Romney video deceptively edits Obama speech to make it sound anti-business. Fox and CNN help spread the lie

Romney video deceptively edits Obama speech to make it sound anti-business. Fox and CNN help spread the lie

Note -- see the update at end of post, in which the Romney campaign uses astonishingly doctored audio, to make it seem as if Obama said something he never said.

Early in this campaign the Romney team put out an ad with a doctored Obama quote. Now Romney is again claiming Obama said things he never said. The billionaire-corporate-funded right-wing media machine drives the lie to millions. This might well work, which brings up a question: If someone gets into office based on lies, what kind of policies result? Those policies help the people pushing the lies, but do those policies help or hurt us in the real world in the long run?
The Lie The First Time

In November the Romney campaign was caught editing a quote in an ad [1] to make it sound like Obama had said something he never said. The ad portrayed Obama as saying, "If we keep talking about the economy, we're going to lose," when Obama had really said (four years previously), "Senator McCain's campaign actually said, and I quote, 'If we keep talking about the economy, we're going to lose."

The Romney campaign defended this use of lies, saying they are just showing they are willing to do what it takes to win. The Boston Globe reported [2], "Romney aides even said they were proud of the reaction and suggested that the ad was deliberately misleading to garner attention."

At the time Thomas B Edsall wrote in the NY Times [3],

    "...the spot’s direct duplicity is also the latest step in the transgression by political operatives of formerly agreed-upon ethical boundaries. What was once considered sleazy becomes the norm."

    And so the sleazy became the norm for the Romney campaign.

The Lie This Time

The sleazy became the norm, so they're cranking it up. This time, the lie machine is telling people [4] that President Obama said that business owners didn't build their businesses, government did. What President Obama actually said was that businesses did not build the roads and bridges that help them get their products to markets:

    Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business -- you didn’t build that.

The billionaire-corporate lie machine version? Heritage Foundation [5]: Obama Tells Entrepreneurs "You Didn't Build" Your Business.

Watch the beginning of this FOX News segment, note how the editing actually shows Obama's mouth moving, before they bring the sound up partway through what he is saying, then listen to the commentators as they pretend this is what Obama actually said. (Of course they know this is not what he actually said, which makes the performance so shocking.)

The lie is propelled through the right-wing media: FOX News, Wall Street Journal and other Murdoch-owned papers, Limbaugh and the rest of talk radio, Washington Times, Weekly Standard, NewsMax, WorldNet Daily, hundreds of right-wing blogs, etc., and then posted by paid operatives as "reader comments" at local news sites, hundreds of sports and auto and other discussion forums, and many, many other places until it "becomes truth."

Watch the kind of crap that much of the public is hearing from almost every media source many of them are exposed to. Seriously, make yourself watch the whole thing, and then think about how many people watch FOX News or listen to talk radio or read the Wall Street Journal or one of the other newspapers that pushes this stuff, or read right-wing blogs -- and even CNN [6]. There is a huge corporate-billionaire-funded media machine pushing this stuff, and it seems it is almost everywhere now.
VIDEOS are at THE TOP LINK.

And then, once it "becomes truth" the Presidential candidate repeats it. WaPo: Romney Hits 'Didn't Build That' Obama Remark [7]

Romney: "I’m convinced he wants Americans to be ashamed of success … [but] I don’t want government to take credit for what individuals accomplish” ...

FOX News dedicated [8] 2 hours, 42 segments, to pushing the lie. CNN even helped [6] push the lie.

So, once again, the lie machine is working to "kinda catapult the propaganda."

....The Plum Line: The Morning Plum: Romney video deceptively edits Obama speech to make it sound anti-business [21],

    So here’s where this is going. The Romney campaign is out with a new Web video hitting Obama over the “don’t build that” quote. It features a business owner who is angry at Obama for supposedly insulting his hard work. “My hands didn’t build this company?” the man asks. “Through hard work and a little bit of luck, we built this business. Why are you demonizing us for it?”

    But the video deceptively edits Obama’s remarks to seamlessly link up two different parts of the speech, removing a chunk in order to make Obama’s remarks seem far worse than they are.


What Did He Really Say?

