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LIE #1
Mitt Romney has joined Orly Taitz, Joe Arpaio and Donald Trump in lunacy. He's become a birther. This afternoon he told a gathering of the like-minded the following:
Romney reminded the crowd in suburban Detroit that he and his wife, Ann, were both born in Michigan.
“No one’s ever asked to see my birth certificate,” he said. “They know that this is the place where both of us were born and raised.”
The comment appeared to be a clear dig at Obama, and a nod to those who question whether he was born in the United States even though he has released a birth certificate showing that he was born in a hospital in Hawaii.
This appears to be another desperate ploy to win over the flip-flopper's conservative base after losing them over his desperate attack of Congressman Todd Akin, which had preceded Romney's desperate attempt to win over the base with his pick of Paul Ryan, which, of course, came after riling up his base by claiming that people are helped with healthcare, which, in turn, came after his desperate lies about President Obama's welfare order to gain traction with his base and on and on back to his pledge in Massachusetts to be better on gay rights than Ted Kennedy.
For a lie like Birtherism, you can't look to government for help. Rather, you have to do it yourself. No government agency is going to fund misrepresentations and out-right craziness. For a lie of this magnitude, you need rugged individualism a political party to back you up.
Unfortunately for Mitt Romney, his lies were more than adequately rebutted by a tweet from the President. In other words, the sum of this distraction from the issues of the day equals: Mitt Romney looks like a birther fool, and President Obama gets millions of dollars of free air time with a tweet.
LIE #2
Paul Ryan is lying about President Obama's recent Executive Order providing Governors with an option to waive portions of the federal welfare law. Ryan, cynically and falsely, claims that a waiver would allow people an easier time to stay on welfare without seeking employment. This lie has been pinocchioed by all the fact-checkers that have looked at it, and it has even, for a change, galvanized reporters into questioning Ryan's truthfulness. Robert Schlesinger, managing editor at U.S. News and World Report provided proof of this galvanization in his piece entitled, "Lies, Damned Lies, and Mitt Romney's Ads":
But the Romney campaign's latest line of attack, highlighted by a television ad accusing President Obama of attempting to "gut" President Clinton's 1996 welfare reform law, is a new level of—what's the phrase?—making stuff up. (Or as I put it in my column today, the ad is "grotesquely, pants-on-fire, Pinocchio's nose just punched a hole in the wall misleading.") The facts of the matter are that the Obama administration did signal a willingness last month to extend welfare law waivers (an act allowed in the law) to states if they come up with new, promising ways to improve the law's goal of getting people into jobs. Oh and the governors who specifically asked for these waivers? They were Republican. And they're not rogue Republicans either—the idea of giving states greater flexibility to deal with welfare programs is a very traditional one in the GOP, endorsed by many, many Republican officials over the years (including, by the way, then-Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney in 2005).
LIE #3
The most amazing lie of all -- the one that takes my breath away -- is coming to television sets on Tuesday, folks, and it's a doozy. Moreover, it has already been debunked here, here, here and hundreds of other places. I'm talking, of course, about the "You didn't build that" lie, in which Mitt Romney intentionally strangled the English language to obtain the result he wanted. As Meteor Blades explains in this front-page diary:
Fox truncated what Obama said that day into "If you've got a business, you didn't build that." He actually made the remark in the context of "this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive," pointing out that "Somebody invested in those roads and bridges." His perfectly accurate comments would have been unremarkable had Fox's propaganda team not sculpted them into something they were not and spent 42 segments totaling more than two hours of air time transforming them into a phony scandal. Republicans from the top of the ticket on down have been capitalizing on Fox's fabrication ever since.
Even Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler, the guy who needed reams and reams of paperwork proving that Mitt Romney worked for Bain after 1999 before finally semi-concluding that Mitt Romney worked for Bain after 1999, noted that Romney had created a gaffe out of thin air. That Romney had lied. Media Matters took down this Romney- and Fox News-created meme here:
After all, Fox News has been stoking outrage for weeks that President Obama insulted business owners by saying they didn't build the roads and bridges that help them bring goods to market and that bring customers to their stores.
The outrage Fox spent so much time and energy manufacturing takes center stage at the GOP convention next week, with the cynical theme "We Built It."
Granted, taxpayers built and own the NHL stadium that will host the convention, redesigned Tampa's highways and byways that convention goers will use to get to that publicly funded stadium, and will foot the bill for the security that will keep those convention-goers safe.
What is most galling about the lie is that it forms the basis for
an entire day of the Republican Convention. In my opinion, the history of journalism will take one of two paths after Tuesday: Journalism will either finally take down a lie this unabashedly big, or journalism will ignore it.
Finally, in the best news of the day, President Barack Obama just announced the American Presidential Delegation to the Opening Ceremony in London of the 2012 Paralympic Games. Leading the delegation will be U.S. Army General Martin E. Dempsey, 18th Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Proving yet again that all politics are local, I'm pleased to announce that one of my all-time heroes will be part of the delegation: Ms. Jean Driscoll, U.S. two-time Olympic silver medalist, five-time Paralympic gold medalist, three-time Paralympic silver medalist, and four-time Paralympic bronze medalist. She also won the Boston Marathon seven times in a row. Here's Jean in action:
Link to Transcripts and Documents.