On HBO's "Real Time with Bill Maher" this past Friday, August 24, Bill got a surprising confession out of Avik Roy, Mitt Romney's health advisor. Roy admitted that Kathleen Sibelius memorandum on welfare work requirements "doesn't really make that many changes." Sadly, Bill didn't move in for the kill. Perhaps he was extra "mellow" that night. More sad, no one in the main stream press has picked up on this.
On HBO's "Real Time with Bill Maher," there were two hard right guests, one of whom was Avik Roy, advisor to Mitt Romney. Bill played the entirely discredited "They just send you your welfare check" ad, saying that there wasn't even a thread of truth. When he challenged his guests, saying, "Is this new, where you don't have any thread back to the truth, because Romney keeps saying it even though he's been caught in a lie." "Isn't this giving back to the states, something Republicans love?" And then he got this startling admission from Roy:
"What Sibelius did was, even though the memorandum doesn't really make that many changes, it's that she's asserting the authority that she can gut the work requirement. and that means that a future administration or maybe even the Obama administration second term can go much further and claim that they have the legal authority to undermine the work requirement."
So, there it is, a full on admission that nothing has changed. The worst Roy can say is that someday an administration might claim the authority to change the work requirement, an authority that hasn't been claimed and that would be challenged in court. Not a single media outlet picked up on this rather shocking admission.
So, essentially, of the two points around which the GOP is basing it's fall campaign, one, "We built that" is based on a willful misreading of a grammatical fussiness (won't call it error) and the other, the welfare attack, is, according to all source including the Romney campaign, a complete lie.
When does the Obama campaign get to start using the word "lie?" Is it too soon?