Political blogger Steve Benen has been posting weekly listings of false statements from Mitt Romney for more than three months and they’re worth reading. Benen isn’t a neutral observer (nor am I, for that matter), but his criticisms are valid. Pretty much all politicians of both parties lie, but Romney lies with remarkable frequency–far more, for example, than John McCain, the last Republican presidential candidate, though perhaps not as much as his running mate.
Benen’s latest post on the subject catalogs these falsehoods from Romney and his campaign, complete with links to detailed explanations:
- Claiming–again–that President Obama has “apologized for America,” which is simply not true.
- Suggesting, according to the campaign, that college tuition costs are going up because “this president decided to take over the student loan market,” which is both untrue (the only change in the loan market is that taxpayers will no longer pick up the tab for new private college loans) and makes no actual sense
- Erroneously contending that under Obama, “the number of new business start-ups per year has dropped by 100,000 per year.”
- Saying that he, Romney, wants to help “the mom and dad who never thought they’d be on food stamps” and “grandparents who can’t afford the gas to visit their grandchildren,” while neglecting to mention that he supports a budget plan that drastically cuts food stamps, supports turning Medicare into a voucher program that would come nowhere near paying the cost of private insurance, and opposes current improvements in Medicare Part D that phase out the so-called “donut hole.”
- Hysterically claiming that “Obamacare” will put the government in control of “half the economy” and that under Obama “we will have effectively ceased to be a free enterprise society.”
- Claiming that he will address the national debt despite policies calling for even more massive tax cuts for the rich that will explode the debt even more (as similar cuts did under Reagan and both Bushes, we might recall).
And there’s more, including statements from the Romney campaign that one might charitably allow aren’t actual lies as such, but sure are misleading.
(Updated to make it clear that the supposed link between tuition increases and student loans was an assertion of the Romney campaign rather than the candidate himself, and that there has not been a “takeover” of student loans.)
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