I write long history books that are published with photos of presidents and presidential aspirants on the covers. Pundits-that is to say, the ones who aren’t stitched into their profession’s lunatic semiology, which holds that it’s unfair to call a Republican a liar unless you call a Democrat one too-have been hard at work analyzing what this all says about Mitt Romney’s character. Then came the Republican convention, when his designated fibbing-mate Paul Ryan packed so many lies into his charismatic introduction to the nation that a Washington Post blogger assigned by his editor to write a piece on “the true, the false, and the misleading in Ryan’s speech” could find only one entrant for the “true” section and his editor then had to concede that “even the definition of ‘true’ that we’re using is loose.” Volume XXVIII, posted early in August, listed twenty-eight separate lies. He was at Volume XXXIX as of this writing, though I’m confident several more arrived while this magazine was at the printers. (OK, I’m lying I just stopped cataloging them, out of sheer fatigue.) You can check in at MSNBC’s Maddowblog for Steve Benen’s series “Chronicling Mitt’s Mendacity” for the current tally. There are more examples, so many more, but as I started to log and taxonomize them, their sheer volume threatened to crash my computer. In 2012, for example, he said he took no more federal money for the Salt Lake City Olympic Games than previous games had taken a decade earlier, however, he called the $410 million in federal money he bagged “a huge increase over anything ever done before.” Here the dossier of Mittdacity overfloweth. Well, you know what? He did change his mind.”Īnd then there’s the most delicious kind of lie of them all, the kind that hoists the teller on his own petard as soon as a faintly curious auditor consults the record for occasions on which he’s said the opposite. There are outsourced lies, like this one from deep in my files: in 2007, Ann Romney told the right-wing site that her husband had “always personally been prolife,” though Mitt had said in his 1994 Senate race, “I believe that abortion should be safe and legal in this country.” And then Ann admitted a few sentence later, “They say he flip-flopped on abortion. There are lies, damned lies, statistics-like his assertion that his tax cut proposal won’t have any effect on the federal budget, which the Tax Policy Center called “not mathematically possible.” That frank dismissal vaulted the candidate into another category of lie, an attempt to bend time itself: Romney responded by calling that group “biased” last year, he called them “objective.” A clever bit of video editing can make it seem like Romney was enthusiastically received before the NAACP, when, in fact, he had been booed. Other Romney fabrications assert presences where there are absences. Some Romney lies posit absences where there are obviously presences: his claim, for instance, that “President Obama doesn’t have a plan” to create jobs. Romney’s lying, in fact, was so richly variegated that it can serve as a sort of grammar of mendacity. He repeats them “so often that millions of Americans believe them to be the truth.” “It is hard to challenge these lies with a well-reasoned-but- overlong speech,” they concluded and how. Romney’s entire campaign rests on a foundation of short, utterly false sound bites,” they editorialized. Romney’s lying went so over-the-top extravagant by this summer, though, that the New York Times editorial board did something probably unprecedented in their polite gray precincts: they used the L-word itself. Of course, in some sense, all politicians, even all human beings, are liars.
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