Mitt Romney’s Campaign Insults and Deceive Voters

Living in Virginia which is being blanketed with campaign ads, I want to scream at times.  Especially when I hear Romney ads.  As I've noted before, I've been active in politics for a long, long time (I was on the GOP City Committee in Virginia Beach for 8 years quite a few years ago) and never in my recollection have I seen a campaign as blatantly dishonest and untruthful as that of Mitt Romney.  Worse yet are the Crossroads GPS ads orchestrated by nasty, sleazy Karl Rove.  They are simply devoid of truth.  There was a time when the Republican Party stood for integrity and some level of honesty.  Those days are clearly gone.  Today's Romney/Rove campaign tactics make the tawdriest whore look like a paragon of honesty and virtue.  Indeed, they make me ashamed to every have been a Republican.  It its main editorial yesterday, the Washington Post vented on Romney's lies and deceptions.  It is worth a full read.  Here are excerpts:

THROUGH ALL THE flip-flops, there has been one consistency in the campaign of Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney: a contempt for the electorate.  How else to explain his refusal to disclose essential information? Defying recent bipartisan tradition, he failed to release the names of his bundlers — the high rollers who collected hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations. He never provided sufficient tax returns to show voters how he became rich.

How, other than an assumption that voters are too dim to remember what Mr. Romney has said across the years and months, to account for his breathtaking ideological shifts? He was a friend of immigrants, then a scourge of immigrants, then again a friend. He was a Kissingerian foreign policy realist, then a McCain-like hawk, then a purveyor of peace. He pioneered Obamacare, he detested Obamacare, then he found elements in it to cherish. Assault weapons were bad, then good. Abortion was okay, then bad. Climate change was an urgent problem; then, not so much. Hurricane cleanup was a job for the states, until it was once again a job for the feds.

The same presumption of gullibility has infused his misleading commercials (see: Jeep jobs to China) and his refusal to lay out an agenda.

And then there has been his chronic, baldly dishonest defense of mathematically impossible budget proposals. He promised to cut income tax rates without exploding the deficit or tilting the tax code toward the rich — but he refused to say how he could bring that off. When challenged, he cited “studies” that he maintained proved him right. But the studies were a mix of rhetoric, unrealistic growth projections and more serious economics that actually proved him wrong.

This last is important — maybe the crux of the next four years. History has shown that it’s a lot easier to cut taxes than to reduce spending.

Now Mr. Romney promises to reduce income tax rates by one-fifth — for the rich, that means from 35 percent to 28 percent — and to raise defense spending while balancing the budget. To do so, he would reduce other spending — unspecified — and take away deductions — unspecified. One of the studies he cited, by Harvard economist Martin Feldstein, said Mr. Romney could make the tax math work by depriving every household earning $100,000 or more of all of its charitable deductions, mortgage-interest deductions and deductions for state and local income taxes.  Does Mr. Romney favor ending those popular tax breaks? He won’t say.

Mr. Obama has a record; voters know his priorities. His budget plan is inadequate, but it wouldn’t make things worse.   Mr. Romney, by contrast, seems to be betting that voters have no memories, poor arithmetic skills and a general inability to look behind the curtain. We hope the results Tuesday prove him wrong.