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Saturday, June 23, 2012

The main tool being used by Romney, Republicans, Faux News, and right wing talk radio is the  LIE!!!!  To lie is the raison d'etre for Rush Limbaugh, the head of the Republican party.  Because this faction cannot tolerate having a black man as President, there is an urgency that he be replaced to restore the hegemony of white nationalism.  With its adherents having mainly a Southern base, the legacy of white supremacy remains a salient force.   The National Rifle Association provides a cloak for the most hyperbolic and violent of this faction.  To facilitate this agenda, this extreme agenda, conservatives must lie.  

The Obama presidency represents an attempt at fairness.  Fairness is a fundamental American value.  White nationalism is not about fairness. White nationalism is about maintaining white domination.  Having a black man as president represents a challenge to white nationalist hegemony.  Gaining back a white leader must be done by any means necessary, including lying. Like Limbaugh, to turn reality on its head, requires a lie.  Reason is not likely to be sufficient.  Rationality does not inspire passion, racist lies do!

Unfortunately, the issue on lying about Obama is not just about Romney, the person.   The Republican right wing has been on this white nationalist campaign against Obama throughout his presidency.   From Joe Wilson's "you lie" to Mitch McConnell's vow to make Obama a one term President,  lying about Obama has been central to their narrative.   The article below by Michael Cohen spells out Romney's use of the lie in his bid to defeat President Barack Obama.  RGN

Romney's Bid to Become Liar-in-Chief

By Michael Cohen, Guardian UK
22 June 12

our years ago, when I was writing about the 2008 presidential campaign, I wrote with dismay and surprise at the spate of falsehoods coming out of John McCain's campaign for president. McCain had falsely accused his opponent Barack Obama of supporting "comprehensive sex education" for children, and of wanting to raise taxes on the middle class, while his running mate, Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, took credit for opposing the so-called "Bridge to Nowhere", which she had actually supported.
At the time, such false and misleading claims from a presidential candidate seemed shocking: they crossed an unstated line in American politics – going from the usual garden-variety campaign exaggeration to wilful lying.
Ah, those were the days … after watching Mitt Romney run for president the past few months, he makes John McCain look like George Washington (of "I Can't Tell A Lie" fame).
Granted, presidential candidates are no strangers to disingenuous or overstated claims; it's pretty much endemic to the business. But Romney is doing something very different and far more pernicious. Quite simply, the United States has never been witness to a presidential candidate, in modern American history, who lies as frequently, as flagrantly and as brazenly as Mitt Romney.
Now, in general, those of us in the pundit class are really not supposed to accuse politicians of lying – they mislead, they embellish, they mischaracterize, etc. Indeed, there is natural tendency for nominally objective reporters, in particular, to stay away from loaded terms such as lying. Which is precisely why Romney's repeated lies are so effective. In fact, lying is really the only appropriate word to use here, because, well, Romney lies a lot. But that's a criticism you're only likely to hear from partisans.
My personal favorite in Romney's cavalcade of untruths is his repeated assertion that President Obama has apologized for America. In his book, appropriately titled "No Apologies", Romney argues the following:
"Never before in American history has its president gone before so many foreign audiences to apologize for so many American misdeeds, both real and imagined. It is his way of signaling to foreign countries and foreign leaders that their dislike for America is something he understands and that is, at least in part, understandable."
Nothing about this sentence is true.
President Obama never went around the world and apologized for America – and yet, even after multiple news organizations have pointed out this is a "pants on fire" lie, Romney keeps making it. Indeed, the "Obama apology tour", along with the president bowing down to the King of Saudi Arabia, are practically the lodestars of the GOP's criticism of Obama's foreign policy performance (the Saudi thing isn't true either).
But foreign policy is a relatively light area of mistruth for the GOP standard-bearer. The economy is really where the truth takes its greatest vacation in Romney world. First, there is Romney's claim that the 2009 stimulus passed by Congress and signed by President Obama "didn't work". According to Romney, "that stimulus didn't put more private-sector people to work." While one can quibble over whether the stimulus went far enough, the idea that it didn't create private-sector jobs has no relationship to reality. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the stimulus bill created more than 3m jobs – a view shared by 80% of economists polled by the Chicago Booth School of Business (only 4% disagree).