Romney Versus the Automakers and the Truth

Throughout this presidential campaign Mitt Romney's dishonesty has been shocking. Many say they have never seen a candidate so willing to lie and make up stories out of thin air.  Sadly, too often the media has aided Romney by lacking to call him what he is: a liar.  Perhaps some of Romney's most incredible lies have involved the auto industry - an industry that Romney was willing to utterly collapse and die.  As noted yesterday, both Chrysler and General Motors have felt compelled to speak out because Romney is running ads and making statements that simply are not true.  And Romney knows they are untrue.  The man simply cares nothing about the truth.  His sole values seem to be amazing more money and power for himself.  Literally not else matters, especially honesty and telling the truth.  I am honestly coming to believe the man is a sociopath.  A column in the New York Times looks at Romney's lies about the auto industry.  Here are excerpts:

When General Motors tells a presidential campaign that it is engaging in “cynical campaign politics at its worst,” that’s a pretty good signal that the campaign has crossed a red line and ought to pull back. Not Mitt Romney’s campaign. Having broadcast an outrageously deceitful ad attacking the auto bailout, the campaign ignored the howls from carmakers and came back with more. 

Mr. Romney apparently plans to end his race as he began it: playing lowest-common-denominator politics, saying anything necessary to achieve power and blithely deceiving voters desperate for clarity and truth. 

This started months ago when he realized that his very public 2008 stance against the successful and wildly popular government bailout of G.M. and Chrysler was hurting him in the valuable states of Ohio and Michigan. In February, he wrote an essay for The Detroit News calling the bailout “crony capitalism on a grand scale” because unions benefited and insisting that Detroit would have been better off to refuse federal money.

When that tactic didn’t work, he began insisting at the debates that his plan for Detroit wasn’t really that different from President Obama’s. (Except for the niggling detail of the $80 billion federal investment.) 

That was quickly discredited, so Mr. Romney began telling rallies last week that Chrysler was considering moving its production to China. Chrysler loudly denounced it as “fantasies,” saying it was only considering increasing production in China for sale in China, without moving a single American job. 

The Romney campaign ignored the company, following up with an instantly notorious ad saying President Obama “sold Chrysler to Italians who are going to build Jeeps in China.”  

Nearly 1.5 million people are working as a direct result of the bailout. Ohio’s unemployment rate is well below the national average. G.M.’s American sales continue to increase, and Chrysler said this week that its third-quarter net income rose 80 percent. These companies haven’t just bounced back from the bottom; they are accelerating. 

What Mr. Romney cannot admit is that all this is a direct result of the government investment he would have rejected. It’s bad enough to be wrong on the policy. It takes an especially dishonest candidate to simply turn up the volume on a lie and keep repeating it..  .  .  .  .  Mr. Romney is providing a grim preview of what kind of president he would be.

What I find deeply disturbing is that Romney claims to be a deeply religious man.  Yet he lies with impunity.  As with the Christofascists and the Catholic Church hierarchy, the truth simply doesn't matter.   No wonder the younger generations are fleeing organized religion in record numbers.  Increasingly, being a Christian or in Romney's case, Mormon, is synonymous with being a liar.