President Obama pointed out that businesses did not build the roads and bridges that help them get their products to markets. He said that in the United States we succeed together. Here is the full quote:

    There are a lot of wealthy, successful Americans who agree with me -- because they want to give something back. They know they didn’t -- look, if you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own. You didn’t get there on your own. I’m always struck by people who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart. There are a lot of smart people out there. It must be because I worked harder than everybody else. Let me tell you something -- there are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there. (Applause.)

    If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business -- you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen. The Internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet.

    The point is, is that when we succeed, we succeed because of our individual initiative, but also because we do things together. There are some things, just like fighting fires, we don’t do on our own. I mean, imagine if everybody had their own fire service. That would be a hard way to organize fighting fires.

Conservatives want to portray themselves as the comic book outer space heroes of business - they created everything on their own in a vacuum - no one built roads or bridges they used, o one provided fire and police protection. No one provided military protection so they could ship their goods or provide services around the world. They are desperate to twist the truth to suit the same radical agenda that caused the Great Recession and spent over a trillion dollars rebuilding Iraq, but fought against rebuilding America.

REPORT: Bottom Half Of American Households Have Just 1 Percent Of Nation’s Wealth. Mitt Romney and the leaching plutocrats at the top say they are "successful". Sure they are in the same way vampires are successful, like bloodsuckers on the working class.

Remember back in the good old days when honesty and integrity were values. Conservative Republicans wipe their bottoms with those old fashioned American values, REPORT: Fox News Spends Two-Plus Hours Distorting Obama's Small Business Comments .

Despite Having a Democrat in the White House We Already have a Mitt Romney Economy

Despite Having a Democrat in the White House We Already have a Mitt Romney Economy

What should be done about the economy? Republicans claim to have the answer: slash spending and cut taxes. What they hope voters won’t notice is that that’s precisely the policy we’ve been following the past couple of years. Never mind the Democrat in the White House; for all practical purposes, this is already the economic policy of Republican dreams.

So the Republican electoral strategy is, in effect, a gigantic con game: it depends on convincing voters that the bad economy is the result of big-spending policies that President Obama hasn’t followed (in large part because the G.O.P. wouldn’t let him), and that our woes can be cured by pursuing more of the same policies that have already failed.

For some reason, however, neither the press nor Mr. Obama’s political team has done a very good job of exposing the con.

"... for all practical purposes this is already a Republican economy."

What do I mean by saying that this is already a Republican economy? Look first at total government spending — federal, state and local. Adjusted for population growth and inflation, such spending has recently been falling at a rate not seen since the demobilization that followed the Korean War.

How is that possible? Isn’t Mr. Obama a big spender? Actually, no; there was a brief burst of spending in late 2009 and early 2010 as the stimulus kicked in, but that boost is long behind us. Since then it has been all downhill. Cash-strapped state and local governments have laid off teachers, firefighters and police officers; meanwhile, unemployment benefits have been trailing off even though unemployment remains extremely high.

Over all, the picture for America in 2012 bears a stunning resemblance to the great mistake of 1937, when F.D.R. prematurely slashed spending, sending the U.S. economy — which had actually been recovering fairly fast until that point — into the second leg of the Great Depression. In F.D.R.’s case, however, this was an unforced error, since he had a solidly Democratic Congress. In President Obama’s case, much though not all of the responsibility for the policy wrong turn lies with a completely obstructionist Republican majority in the House.

That same obstructionist House majority effectively blackmailed the president into continuing all the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy, so that federal taxes as a share of G.D.P. are near historic lows — much lower, in particular, than at any point during Ronald Reagan’s presidency.

As I said, for all practical purposes this is already a Republican economy.

As an aside, I think it’s worth pointing out that although the economy’s performance has been disappointing, to say the least, none of the disasters Republicans predicted have come to pass. Remember all those assertions that budget deficits would lead to soaring interest rates? Well, U.S. borrowing costs have just hit a record low. And remember those dire warnings about inflation and the “debasement” of the dollar? Well, inflation remains low, and the dollar has been stronger than it was in the Bush years.

Put it this way: Republicans have been warning that we were about to turn into Greece because President Obama was doing too much to boost the economy; Keynesian economists like myself warned that we were, on the contrary, at risk of turning into Japan because he was doing too little. And Japanification it is, except with a level of misery the Japanese never had to endure.

So why don’t voters know any of this?

