I love some conservatives--starting with my spouse of 30 years. I attend a very conservative church with her, and thus have known many conservatives for decades.
As a group they are personally honest and forthright. (As are the liberals I know, for that matter.) My spouse is almost physically incapable of telling a lie.
Yet my conservative friends all staunchly support Mitt Romney, who, unlike the conservatives I know, is a serial liar, a knowing liar, a liar about important things, and a liar who constantly impeaches the President's personal character, violating the Ten Commandments rule "Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor."
I am not talking about matters of opinion or differences in political philosophy. Nor am I claiming that President Obama always tells the truth. He does not, as is true of most successful politicians, I am claiming that the sheer volume and severity of Romney's lie-a-thon is an order of magnitude worse
Factcheck.org and Politifact.com support this claim. They ding both regularly, and both are intelligent men who know better--and Romney is waaay out in front.
I'm also not talking about what their surrogates and allies say. I'm talking about what Romney and Obama themselves say. And I'm talking about what Romney continues to say even when he's been refuted. He appears to be constitutionally incapable of admitting his mistakes. This makes him morally inferior to even John Edwards, who today took the blame for his personal failings.
Today Rachel Maddow, who conservatives despise because she mocks them (just as they despise Lawrence O'Donnell because he rails against them...well, actually they despise anyone who disagrees with them--even fellow conservatives who fail to toe the Tea Party line)...today Rachel Maddow pointed out that Romney's own website still includes his first campaign ad, which directly lied by quoting President Obama as saying something he flat out didn't say by editing a speech in which Obama quoted John McCain--editing it to make it seem like Obama was saying himself what he was quoting.
This was disproven the day the ad came out. Yet it's still up there, unchanged, and Romney states that he stands by everything he's said--something like a claim of Papal infallibility.
And today Mitt Romney stood in front of Solyndra's shuttered doors and stated the baldfaced lie that President Obama has been awarding aid to friends and family to Solyndra and other companies. This repeats a lie a right wing author/demagogue made which had been debunked before this day, definitively. Romney is also sidestepping the fact that, as Maddow points out, Romney awarded millions of dollars in contracts to high tech startups (some of which failed like Solyndra) when he was Governor of Massachusetts.
To top it off, he also stated that he sent his goons to an Obama campaign event to drown out speaker David Axelrod with constant loud chanting and blowing vuvuzuela (the South African one-note horn that bedevils soccer matches).
In every case Romney's defense is the non sequitur "What's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander." He has been heckled by liberals but Obama has never sent a goon squad to drown him out.
I don't accept the excuse that this is all just politics and what do I expect--they're all liars. That's simple-minded. There are big differences here. Don't let conservatives off the hook when they start spouting bromides about politics all being a dirty business.
What this all tells me is that Romney is not actually a conservative. He doesn't behave in the morally upstanding manner the conservatives I know do. And he doesn't seem to believe in the conservative cause, because if he did he'd tell the truth and not resort to constant lying.
He's a liar. It's not just what he does. It's who he is. I bet he's honest with personal friends and family, and just compartmentalizes his public behavior, excusing it with some kind of it's all a big game analogy in his head. Not, I hope, telling himself that the end justifies the means. Because I've been listening to Mormons in church nearly every Sunday for 27 years, and they've consistently said the exact opposite. Which also means he isn't a Mormon. At least not when it comes to politics.
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1 comment:
Now you've done it. You've officially stepped over the line.
This last article tells all who would read it who and what you are.
It says that you have officially given up any hope of an Obama second term, and are now flailing in bitterness, willing to say anything... piteous.
Anyone would assume that an article that repeats the word 'liar' endlessly would have actual documentation of some actual lies.
You appear to come from the school of thought that if you repeat something often enough, it becomes true.
You forget that the one or two people who read your stuff are educated adults looking for balanced discourse, such that they are no longer finding here.
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