Introduction by Fat Bastard
Since I, Fat Bastard do not posses the eloquence and style of Eugene Robinson all I will say is that Romney is a lying sack of shit and hen it comes to lying sacks of shit Romney wins the gold medal. Mr Robinson explain in great detail some of Romney's lies.
Romney’s pants on fire
There are those who tell the truth. There are those who distort the truth. And then there’s Mitt Romney.
Every political campaign exaggerates and dissembles. This
practice may not be admirable — it’s surely one reason so many Americans
are disenchanted with politics — but it’s something we’ve all come to
expect. Candidates claim the right to make any boast or accusation as
long as there’s a kernel of veracity in there somewhere.
Even by this lax standard, Romney too often fails. Not to put too fine a point on it, he lies. Quite a bit.
“Since
President Obama assumed office three years ago, federal spending has
accelerated at a pace without precedent in recent history,” Romney
claims on his campaign Web site. This is utterly false.
The truth is
that spending has slowed markedly under Obama.
An
analysis published last week by MarketWatch, a financial news Web site
owned by Dow Jones & Co., compared the yearly growth of federal
spending under presidents going back to Ronald Reagan. Citing figures
from the Office of Management and Budget and the Congressional Budget
Office,
MarketWatch concluded that “there has been no huge increase in spending under the current president, despite what you hear.”
Quite
the contrary: Spending has increased at a yearly rate of only 1.4
percent during Obama’s tenure, even if you include some stimulus
spending (in the 2009 fiscal year) that technically should be attributed
to President George W. Bush. This is by far the smallest — I repeat,
smallest — increase in spending of any recent president. (The Washington
Post’s
Fact Checker concluded the spending increase figure should have been 3.3 percent.)
In
Bush’s first term, by contrast, federal spending increased at an annual
rate of 7.3 percent; in his second term, the annual rise averaged 8.1
percent. Reagan comes next, in terms of profligacy, followed by George
H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton and finally Obama, the thriftiest of them all.
The MarketWatch analysis was re-analyzed by the nonpartisan watchdogs at
Politifact who found it “Mostly True”
— adding the qualifier because some of the restraint in spending under
Obama “was fueled by demands from congressional Republicans.” Duly
noted, and if Romney wants to claim credit for the GOP, he’s free to do
so. But he’s not free to say that “federal spending has accelerated”
under Obama, because any way you look at it, that’s a lie.
Another
example: Obama “went around the Middle East and apologized for
America,” Romney said in March. “You know, instead of apologizing for
America he should have stood up and said that as the president of the
United States we all take credit for the greatness of this country.”
That’s two lies for the price of one. Obama did not, in fact, go around
the Middle East, or anywhere else, apologizing for America. And he did,
on many occasions, trumpet American greatness and exceptionalism.
Romney offers few specifics, but the conservative Heritage Foundation published a list of “
Barack Obama’s Top 10 Apologies” — not one of which is an apology at all.
One
alleged instance is a speech Obama gave to the Turkish parliament in
2009, in which he said the United States “is still working through some
of our own darker periods in our history . . . [and] still
struggles with the legacies of slavery and segregation, the past
treatment of Native Americans.” If the folks at Heritage and at the
Romney campaign don’t know that this is a simple statement of fact, they
really ought to get out more.
Romney does single out the following
Obama statement
from a 2009 interview: “I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I
suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks
believe in Greek exceptionalism.”
Romney says this acknowledgment
— that others might have as much national pride as we do — means Obama
doesn’t really believe in American exceptionalism at all.
But in
the same interview, Obama went on to say he was “enormously proud of my
country and its role and history in the world,” and to tout U.S.
economic and military might as well as the nation’s “exceptional”
democratic values. So he should be accused of chest-thumping, not
groveling.
I could go on and on, from Romney’s laughable charge that Obama is guilty of “
appeasement” (ask Osama bin Laden) to claims of his
job-creating prowess at Bain Capital. He seems to believe voters are too dumb to discover what the facts really are — or too jaded to care.
On both counts, I disagree.