Part of the answer is that far too much economic reporting is still of the he-said, she-said variety, with dueling quotes from hired guns on either side. But it’s also true that the Obama team has consistently failed to highlight Republican obstruction, perhaps out of a fear of seeming weak. Instead, the president’s advisers keep turning to happy talk, seizing on a few months’ good economic news as proof that their policies are working — and then ending up looking foolish when the numbers turn down again. Remarkably, they’ve made this mistake three times in a row: in 2010, 2011 and now once again.

At this point, however, Mr. Obama and his political team don’t seem to have much choice. They can point with pride to some big economic achievements, above all the successful rescue of the auto industry, which is responsible for a large part of whatever job growth we are managing to get. But they’re not going to be able to sell a narrative of overall economic success. Their best bet, surely, is to do a Harry Truman, to run against the “do-nothing” Republican Congress that has, in reality, blocked proposals — for tax cuts as well as more spending — that would have made 2012 a much better year than it’s turning out to be.

For that, in the end, is the best argument against Republicans’ claims that they can fix the economy. The fact is that we have already seen the Republican economic future — and it doesn’t work.

by Paul Krugman. Reprinted for educational purposes.

There is no economic historical record that links unemployment with deficits. It is more conservative voodoo economics to say that deficits cost jobs - especially when the economy for working class Americans is practically at a stand still. Could Obama have done more. Even though conservatives hold a minority in the Senate ( they are the majority in the House) conservatives threaten to filibuster every jobs bill - they have killed at least four. Romney's answer to the problem is to make the middle-class and blue collar workers pay more taxes and have lower safety net benefits  - which will crate more poverty - as he cuts taxes for the wealthy. If low taxes created jobs we'd be at 1% unemployment.

5 Facts About The Massachusetts Economy Under Mitt Romney. If you threw a pebble into a crowd it would likely hit someone who is a better job creator than Romney.

Mitt Romney is an Anti-American Vulture, Not a Capitalist

Romney is an Anti-American Vulture, Not a Capitalist, Why Mitt Romney’s Time At Bain Capital Matters

As we discussed yesterday, Mitt Romney’s tenure at Bain Capital is once again back in the news — big time. As President Obama said, this is not a distraction, it’s central to the main question of this campaign: do we create an economy that works for everyone, not just the wealthy few, or, do we double down on an economy where the game is rigged for the rich at the expense of the middle class?

It’s also not a distraction because Mitt Romney himself has made his business experience the centerpiece of his campaign, saying just today that “of course” he welcomes a discussion of his record at Bain Capital.

Here’s the rundown on Mitt Romney’s time at Bain Capital — and why it still matters today.

Jobs

While running Bain Capital, whose investments he still profits from to this day, Mitt Romney amassed a quarter-billion dollar fortune by bankrupting companies, laying off thousands of American workers, closing factories and sending jobs overseas.  As experts on the private equity industry and even his own former Bain colleagues openly admit, Romney’s job was not to create jobs, it was to create wealth for himself and other investors.

Romney and his campaign have made a wide variety of claims regarding how many jobs he created while at Bain: thousands, tens of thousands, 100,000, and even “well in excess of 100,000.” Neither Romney nor Bain has offered any proof to substantiate any of these claims and multiple independent fact checkers have concluded that Romney’s claims on job creation at Bain are simply false.

The most important job for our next president is to create jobs and get the economy moving faster. When asked today to predict the unemployment rate under a Romney presidency, he predicted that it would be 6 percent at the end of his first term in 2016 — which is exactly where economists predict it will be anyway.

A Rigged Game

One of the reasons Romney has been able to amass such an immense fortune is because he’s been able to take advantage of a tax code that is rigged to favor the wealthy few. He pays a lower tax rate than millions of middle class workers because of a variety of loopholes and giveaways, including one major loophole available only to private equity and hedge fund managers like himself and his partners at Bain Capital.

The Safety Net

While at Bain Capital, Romney left thousands of workers without  jobs, health insurance, or the pensions they’d been promised.

In order to partially offset the cost of his giveaways to the very wealthy, Romney slashes Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and vital programs that benefit the middle class every day and are the key to economic growth.  Earlier this year, Romney famously said that he’s “not concerned about the very poor,” which is reflected in his support for a budget that would throw 13 million people off food stamps and 1 million off Pell grants.

Jobs Here or Jobs Overseas?

Under Romney’s leadership, both Bain Capital and his administration in Massachusetts sent jobs overseas.  Now, Romney has signed a pledge to protect all tax giveaways, including those that reward companies who ship jobs overseas.

