The Difference Between Embellishing the Truth and Lying

by Dee Newman

Dissembling attack ads have always been apart of political campaigns. All political candidates are guilty of distorting their opponent’s record.

Political attacks ads, some of which have been malicious and slanderous, including accusations of pimping, adultery, miscegenation and bestiality, inform our nation’s history. More often than not, their use has provoked vicious counter attacks – some even violent. In 1804 Aaron Burr was the sitting vice president of the United States when he shot and killed Alexander Hamilton in a duel.

I cannot deny that the Obama campaign has engaged in its own share of dissembling. It has. But their efforts to exploit Romney’s flip-flopping and his positions on taxes (including his own), abortion and foreign affairs do not come close to Romney’s lies and his campaign’s fundamental contempt for the truth.

Mr. Romney’s outlandish fabrications and accusations have been qualitatively far worse than President Obama embellishments: from his nefarious charge that the President participated in a Middle East “apology tour” to his fraudulent claim that Obamacare is a “government takeover of healthcare,” from his false allegation that the President gutted welfare-to-work rules to his baseless assertion that Obama’s auto bailout is responsible for Chrysler shipping jobs from Ohio to China.

It is clear that the Romney campaign believes that facts can be ignored with impunity. As Romney’s pollsters Neil Newhouse said, “We’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact checkers.”

Unfortunately, our press has for sometime chosen to be merely stenographers not journalists, reporting all accusations and assertions as equally valid. Nevertheless, I believe that the majority of voters (though slim) will rebuff Romney’s lies and his contemptuous manipulations.

It is though beyond my comprehension that today as I write this nearly half of the electorate will vote against their own interests for yet another lying Republican plutocrat who made hundreds of millions of dollars by using other people’s money to buy and sell other peoples businesses, and who (along with his rich plutocrat buddies) helped wrecked the nation’s economy and send us to the brink of another Great Depression.