Mitt Romney: A sleazy salesman who doesn't respect his customers (Brian Snyder/Reuters)
Mitt Romney's meaningless 92.3 percent statistic about women and job losses has been thoroughly debunked pretty much everywhere, but let's take one last look at
his original statement:
There's been some talk about a war on women. The real war on women has been waged by the Obama administration's failure on the economy. Do you know what percentage of job losses during the Obama years of have been casualties of women losing jobs as opposed to men? Do you know how many women, what percent of the job losses were women? 92.3 percent of the job losses during the Obama years have been women who've lost those jobs.
In large part because of its absurdity, Romney's
misleading 92.3 percent claim became the focus of attention after he delivered his remarks. When you reread his original statement, however, it's clear that the bogus statistic wasn't really the main thing he hoped to communicate. Rather, he offered it as evidence to support his core accusation: that "the real war on women has been waged by" President Obama.
As it turns out, the 92.3 percent stat failed to provide any support whatsoever for that claim—even though it was technically accurate. That's important: Romney's 92.3 percent claim wasn't itself a lie, rather it was a meaningless factoid offered in an attempt to mislead his audience about something else. That's a time-honored tactic of unethical salesmen, and the fact that Mitt Romney decided to take such a sleazy approach to the issue is a pretty big clue that he was in the middle of telling a pants-on-fire lie.
Sure enough, that's exactly what it was. Mitt Romney and his Republican Party are waging an all-out assault on Planned Parenthood, birth control coverage, reproductive rights, and even Obamacare's guarantee that women won't be charged more for insurance than men just because they can get pregnant. That's what you call a real war on women. It's being led by Romney and the Republicans. And when they blame it on President Obama, that's a lie.