President Obama, by contrast, has put ending those tax giveaways in order to pay for rewarding companies who bring jobs back to the U.S. on the to-do list he recently submitted to Congress.

IN ONE SENTENCE: Mitt Romney’s past at Bain Capital was the prologue to a presidential campaign based on policies that will benefit the very wealthiest Americans at the expense of the middle class.

Do you believe in fairness? Do you believe that people should do work to earn their money? Do you believe that having great ideas like a cure for heart disease or a new energy saving refrigerator should be rewarded? Do you believe that is how capitalism should work. Then you cannot support Mitt Romney or the kind of back door crony vulture capitalism that Romney represents.Romney and like minded conservatives swoop down on the capital created by the work of others and exploits that for profit. For a short film on how the crony corrupt capitalism of Mitt Romney works see here -  How Did Mitt Romney Get So Obscenely Rich?

How Wealthy Americans and Wealthy Corporations Betray Their Country

How Wealthy Americans and Wealthy Corporations Betray Their Country

The betrayals come in many forms. Here are a few of the more outrageous, and destructive, examples:

Evasion: Corporations suddenly stopped meeting their tax responsibilities

While corporate profits have doubled to $1.9 trillion in less than ten years, the corporate income tax rate, which for thirty years hovered around the 20-25% level, suddenly dropped to 10% after the recession. It has remained there for three years.

We are seeing a manifestation of the Shock Doctrine. Corporations are using the national emergency of the financial collapse to make a statement about taxes, and a traumatized nation is too preoccupied to do anything about it.

Delusion: Technology companies won't admit that much of their 'innovation' is due to public assistance

According to the report Funding a Revolution, government provided almost half of basic research funds into the 1980s. Federal funding still accounted for half of research in the communications industry as late as 1990. Even today, the federal government supports about 60 percent of the research performed at universities.

Apple's first computer was introduced in the late 1970s. Apple still does most of its product and research development in the United States, with US-educated engineers and computer scientists.

Google's business is based on the Internet, which started as ARPANET, the Defense Department's Advanced Research Projects Agency computer network from the 1960s. The National Science Foundation funded the Digital Library Initiative research at Stanford University that was adopted as the Google model.

Apple got its tax bill down to 9.8% last year. About 2/3 of its profits remain overseas for tax avoidance purposes. Google, like Apple, avoids taxes by moving most of its foreign profits through Ireland and the Netherlands to Bermuda. Both Apple and Google, along with Microsoft and Cisco, are lobbying for a repatriation tax holiday to allow billions of overseas dollars to come home at a greatly reduced tax rate.

An Apple executive said: "We don't have an obligation to solve America's problems." That may be true, but they do have an obligation to pay the taxes that help America solve its problems.

Desertion: The people who benefit most from government are renouncing their citizenships to avoid taxes

Perhaps the ultimate insult to America is to just quit on your country after making a fortune off of it. In 2011 almost 1,800 Americans gave up their citizenship to avoid taxes.

The wealthy benefit disproportionately from property and inheritance laws, contracts, stock exchanges, favorable SEC regulations, the Small Business Administration, patent and copyright and intellectual property laws, estate planning, trust funds, Internet marketing, communications infrastructure, highway maintenance, air traffic control, local and national security, and 60 years of research in technology and other industries.

A recent outrageous example is Facebook part-owner Eduardo Saverin, whose family came to America from Brazil partly for safety reasons, and who happened to land Mark Zuckerberg as a roommate at Harvard. Now after falling into billions, he's decided to renounce his U.S. citizenship to avoid taxes.

Denial: Traders feel it's inappropriate to pay even a tiny tax on a quadrillion dollars in sales

A quadrillion dollars sounds like a fake amount. But it's all too real. That's a thousand trillion dollars of derivatives transactions which, along with the high-frequency computer-generated transactions (5,000 per second) that make up over half of U.S. stock trades, contributed to a financial meltdown and a $3 trillion bailout for reckless trading.

But there's no tax on these transactions.

While average Americans pay a 10% sales tax on necessities, millionaire investors pay just a .00002% SEC fee (2 cents for every thousand dollars) for a financial instrument. And their supporters claim, inexplicably after the disastrous trading frenzy in 2008, that a tax would increase volatility.

