Obama and the Romney campaigns. There’s nothing in modern presidential politics that quite equals the audacity and scope of Romney’s long march of lies."

The list could go on and on. One Republican operative, a genuine conservative who thinks Romney isn’t genuine at all, renders his verdict: “He doesn’t believe in anything but his own ambition.” Maybe that’s why Romney will say anything. But why, then, should we believe anything he says?
 



Congressman Paul Ryan

Michael Tomasky joins Robert Shrum with his article on Romney-Ryan campaign "Big Lie".

So this will be the entire point of the Romney-Ryan campaign. Lie lie lie. Muddy the waters. Turn day to night, fire to water, champagne to piss. Peddle themselves as the precise opposite of what they actually are. That is clearly the m.o.