Ever wonder where the Baldy's and AssGreaseFan's of the world get their talking points on welfare? From fucking liars like Mitt Romney and the dorks who run his campaign.Presidential campaigns and political conventions are supposed to help voters understand how a candidate would govern. If the past few weeks are any indication, Americans can expect two things from a Mitt Romney presidency: lies and attempts to further divide a nation that already is too polarized.
Romney is running a series of ads criticizing President Barack Obama's decision to waive some requirements of the 1996 welfare reform law. The waivers give states more flexibility in how they meet the goal of getting welfare recipients back to work. But the Romney ads claim that under "Obama's plan, you wouldn't have to work and you wouldn't have to train for a job. They just send you your welfare check."
This is the opposite of the truth. The waivers were requested by five governors, including two Republicans, to increase the effectiveness of welfare-to-work programs. The Romney ads have been tagged with four Pinocchios from Washington Post fact checker Glenn Kessler and a "pants-on-fire" rating from PolitiFact. Yet the lies keep coming.
Campaigns spin all the time, but we can't recall a more baldly false claim than this one.
Why would Romney so brazenly lie to voters he hopes will trust him to lead? The simplest explanation is because he can. In our splintered media environment, it's tough for voters to keep up with every charge and countercharge. Most people don't look them up on PolitiFact.
That Obama wants to give the shiftless poor more of your hard-earned money -- is central to the Romney campaign's new strategy, analyzed by The New York Times this week. "In a marked change," the paper reported, "Mr. Romney has added a harder edge to a message that for most of this year was focused on his business and job-creation credentials, injecting volatile cultural themes into the race."
Cultural? Racial is more like it.
This helps explain why Romney made a birther joke last week in Michigan, and how he's portraying the $716 billion cut to Medicare spending in Obamacare: "The money you paid for your guaranteed health care is going to a massive new government program that is not for you," one ad says.
More than three-quarters of Medicare recipients are white, compared with less than half of those expected to be helped by Obamacare. A disproportionate share of welfare recipients is African-American. And every analysis of this race makes clear that Romney's only chance of winning is to run up his margin among white working-class voters, his strongest supporters.
So Obama's welfare and Medicare policies are portrayed as taking from hardworking Americans and giving to people of color and the poor. Lacking facts to base this on, Romney makes things up.
It is a frightening strategy at a time when Americans need more than ever to pull together.
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