Illusion: The media leads us to believe we should all be cheering when the stock market is booming

Conservatives insultingly assure us that the "democratization of stock ownership" is gradually making America more equal, as evidenced by the flattening of wealth ownership among the richest 1% in recent years. So we should all be excited about a rising stock market.

Here are the facts. Data from Edward Wolff confirms that from 1983 to 2007 the percentages of net worth and financial wealth for the top 1% remained steady. But the percentages for the rest of the richest 5% increased by almost 20%, while the percentages for the lowest 80% of the population DECREASED by almost 20%.

In other words, the share of wealth owned by the top 1% leveled off because the "democratization of stock ownership" spread the wealth among just 5% of the population, those earning an average of $500,000 per year. A few people -- 5 out of 100 -- got very rich, but everyone else lost ground.

Conclusion

The issues are difficult to address with Congress largely on the side of the wealthy. At the very least:

(1) Eliminate the tax break on unearned income (capital gains). The richest Americans, who own most of the stocks, should not pay a smaller tax than everyone else.

(2) Implement a small financial transactions tax. It would be easy to administer on computer trades, it would generate hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue, and it would help guard against the reckless speculation that devastated the financial markets and our country.
Paul Buchheit

Paul Buchheit is a college teacher, an active member of US Uncut Chicago, founder and developer of social justice and educational websites (UsAgainstGreed.org, PayUpNow.org, RappingHistory.org),

Conservatives and even some Democrats want everyone to believe that it is low income to lower-middle-class Americans who are the leaches. On the contrary the biggest recipients of welfare are those making the most money. Not all millionaires -many of whom would be happy to pay more taxes. 

Mitt Romney, Very Bad Book Reviewer. Romney scores an F in reading comprehension and analysis.


CNN's Campbell Brown is an incompetent partisan hack. 

When Did Conservatives Exploit Terrorist Deaths For Partisan Political Gain

When Did Conservatives Exploit Terrorist Deaths For Partisan Political Gain

Perusing the political media these days you can't help but notice the hand-wringing consensus that the Obama administration is running a risk by "politicizing" the death of Osama bin Laden. Foreign policy achievements, we're told, are somehow sacrosanct and shouldn't be sullied by the taint of electioneering.

The president, according to McClatchy, is in "a roiling dispute between his re-election campaign and Republicans, who accuse Obama of politicizing a unifying event by taking credit for ordering the raid that got bin Laden." The ever-eager Fox News reports that "President Obama faced mounting criticism Tuesday for allegedly politicizing the anniversary of Usama bin Laden's death, with Sen. John McCain scolding the commander-in-chief and former New York Gov. George Pataki going so far as to call on Obama to apologize."

It would be nice if the press, when wrestling with this narrative, could dive deep into their memories and travel all the way back to June 2006, when the government of Iraq announced that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the head of Al Qaeda in Iraq, had been killed in an airstrike. The Bush White House and the Republican Congressional majority, facing terrible poll numbers and an angry electorate, were ecstatic at the news that one of the world's most wanted terrorists had met his end at American hands and immediately set to work politicizing his death.

The New York Times reported on June 13, 2006:

    It came as Republicans began a new effort to use last week's events to turn the war to their political advantage after months of anxiety, and to sharpen attacks against Democrats. On Monday night, the president's top political strategist, Karl Rove, told supporters in New Hampshire that if the Democrats had their way, Iraq would fall to terrorists and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi would not have been killed.

    "When it gets tough, and when it gets difficult, they fall back on that party's old pattern of cutting and running," Mr. Rove said at a state Republican Party gathering in Manchester.

Rove (who is now busily and dishonestly trying to diminish the Bin Laden raid) was delivering a message that synced nicely with the House Republican strategy (elucidated in a confidential memo prepared by John Boehner) to use Zarqawi's death to draw "a portrait of contrasts between Republicans and Democrats with regard to one of the most important political issues of our era."

Per the memo:

    As a result of our efforts during this debate, Americans will recognize that on the issue of national security, they have a clear choice between a Republican Party aware of the stakes and dedicated to victory, versus a Democrat Party without a coherent national security policy that sheepishly dismisses the challenges America faces in a post- 9/11 world.

Of course, even if there were no high-profile example of Republicans "spiking the football" over the death of a terrorist, are we really to believe they wouldn't have done exactly that had he been killed under Bush's watch?

