Consortium News / By William Boardman (Originally published Sept. 6, 2012)

Fact-checking Campaign 2012 has become more than a fulltime job, but one danger is to apply false equivalence as fact-checkers protect their “credibility” by blaming both sides equally. That ignores the fact that some people lie more than others and some of the lies are bigger.

One reason lying apparently works in politics is that so many people are content to tell themselves that “everybody does it.” This illusion may be comforting, but it’s also a self-deceptive evasion of harder truth: the scale and frequency of lies matter, and everybody doesn’t lie on the same scale or at the same rate.

To take a relatively small example, Clint Eastwood asserted in passing, without elaboration in his talk-to-the-empty-chair at the Republican National Convention, that “there are 23 million unemployed people in this country.” That is simply false. There have never been 23 million unemployed people in this country. In the worst year of the Great Depression, 1933, there were 12.8 million people unemployedand the unemployment rate was 24.9 per cent.

When a Hollywood actor is wrong in a political speech, the stakes are relatively low. But the Romney campaign defended Eastwood’s 23 million figure by re-inventing what he said to include part-time workers, the so-called “underemployed.”

That’s an indirect way of admitting Eastwood was wrong, of course, and meets the low expectations so many people have of political campaigns. Unfortunately, most of the “fact checkers” out there used the same forgiving analysis that only blurs reality.   [Read more…]

90 Day, 90 Reasons / By Patton Oswalt (Orginally appeared Sept. 6, 2012)

Romney is money’s bitch. He’s ambition’s bitch. He’s success’s bitch and he’s victory’s bitch. And, like those particular sort of pampered dogs you see in the laps of the very rich, he yaps and snaps and snarls at the everyday mutt. He’s frightened and confused by a dog who’s happy to treasure the sunshine and play with the other dogs and eat enough food to fill its belly and lap enough water to slake its thirst and then get out of the way for the other dogs to have their turn. Romney’s been trained since birth that not only are there No Other Dogs But Him And His Ilk, but that dogs who don’t aspire to immobility on a fat lap are to be snarled at, chased away, and bred out of existence.

In 2010 and 2011, Mitt and Ann paid $6.2 million in federal tax on $42.5 million in income (get away from my food!!!) for an average tax rate just shy of 15 percent (get away from my water!!!), substantially less than what most middle-income Americans pay (yapyapyapyap!!!)

He’s curled up so snugly and safely in the lap of wealth that he’s never once bolted and gallivanted and lived in the world. The freedom’s there, but he’d rather put more diamond studs, more trinkets and jewels, and more frills and feathers on his too-tight collar, and double-check that his leash is double-clasped to it, never to come loose.   [Read more…]