MoveOn.org - fast and loose with the facts, again!
You might have seen this new video MoveOn.org published recently. As is the norm for them, it is difficult to find anything in their publications that even remotely resembles the truth. The best they can do is project their own strategies onto the Republicans or quote people out of context. There is so much wrong with this video, it is difficult to know where to start. I must say that I am in one fashion impressed with the video, though. The amount of falsehoods, misrepresentations and out of context quotes packed into a mere 4 minutes is downright Orwellian.
But, since a friend of the liberal persuasion asked me, no, challenged me, to do just that, I'll start with a point by point rundown of the claims made in the MoveOn.org video. I'm sure that I'll miss some, but no doubt someone will point out my oversights.
The first thing I will address is the comment regarding Romney's background: "Did anybody even vet this guy?"
WHAT?!?! LOL! From Obama backers? I couldn't stop laughing at that one for a while. Are these people even aware that Obama has released virtually none of his records and of the few he has released, most of them have been declared forgeries by qualified document forensic analysts? Of those that have not been demonstrated to be fakes, most of them are contradicted by each other or by documents the Obama machine could not completely eradicate, like his book blurb. Even the pictures put forth by the Obama machine have been discredited, like the one where his mother has a black hand, or the one where Obama is wearing a wedding ring in 1983 (he married Michelle in 1992, nine years later). All those documents and pictures do is lend support to the claims that his birth certificate is a forgery.
Romney, on the other hand, has published many of his personal documents. That is why the Obama machine is targeting the tax returns. They don't have anything else to go after that might be useful. Obama has never had a particularly complicated financial situation. It's certain to be easy for the Obama machine to pick some specific point and present it out of context with the complexity Romney's tax records are likely to present. And, of course, since nobody has legal access to Romney's tax records, it's easy for Reid and Pelosi, as surrogates of the Obama campaign, to insinuate or outright declare anything they want to regarding them. Of course, Reid has not released his own income tax returns.
Next up is the "corporations are people" out-of-context quote. When Romney said that he intended to convey the fact that people own corporations, and making corporations pay taxes is just making those people who own the corporation pay more taxes - which get passed on to the consumers of what ever that corporation makes. Corporations are not faceless inanimate objects, they are jobs, incomes, products, services and a host of other things to their employees, owners, customers and vendors. Make an oil company pay more taxes? You are just making gas more expensive. Make a pharmaceuticals corporation pay more taxes? You just made medicine cost more. Pass laws or create regulations to prevent those price increases? You just put those companies out of business. Since a lot of those companies are components in IRAs and pensions, you just screwed a lot of people. Really, where does it stop?
If corporations are 'not people' then what are they, exactly? They are property of people. So when you make the corporation pay taxes and then the owners pay additional taxes, you are taxing those people twice. That seems fair, especially since we already have the highest corporate taxes in the developed world... Right.
Then we have the Romney family dog strapped to the roof of the car. He was in a carrier. Dogs ride in carriers inside vehicles. Dogs love to have the breeze flapping their ears and nose and their tongues, too, with as much of their bodies as possible stuffed into however much you dared to roll down the window. Dogs ride in the beds of pickup trucks all the time, too. Based on my experience and observations of my family's dogs (gasp! profiling!), including one Irish Setter, I am inclined to accept Anne Romney's claim that the dog liked it. So far, I haven't seen any evidence that the Romneys actually ate the family dog, like Obama did.
Next we hear that Romney has refused to release more than two years of his records. I believe I covered that more generally in the 'vetting' section, but why should Romney release any records when Obama has released virtually none of his own?
Next up is the charge that Romney parks his money in offshore accounts. Lots of rich people do, especially when they can't make as much investing here, like they want to. Kennedy (yes, I know he's dead), multiple time Presidential Candidate did. DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman-Schultz has offshore investments. Should we even talk about tax cheat John Kerry? Nancy Pelosi has offshore money, too, along with many of her co-hypocrites and invested in one of the companies they are trying to bash Romney over with regard to outsourcing jobs. Obama would have them, no doubt, if he'd ever had a high paying private sector job or an inheritance. There are numerous tax cheats in the Obama administration, so he ought to know what he's talking about - or having his surrogates talk about. It's all just a distraction to keep you from talking about the jobs crisis.
Now we get to the conspiracy theories. The 'three prong GOP plan' to elect Mitt Romney. First of all, is there some reason that the GOP should not be planning to get Romney into the White House? No? So it must be a matter of methods.
Prong one: Sabotage the economy and blame Obama.
