Today the headlines are screaming Senator Reid is a dirty liar, yet it begs the question who is the liar and which campaign is promoting lies? Romney is complaining about false campaign ads, but is building his campaign on them. The past weeks alone have brought you false assertions that the Obama campaign is trying to disenfranchise military voters and that Obama said individuals did not build their own businesses.
Freud had a term for this behavior, projection. In a nutshell, projection is when you attribute your own negative feels and behaviors to others. A classic example is when a cheating wife accuses her husband of cheating. Projection can explain many of Romney's audacious behaviors.
Rachel Maddow the other night opined disbelieving about Romney's hypocrisy about taxes. In 2002, Romney who had refused to release his tax returns, publicly claimed that he had filed as a Massachusetts resident before finally admitting that he had not done so. At the same time that he was hiding this information, he blazenly accused his opponent of hiding something because his opponent's husband had not released his taxes. Romney was the one hiding falsehoods by not releasing his taxes.
The take away is that the concept of projection can help us understand much of Romney and his his campaign. They accuse others of lying because they lie. They accuse others of running false negative campaign adds because they do so. They accuse of other of hiding important information because they hid important information. Listening to Romney's and his Campaign's accusations is often a road map to their own problematic behavior.