So this is the headline in USA Today that greeted me this morning, along with tens of thousands in airports and hotels across the country:
"Romney: Obama is waging a 'vicious' campaign"
With this sub-headline below the fold:
"Republican calls president's tactics low- but effective. He talks about lessons learned and the road ahead."
Here's the opening line of Ms. Page's article from the interview, given in a Columbus, OH suburb after Mr. Romney's last rally before the Tampa convention:
"Mitt Romney calls campaign attacks by President Obama and his allies "vituperative" and "vicious" and "absurd" and "sad". Also: Effective. "I do think that the president's campaign of personal vilification and demonization probably draws some people away from me," Romney says when asked why he's no better than tied against a vulnerable incumbent."
Then the article goes into the usual fluff we've all come to expect from our vaunted "liberal" media about personal biography and Mr, Romney's enviable advantages of enthusiasm and money, leading in a USA Today/Gallup poll on the economy and apparently "more likely to be respected by foreign leaders".
More below the fold
The headline on page 4A where the article continues?
"Romney: Voters 'deserve better'"
And where it continues on page 5?
"Isn't it sad that the focus of the president's campaign, having been president for four years, is to try and attack the personality of the person he's running against as opposed to standing up for his record and his plan for the future? Mitt Romney
Okay, we all expect puff articles during the Republican convention week like those short bios that ran over the weekend on cable, and maybe if they can avoid having mean things said about them by the right there might even be a comparable piece on President Obama next week.
My problem? The headlines in the piece are blatant lies, and unless the candidate insisted on editing the article personally, totally unnecessary even in the environment of giving a candidate an unfettered platform to say anything he wants unchallenged.
We've come to expect that year round our intrepid journalists will allow whoppers to come from the right with no follow up at all, like maybe "that has been dis-proven by multiple fact check organizations, why do you continue saying it?"
And in particular we political junkies begrudge no candidate the opportunity to have his own words put forth, even the lies, especially this week. Just not splashed across the nations new stands in bold type unchallenged.
My beef has to do with my own background where airports and hotels were my life year round, where sometimes I had time to pick up several papers on a long layover or an extended hotel stay and read them all thoroughly, but more often than not with mere minutes to spare the only chance to keep abreast of news were furtive skimming of the paper's headlines, sometimes while still in the racks.
Those in similar situations today traveling the nation were treated to blatant lies created and placed by USA Today, not Mitt Romney.
Everyone paying attention knows the President has taken the high road and criticized only policy and it's potential consequences while Mitt Romney has personally race baited and lied in his own ads by claiming falsely our first black President is trying to abolish work from the welfare program and turn the country into a European socialist state and he doesn't know what it's like to be an American, among other dog whistles.
This from a paper who's editorial page has long since sold out to the cat food commission's insistence that because Wall Street Bankster's stole the nation's wealth and sent it to secret accounts in The Cayman's, Bermuda, and Switzerland, among other destinations, the rest of us have to give in to Republican's seventy-year efforts to dismantle the New Deal and their almost fifty-year efforts to destroy the Great Society safety net programs and learn to "live within our means".
We wonder how in the heck can half the country believe that tax cuts increase revenue, blah people are all drawing welfare and food stamps, Republicans are fiscal conservatives concerned about the deficit, or that they're the "pro-life party, or that Obama's coming for our guns, or that Obamacare "cut" 716 billion from Medicare when he strengthened it and extended it's life by eight years by re-investing wasteful over-payments created by Congress in their corporate giveaway Medicare Advantage program, or that they're the "family values" party, and on and on and on?
There you go.
P.S. Hey, media, I listened to some of Hannity and Rush traveling in the rental car today - they still hate you and said you're all on Obama's payroll anyway. Try, try, try.