The Republicans don't need to sabotage the economy, Obama is doing fine on his own. Job creation is stagnant - or worse - because of the uncertainty of the cost of doing business that exists. This doesn't just affect existing businesses, it affects people trying to start businesses, and the most significant factor in job creation is not the size of the business so much as the age of it. The younger the business the more jobs it creates. There is also a high correlation between size and age, which has led to the belief that it is the small companies, and as far as tax policy goes, it works out pretty much the same way. If nobody is starting businesses, they are not creating those jobs. If they aren't sure they can afford the overhead of even the employees they already have, they aren't hiring more, and especially with the larger companies, may need to cut staff in order to afford the rest. And no raises. Companies are also spending money - some - on equipment that will replace current or potential new employees just like they did during the last major downturn.
The idea that 'the federal government is starving the states of funding' might be arguable if there was a budget, but now, as for the last three years, there isn't one. The House has passed budgets with some Democrat support but the Senate rejected them, the Obama administration has submitted three budgets which all failed to get any votes at all, and the Democrat controlled Senate has done... nothing. Right now the federal government is just spending willy-nilly and it's already a catastrophe. And the 'debt ceiling debacle'? We got our credit rating downgraded because of our fiscal recklessness. We didn't have to raise the debt ceiling, but Obama insisted. Blaming that on some GOP conspiracy is just insane.
Mitch McConnell vowing to make Obama a one term President as his most important goal was also presented out of context. Here is the complete quote:
âWell that is true, [making Obama a one-term President is] my single most important political goal along with every active Republican in the country. But thatâs in 2012. Our biggest goal for this year is to get this country straightened out, and you canât get this country straightened out if we donât do something about spending, about deficit, about debt and get this economy moving again. So, our goal is to have a robust vibrant economy that will benefit all Americans, and thatâs why I think this debate that weâre having right now is so important to our countryâs future.â
Exactly the opposite of what the video claims.
The claim that people blame Obama more for the struggling economy over 'Wall Street, Congress or even George W. Bush' might be true, but the underlying claim that the crash was caused by Wall Street, Congress or Bush has some serious holes in it. The struggling economy is the direct consequence of the mortgage crisis, and that was engineered by Barney Frank and Chris Dodd. Simply, Frank and Dodd created a situation that forced banks to make high risk loans. A large number of these loans went bad - after being bundled and sold overseas in many cases - causing the mortgage bubble created by easy loans to burst. Housing market crashed. Then Dodd and Frank (again) authored some legislation in the Democrat controlled congress that was supposed to help the situation but really just made it a lot worse. Meanwhile, the market crash also wreaked economic havoc in Europe, where many of those bundled toxic assets had gone, and their economic troubles bounced back to us for the double-whammy.
Prong two: Round up a bunch of rich one-percenters to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on misleading ads.
Obama got more wall street donations last election cycle than John McCain and now he's whining because he pissed off or scared a bunch of them into giving to Romney's campaign? Whiny crybaby. Obama's continual reliance on criminals supporting his campaigns should bother you more. It was okay for Obama to expect to spend 1 billion, but now it's wrong for Romney. And the claim that Romney would be beholden to his big corporate donors is ridiculous, or perhaps it means that Obama is beholden to his big donors, such as SEIU President (former) Andy Stern who visited the White House some 53 times. Then there are some other big donors to Obama, who only got about the same amount of small donations (under $200) as Bush did in 2004. So who is misleading who?
Prong Three: Â An unprecedented voter suppression campaign.
This one is particularly offensive, considering that the Obama campaign is actively trying to suppress military votes in swing states as part of his reelection strategy, along with a campaign to enable massive voter fraud. Meanwhile, attempts to remove ineligible voters (cartoon characters, pets, felons, non-citizens and dead people, constituencies that vote overwhelmingly Democrat) from the rolls are denounced as vote suppression. Why is this? Because Democrats can't win some states without massive fraud. Requiring someone to provide an ID in order to vote is also not voter suppression. Some places will provide you with transportation in order for you to get an ID if you don't already have one and don't have the means to get to where you can get one. Oh, and it's free in many places.
On top of that, the hypocrisy of Michelle Obama requiring photo IDs in order to attend her book signings - presumably people who are going to vote for her husband - and Eric Holder, who describes voter IDs as racist, yet required them for his own speech to the NAACPÂ is boundless.
In Pennsylvania, the House Majority Leader, Mike Turzai said "voter ID, which is going to allow Governor Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania" - not "give" the state to Romney. This statement was also taken out of context, that being that Pennsylvania has had a vote fraud problem which has given the state to the Democrats and would not 'allow' a fair election. But this video distorts that context to imply Republican fraud.
And, of course, the race card is played repeatedly. The classic liberal acknowledgement that they don't actually have the issues on their side.
"Let's just call it what it is. A racist strategy to stop voters that they think are statistically inclined to vote for Obama. And Mitt Romney is right in lock-step with that plan."
Finally(!), in their closing comments they said:
"The next President could fill three Supreme Court Justice seats. This election is about a whole lot more than Obama versus Romney. It's about the soul and direction of our country for the next 50 years."
They got that much right, but that's about it.