So please: before we lend credence to all the pearl-clutching bluster over "politicizing" the death of a terrorist, let's pay due respect to recent history and common sense.

Conservatives lied us into Iraq as a way to promote the conservative movement. They lied about connections between Iraq and Bin Laden. Conservatives exploited terrorism at the 2004 RNC conventions - as this video clearly shows. Conservatives have no shame and no honor when it comes to doing whatever they can to unjustly promote themselves, lie to the American people and trash the economy in their spare time. Conservatives are the enemy within. Everyday doing whatever they can to make America and Democracy weaker.

Romney Wrote NYT Op-Ed Entitled "Let Detroit go bankrupt." Now Claims Auto Industry Reorganization by Government Was His Idea

John McCain still whining about 'politicizing' Mitt Romney's opposition to bin Laden raid strategy. Of course McCain's personal war experiences were awful, yet he has exploited them for political gain at every opportunity.

Paul Ryan(R-WI) has a pleasant personality - that does not mean he should get away with being a fanatic. One who would gut Medicare and increase the deficit.


Michelle Malkin hates women. Hates equal pay for women who do the same work as men. Hates that women should not be discriminated against for health insurance. Malkin basically hates every democratic ideal America stands for.

Conservative Misogynist Donald Trump Hosts Birthday Fundraiser For Ann Romney

Conservative Misogynist Donald Trump Hosts Birthday Fundraiser For Ann Romney

Last week, Ann Romney became her husband’s point-person on the so-called “war on women” when she accused Democrats of not valuing the work of stay-at-home moms and went after CNN contributor Hilary Rosen (who is not an Obama adviser, but is a CAPAF board member) for saying that she hadn’t worked outside of the domestic sphere. The campaign went into overdrive trying to paint all Democrats as insensitive to women who choose to raise their children, only to admit hours later that Mrs. Romney saw the barb as a political “gift” she could exploit in order to help Mr. Romney close his widening gap among women voters.

This afternoon, just five days after the “controversy,” the Romneys will be participating in a special birthday fundraiser at the home of top campaign surrogate Donald Trump, further eroding their credibility in the “war on women.” Trump, after all, has a long history of misogynistic rhetoric and behavior that is far more offensive than even the least generous interpretations of Rosen’s comments. Below are Trump’s most sexist comments:

    1. “I think [Attorney] Gloria [Allred] would be very very impressed with [my penis].” [2012]

    2. “[Rosie O'Donnell is] not a smart person,” “a stone cold loser,” “a bully” “a slob,” “disgusting,” “an animal” and a “very unattractive woman both inside and out.” [ 2007]

    3. “[Angelina Jolie's] been with so many guys she makes me look like a baby, OK, with the other side. And, I just don’t even find her attractive.” [2006]

    4. “You know, it doesn’t really matter what [the media] write as long as you’ve got a young and beautiful piece of [expletive].” [1991]

    5. “Well, you know ‘The National Enquirer’ did a story they said, ‘Who’s had more supermodels than any man ever in history?’ ‘Let’s name ‘em, let’s each of us name ‘em’ ‘I’ve had a lot of them, I’ll tell you that.” [2011]

    6. “All of the women on ‘The Apprentice’ flirted with me- consciously or unconsciously. That’s to be expected.” [ 2011 ]

    7. “I think the only difference between me and the other candidates is that I’m more honest and my women are more beautiful.” [ 2000]

The birthday luncheon has already netted over $600,000 for the Romney campaign, a Trump spokesman tells CBS News, and the campaign has asked the businessman to “host a similar fundraiser when Romney secures the Republican presidential nomination.” “[T]ickets to that event would sell for $50,000 and 50 donors have already expressed interest in attending.”

Conservatives have been so successful on dumping down what makes a good or smart citizen that we have Donald Trump on TV. Seemingly everyday day pontificating on whatever. If Donald had started out in life as a poor child in a poor family he would never had had the intelligence to rise by way of actual merit. In other words, like Mitt and Ann Romney, he is a perfect conservative.

Potential VP Candidate South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley (R) Can Darn Well Mangle The Truth As Well as Anyone

Hannity Dredges Up Fabricated Link Between Former Education Department Official Kevin Jennings And NAMBLA. Hannity is always ready to give us examples of conservative values - values that only a cockroach could embrace.

