RomneyLYIN

The Fact-Checking Dictator’s Friend

“We’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact-checkers.” — Romney pollster Neil Newhouse, August 28, 2012.

But first, a note to our regular Orange Juice Blog readers:

Because I’m forwarding an external URL of mine — RomneyLyin.com — to this page, I’ve decided to close comments here.

I know that, if I didn’t do so, many of you who support the Romney-Ryan ticket would feel a personal moral responsibility to make unpleasant and distracting comments to negate the effectiveness of the material presented.  I want to spare you that burden.

Please direct any comments about the contents of this page to the weekly Open Thread, which you’ll find through our main site.    — Greg Diamond, Associate Editor)

(Please note: as used here, the term “lies” will include “half-truths,” “distortions,” “unfair insinuations,” and all other offenses against fairly and in good faith presenting people with the truth.)

ABOUT OUR EVIL COMPETITORS:

Several other web sites are already trying to ride the lucrative Romney-Ryan fact checking gravy train to fame.  We urge you to visit them just so that you will recognize, simply by comparison, the unquestionable superiority of this site.

♦ THE KAHUNA OF CHRONICLING LYING: Our biggest (and therefore most evil) competitor is blogger extraordinaire Steve Benen (at Rachel Maddow’s blog), who is keeping a huge weekly list of lies, misrepresentations, and flim-flammery — though even he doesn’t claim that his list is exhaustive.  Click each installment separately for your … enjoyment.  I’ll try to keep these updated as they roll out:

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.

(There will, needless to say, be some overlap between the elements of that list with what follows.  If anyone wants to help groupsource expanding and cataloguing them by category, let me know!)

♦ Romney the Liar: this site seems to be updated far too often, pretty much daily, with new Romney-Ryan lies and misrepresentations.  There’s just gobs of stuff here.  Why is the author trying so hard?  Can’t he just choose the best three or four lies and be done with it?  Can it be that he is trying to cover up quality by quantity, without sacrificing quality?  We have our suspicions, but we’ll keep monitoring the site and you should too!

♦ Sassy Sally Kohn’s takedown “in three words” of the Ryan acceptance speech from the bowels of Fox News’s own website itself.  Kohn’s reward is a link to her own personal website, from which she is not likely to be purged any day now.

♦ TheWeek.com on how journalists manage not to call lies “lies,” but rather “innacurate misleading prevarications” and such (that’s a composite paraphrase) that nevertheless surely “motivated people.”

♦ Someone from Alternet collects a bunch of lies.

♦ PolitiFact’s file on Romney-related statements.

♦ Vanity Fair‘s Kurt Eichenwald decided to write an amazing takedown of Romney and Ryan’s lies.  (Warning: long!)

ROMNEY:

♦ The site Think Progress got together for a comprehensive takedown of his convention speech.  Yikes!

♦ Romney says that Obama is trying to prevent Ohians in military service from early voting.  Nope!

♦ Romney’s audacious lie about Obama’s wefare reform: Governors (largely Republican) asked for room to innovate as they tried to move people from welfare to work, and Romney said that it was undermining welfare-to-work legislation.  (To be fair, this is perhaps not so much intended as a lie as race-baiting.  Apparently, President Obama is Black, and in the mind of some voters, an overwhelming proportion of recipients of public aid are also wrongly believed to be Black.)

RYAN:

♦ Dave Weigel of Slate notes six genera of lies from Ryan’s acceptance speech at the Republican convention:

• the one about Obama and the Janesville, Wisconsin GM plant
• the one about the stimulus
• the one about the Medicare cuts (which Ryan himself supported)
• the one about downgrading the federal government’s credit
• the one about the Simpson-Bowles commission (which Ryan was on, and whose recommendations he opposed)

♦ Ryan has not run a sub-3:00:00 marathon.  Nor has he run a sub-4:00:00 marathon.

ANN:

♦ Her father didn’t build his business himself.

♦ The “Obama wants to kill Romney” routine.

♦ To come: lots on dressage horses.

♦ David Letterman says that Ann Romney is lying about her husband shopping at Costco and wearing their house brand of shirts.  We don’t know if that’s so, but if it is so then we’re pretty sure that it’s blasphemy.

AND THEIR SUPPORTING CAST:

EASTWOOD TALKING TO EMPTY CHAIR:  Ten lies and deceptions in twelve minutes — not bad for no script!

SUNUNU LIES SHUT DOWN BY SOLEDAD O’BRIEN: Romney surrogate freaks out when confronted by acts of premedidated journalism.

STAPLES FOUNDER CAUGHT IN DAMAGING “ANTI-LIE”: Former Staples head Tom Stemberg was caught explaining that at Bain Capital Romney’s interest was in making money, not in creating jobs, which is not itself a lie but which shows that a lot of the campaign’s “job creator” rhetoric is just misleading puffery.