It’s been a while since I linked to a Steve Benen post about the Mendacity of Mittens, but here is a recent one. See also David Bernstein and Paul Waldman.
So, yes, the GOP field is a pack of mutts, but possibly the most bizarre behavior of the lot of them, which is saying something, is Mitt’s lying. Yeah, politicians lie, but not like this. They spin, they stretch, they take stuff out of context. Romney just makes it up.
Bernstein writes,
I think we’ve seen, over the past couple of months, an important tipping point where much of the national political media now recognizes — as the McCain team did during that January 2008 St. A’s debate — that, in the Romney campaign, they are dealing with something unlike the normal spin and hyperbole. They are realizing that Romney and his campaign simply cannot be trusted, in any way, about anything.
They are also coming to realize just how carefully controlling Romney is about the media, how little access and information the media will get from the candidate and the campaign, and how hostile Romney is toward them.
And Waldman says,
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 narrative the Press has been going by is that Ron Paul is a flake, Noot and Frothy are bomb-throwing clowns, and Mittens is the relatively “normal” one. But the truth is Mittens may be the sickest one of all.