What Will It Take For The Press To Call Out Romney and Conservatives for Lying About Obama and Israel

What liberal media? What Will It Take For The Press To Call Out Romney and Conservatives for Lying About Obama and Israel

Two days ago, Barack Obama went before AIPAC (which is commonly known as "the Israel Lobby" but would be better understood as the Likud lobby, since it advocates not Israel's interests per se but the perspective of the right wing of Israeli politics, but that's a topic for another day), and said, among other things, the following:

    "I have said that when it comes to preventing Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon, I will take no options off the table, and I mean what I say. That includes all elements of American power: A political effort aimed at isolating Iran; a diplomatic effort to sustain our coalition and ensure that the Iranian program is monitored; an economic effort that imposes crippling sanctions; and, yes, a military effort to be prepared for any contingency. Iran’s leaders should understand that I do not have a policy of containment; I have a policy to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon. And as I have made clear time and again during the course of my presidency, I will not hesitate to use force when it is necessary to defend the United States and its interests."

This didn't surprise anyone, because it's the same thing Obama has been saying for a while, in scripted and unscripted remarks alike, in both speeches and interviews. Yet later that day, Mitt Romney went out and said the following:

    "This is a president who has failed to put in place crippling sanctions against Iran. He's also failed to communicate that military options are on the table and in fact in our hand, and that it's unacceptable to America for Iran to have a nuclear weapon."

So here's my question: Just what will it take for reporters to start writing about the question of whether Mitt Romney is, deep within his heart, a liar?

Because he does this kind of thing frequently, very frequently. Sometimes the lies he tells are about himself (often when he's trying to explain away things he has said or done in the past if today they displease his party's base, as he's now doing with his prior support for an individual mandate for health insurance), but most often it's Barack Obama he lies about. And I use the word "lie" very purposefully. There are lots of things Romney says about Obama that are distortions, just plain ridiculous, or unfalsifiable but obviously false, as when he often climbs into Obama's head to tell you what Obama really desires, like turning America into a militarily weak, economically crippled shadow of Europe (not the actual Europe, but Europe as conservatives imagine it to be, which is something like Poland circa 1978). But there are other occasions, like this one, where Romney simply lies, plainly and obviously. In this case, there are only two possibilities for Romney's statement: Either he knew what Obama has said on this topic and decided he'd just lie about it, or he didn't know what Obama has said, but decided he'd just make up something about what Obama said regardless of whether it was true. In either case, he was lying.

The "Who is he, really?" question is one that consumes campaign coverage, but in Romney's case the question has been about phoniness, not dishonesty, and the two are very different things. What that means is that when Romney makes a statement like this one, reporters don't run to their laptops to write stories that begin, "Raising new questions about his candor, today Mitt Romney falsely accused President Obama..." The result is that he gets a pass: there's no punishment for lying, because reporters hear the lie and decide that there are other, more important things to write about.

To get a sense of what it's like when reporters are on the lookout for lies, remember what Al Gore went through in 2000. To take just one story, when Gore jokingly told a union audience that as a baby his parents would rock him to sleep to the strains of "Look for the Union Label," everyone in attendance laughed, but reporters shouted "To the Internet!" and discovered that the song wasn't written until Gore was an adult. They then wrote entire stories about the remark, with those "Raising new questions..." ledes, barely entertaining the possibility that Gore was joking. Why not? Because it was Al Gore, and they all knew he was a liar, so obviously if he said something that wasn't literally true it could only have been an intentional falsehood.

That is not yet the presumption when it comes to Mitt Romney. There's another factor at play as well, which is that reporters, for reasons I've never completely understood, consider it a greater sin to lie about yourself, particularly about your personal life, than to lie about your opponent or about policy (I wrote about the different kinds of lies and how the press treats them differently here). Because Romney is lying about his opponent and about a policy matter, reporters just aren't as interested. But at some point, these things begin to pile up, and they really ought to start asking whether this dishonesty is something fundamental in Romney's character that might be worth exploring.

One reason the media will not call conservatives liars is because conservatives have been pretty good at intimidating the press. So much so the media in general, even when they know Romney or Gingrich or Santorum or Ron Paul are lying they report it as conservatives say the earth is flat but others disagree. Some facts are not open to disagreement, they are facts, the earth is not flat no matter how often conservatives claim otherwise.