Wednesday, September 26, 2012

Team Romney can't find examples of fact-challenged ads the candidate says have been fixed

Mitt Romney's new sloga, Lying about lying. Evan McMorris Santoro takes note that, in an interview with CNN Tuesday, Mitt Romney claimed "that when things are wrong in his ads, his campaign fixes them." But neither he nor his campaign staff could come up with an example after the interview.
'We stand by our ads because they are accurate,' Romney spokesperson Ryan Williams said. 'The Obama Campaign stands by their ads even though President Obama admits that some of them contain mistakes and go 'overboard.'' [...]

'We've been absolutely spot-on,' Romney said. 'And any time there's anything that's been amiss, we correct it or remove it.'

If I could get as much strenuous exercise as the Romney campaign has given my guffaw gland this year, I'd be in the running for the Senior Olympics. Every time the GOP candidate generates another whopper, I figure this has to be the one that takes the cake. And then I remember that the campaign has another five-plus weeks to run. What is really likely to happen in that time is the Romney staff will engage in its usual m.o. and resurrect some of its months-old claims and pass them off in ads, once again, as accurate representations, completely ignoring that they have been deeply debunked. They count on memories being short and most voters not catching on.

Team Romney could, of course, come up with some examples of bogus advertising it has fixed if it actually fixed some. Not to mention some of the concocted statements that never make it to ads but "go viral" anyway.

For instance, the campaign could walk back its ludicrous claim that "redistribution" has "never been a characteristic of America" as part of its attack on Barack Obama for supporting "redistribution." In fact, just when the tax system alone is taken into account, "redistribution" has been going on since colonial times.

Romney and campaign staffers could offer an example of a correction made if they cut a commercial admitting that the "you didn't build it" theme which formed the centerpiece of the Republican Convention was a lie built on a highly edited version of President Obama's remarks.

Or they could correct and apologize for Romney's effort to paint Obama as a wimp with the bullshit claim that President Obama's term "began with an apology tour" around the world.

There are plenty of examples of ads and statements about his opponent that are "amiss" in the Romney campaign. The only way for the candidate to legitimately claim these have been corrected is to start actually, like, you know, correcting them. Until then, he's even lying about not lying.


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