"Mitt Romney’s casual, effortless falsehoods" - We need more focus on Mitt as Con Man, Liar, Fraud.

Mitt Romney’s casual, effortless falsehoods

By Greg Sargent

One of the more remarkable things about Mitt Romney’s falsehoods is how casual they are. I’m not talking about the big Romney lies (Obama apologized for America; Obama made the economy worse; etc.). Rather, I’m talking about the small, almost inconquential falsehoods that slide out of Romney, day in and day out, as smoothly as a puck on an air hockey table.

Here, for instance, is Romney hitting back at Newt Gingrich’s recent criticism of the layoffs that occured on Romney’s watch at Bain Capital:

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Yet Romney, in a clearly calculated rebuttal, deftly slipped in the idea that Gingrich had called his Bain actions “un-American.”

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I continue to maintain that Romney’s ability to lie, dissemble, distort and equivocate so effortlessly is a far more important story — and is far more telling about his character — than any $10,000 bet.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/post/mitt-romneys-casual-effortess-falsehoods/2011/12/14/gIQAYXS0tO_blog.html

Two Candidates

Jonathan Chait: "The robotic consistency of Romney's newfound conservatism does contrast sharply with Gingrich, who lurches between hysterical right-wing paranoia and bouts of bipartisanship. And yet the erratic character of Gingrich's swings suggests that they're unplanned, and thus that they spring from actual conviction, albeit momentary convictions. Gingrich actually believes what he is advocating at the moment he is advocating it. Nobody can plausibly say the same of Romney."

"Romney is the handsome swindler who plots to win your mother's heart and make off with her fortune. Gingrich is like the husband who periodically gets drunk and runs off to spend a week with a stripper in a low-rent motel but always comes home in the end. Which one would you rather see your mother marry?"

http://politicalwire.com/archives/2011/12/14/two_candidates.html

Romney’s Eerie Post-Flip-Flop Consistency

By Jonathan Chait

When Mitt Romney decided to get Republican ideological-purity cautionary tale and non-witch Christine O’Donnell to announce her endorsement of him, he was probably thinking about how useful it would be to have the support of another staunch conservative. He may not have been thinking about some of the secondary issues involved in this plan, such as the fact that it would require O’Donnell to talk, which would involve her saying awkward things like, “he’s been consistent since he changed his mind.”

The line actually gets to the nub of the conservative question on Romney. Since he changed his mind, he has indeed been dogmatically consistent. (In contrast to Newt Gingrich.) But why?

One of the most revealing stories I’ve seen on Romney was written by Jonathan Weisman last month in The Wall Street Journal. In it, Weisman chronicles the degree to which Romney simply flipped a switch in 2005, deciding virtually overnight to stop courting moderates and liberals he needed to get elected in Massachusetts and to start courting the right. The switch occurred across the board, on social as well as economic issues:

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The positive interpretation of this narrative, if you’re a conservative, is that Romney will stay bought — he decided to ingratiate himself with the right, and he needs to retain the right's support to accomplish anything. That’s more or less the argument Ramesh Ponnuru made in his National Review cover story endorsing him. The negative interpretation is that Romney is essentially running a con, though it’s impossible to tell if he was conning Massachusetts then or is conning Republicans now. (My guess, based on Romney’s admiration for his moderate father, is that he’s conning conservatives now, but I can’t really be certain.) When you’re running a con, of course you stay consistent – you have to keep up the front, no matter what.

http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2011/12/romneys-eerie-post-flip-flop-consistency.html