Mitt Romney is the most blatant and openly brazen liar that I've ever seen run for US President as the standard bearer of the Republican Party in the post 1964 Movement Conservative era.
That's not hyperbole, snark, boilerplate, or even a bit of good old fashioned rhetorical red meat. I'm being as serious as I have ever been on this blog. Mitt Romney is like a living paradigm shift. The 21rst century codswallop equivalent of watching a runner pace a stunning two minute mile.
He lies with the kind of sheer breathtaking abandon usually reserved for con artists, sociopaths, and spoiled rotten children who have just recently discovered the deep primal joy of successful parental misdirection. Mitt Romney will even go so far as to lie about utterly superficial niggling little things that he simply just does not have to lie about. Not at all. The mundane things, the unimportant details, the dry facts, and the inconsequential meh-bleh bits of a day-to-day life.
Very rarely do you find a man who will tell you something so often that he becomes famous for saying it, and then deny bitterly that he ever said anything remotely like what you are claiming was said by him at all. Ever. A true five tool player of falsehood. The Alex Rodriguez of bullshit.
And America's Political Weather Vane is not just merely getting away with it, but he is actually managing to get less and less scutiny and more and more room to operate the worse he gets.
What makes this all so particularly amazing, utterly gobsmacking really, is that it is 2012. This latest maddening de-evolution and enabled bar-lowering of the status-quo for the Republican nominee for President, from having to rely on dog whistles, double-talk, and pretending to be more moderate, sane, and measured in his thinking than he actually is to get elected, to his just being free to openly make shit up as he goes along without fear, is all happening in 2012.
After:
Iran-Contra. Arms for Hostages. The Arkansas Project. Travelgate. Troopergate. Clinton "a drug dealer". Chelsea Clinton was "the product of Rape". Clinton "had both Brown and Foster Murdered". The GOP-led U.S. Government Shut-Down. The Clinton Impeachment. Coverage of the Gore campaign vs. the coverage of the Bush campaign. Minority Voters Purged in Ohio. Minority Voters Purged in Florida. Florida 2000. The Brooks Brothers Riot. The Supreme Court fix in for Bush. The Iraq War being planned long before 9/11 attacks. The entire run-up of lies to the Iraq War. No-bid contracts for post-war reconstruction lavished on GOP donors/insiders. No plans for an insurgency in Iraq. Firing the Iraqi Army. Swiftboaters. Blackwater Mecenaries Killing Innocent Iraqi civilians. Billions simply missing due to Widespread Corruption and Incompetence in Iraq. Billions vanish due to the funds being transported wrapped on pallets. Additional Billions lost due to continuing post-war reconstruction contracting fraud. Totally unqualified hack Young Republicans "consulting" and "supervising" governance in Iraq. Abu Graib. Rendition. Secret Prisons. Waterboarding. Jack Abramoff. Domestic surveilance. Lobbyists writing regulations, and then appointed as regulators. Katrina. FEMA. Heck of a Job Brownie.
But setting all of those earthquake moments that should have long ago shaken any such free pass aside, along with tacking on fictional "Death" panels, patently bogus charges of Socialism, Communism, Atheism, and Birtherism to the mix. Just as a thought experiment. Pretending that all of that awful bullshit never happened and only one conservative, or conservatism enabled, calamity of many in my lifetime had been the only one to go down.
After this:
Conservative Economics and Policies leading to a lack of regulation and oversight that led to a historic house of cards implosion of the financial fraud factory that ended up nearly destroying the US economy and plunging the entire world into a second Great Depression.
Mitt Romney is more openly running on lies, and is more free to do so, than any other previous Republican Presidential candidate in modern American history even after all that being written as the GOP's track record on the national ledger. It's like waking up in a world gone mad where being a registered sex offender is not just okay, but actually the highest qualification you can have to secure employment as the only adult overseer in a daycare center.
No Romney version of "Kinder and Gentler America" or "a Thousand Points of Light". No Romney comp of W's trite "Compassionate Conservatism". No Dog Whistle. No Beards. No Kabuki Willard Bait and Switch. Just what should be a steady stream of easily debunked falsehoods and a side of disasterously failed policies, basically ignored. This might just be the most starkly black and white national election, in every sense, we have ever seen in our lives. Usually, the GOP is all about muddying the waters. Creating just enough doubt to get them to %50.1.
Not these days.
Now, they can just lie like there is no such thing as a lie.
I would argue, strongly in fact, that Mitt Romney really could not have run for President lying so blatantly and so often this way, even as a Republican candidate in a national election, just four short years ago. He could lie, and still distort the Democratic candidate's record, but not like this. Not doing what he's been doing over the last few weeks and months. He says something, and the next day denies he said what you have him on tape saying the other day. I've seen him stump where literally everything that he says is some degree of being demonstrably false other than "Hello", "Good Morning", "Good Evening", or "Good Night".
It's been a pretty breathtaking display, and I've been a political junkie watching the elite of our traditional media gleefully dole out free handjobs and full-on happy endings that require almost an entire box of wetnaps post mortem to the GOP elite and their rabble alike for decades.
So I ask the question:
What is to be gained, at this point, by not taking a much, much harder line with the traditional news media? How else do you establish that the 'liberal media' canard is a total canard without taking the risk of challenging it in the most aggressive way possible? What could they possibly do that they are not already doing to good Democrats in terms of false equivalency and looking the other way like a corrupt cop paid to pretend to walk a vital beat in a very dangerous set of mean streets for the poor and middle class alike thanks to the Movement Conservative Right?
Instead of the Village, maybe it's time we should just start calling them PolitiFact Nation.
Because, in many ways, the site PolitiFacts is the perfect metaphor for how things have just gotten worse since the last great bar lowering for the benefit of the Right. Now the traditional media has gone from merely pushing false equivalencies, carrying the GOP's water, and mugging Democrats in general for things they ignore or spin away when it's a Republican doing the deed, A.K.A. IOKIYAR, to finding ways to frame a lie as something other than a lie, less than the lie it is if you will, when it is not trying to spin the lie as a kind of semi-truth to the truth outright.