Posted by AzBlueMeanie:
Time once again for Steve Benen's weekly fact check of the shameless shapeshifter and pathological liar, Willard "Mittens" Romney. "What a long strange trip it's been," as the Grateful Dead once observed. Chronicling Mitt's Mendacity, Vol. XLI:
In a way, I blame my friend Greg Sargent. In the first week in
January, he noted, almost in passing, that Mitt Romney seemed to be
making a lot of false claims, and someone "really should document them all." That struck me as a good idea, so I decided to tackle this on my own.
After
all, I thought at the time, how hard could this be? Once a week, I'd
let readers know about Romney's whoppers, which I assumed would total
about a half-dozen a week, and maybe after the election, I'd do a top 20
list of my favorites. The project would be a nice little
Friday-afternoon feature.
Little did I know at the time that
Romney would become an ambitious prevaricator, whose rhetoric would come
to define post-truth politics. Nearly 11 months after Greg Sargent's
harmless suggestion, I've published 40 installments in this series,
which, before today, featured 884 falsehoods. (If you include today's
edition, the new total is 917 falsehoods for the year.)
I wish that were a typo. It's not.
The
outcome of next week's election remains in doubt, but regardless of who
wins, I suspect this will be the final edition in the series. If
President Obama wins, the project will have run its course. If Romney
wins, I rather doubt I'll be able to keep this going every week for four
years. So, with that in mind, enjoy the 41st and probably final
installment of my weekly series, chronicling Mitt's mendacity.
1.
At a campaign event yesterday in Roanoke, Virginia, Romney again
suggested the president is to blame for the fact that "gasoline prices"
have "gone up."
This is wildly misleading.
It's true that when Obama took office, gas cost about $1.81 a gallon,
and it's more than double now. And how did gas prices get so low in
late 2008 and early 2009? Because there was a global economic
catastrophe — gas was cheap because the economy had fallen off a
cliff, and demand crawled to a stop. As the economy improved, demand
went up, and the price of gas started climbing. It's Economics 101.
2.
In the same speech, Romney said he should be elected in order to
prevent "four more years of trillion dollar deficits in Washington."
According to the budget plan Romney endorsed, we'll have four more years of trillion dollar deficits in Washington anyway.
3. Romney added he has a "five-point plan … that'll get this economy going."
The
five-point plan — oil drilling, trade, privatizing K-12 education,
vague assertions about debt reduction, and ambiguous promises about
doing nice things for small businesses — is a rehash of Bush/Cheney promises. No credible analysis of the vague agenda has found it capable of boosting the economy.
Continue reading Chronicling Mitt's Mendacity, Vol. XLI.
Previous editions of Chronicling Mitt's Mendacity: Vol. I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX, X, XI, XII,XIII, XIV, XV, XVI, XVII, XVIII, XIX, XX, XXI, XXII, XXIII, XXIV, XXV, XXVI, XXVII, XXVIII, XXIX, XXX, XXXI, XXXII, XXXIII, XXXIV, XXXV, XXXVI, XXXVII, XXXVIII, XXXIX, XL