Posted by AzBlueMeanie:
We have incontrovertibly established that Willard 'Mittens' Romney is a pathological liar with the weekly "Fact checking the mendacity of Mittens" series via Steve Benen.
We have also established that the Romney campaign admittedly is engaging in a textbook case of psychological projection. Willard 'Mittens' Romney: 'I'm rubber, you're glue'.
Now the Romney campaign is descending into obsession. For the Romney campaign, time began with the inauguration of Barack Obama on January 20, 2009. All of human history which preceded President Obama's inauguration is irrelevant. Barack Obama is the source of all our woes, and he is not worthy of any praise for anything good that has occurred during his term.
Romney spokesman Eric Fehrnstrom presented the new argument at a campaign stop in Ohio Last week:
"The fact that [the economy] struggled through the last three years is not the fault of Barack Obama's predecessor; it's the fault of this administration and the failure of their policies to really get this economy going again."
Ed Kilgore writes at the Political Animal blog, “Obama Isn’t Working”:
By now you’ve probably heard about the Romney campaign’s big slogan for the 2012 campaign, at least at this point: “Obama Isn’t Working.” When I first heard about it, I immediately flashed back to a moment early in the movie Sid and Nancy, when in the background of one gritty London scene you could see a poster reading: “Labour Isn’t Working,” the big Tory slogan in the general election of 1979 (unfortunatey for the credibility of the filmmakers, Nancy Spungeon’s death, the dramatic fulcrum of the movie, actually occurred in 1978).
And indeed, the official explanation for the slogan posted last year on the Romney campaign website explicitly cites the 1979 Tory campaign as its inspiration, touting the professional awards won by the consultants who devised it.
So now we're recycling old British Tory campaigns? How very "European" of Mittens. (A charge he frequently levels against Obama -- more projection). More importantly, it is without any foundation in fact.
Economists of all stripes agree that The Bush Years Were a Lost Decade. Romney has surrounded himself with George W. Bush advisors and appointees, and promises to return to Bush economics on steroids. I consider that a threat to our national security and economic well-being. As I said in the above post:
[T]he next time you hear a Republican or Conservative say that they want to "take back our country" and to return to conservative "free market" and "supply-side" economic policies which created the worst economic catastrophe since the Great Depression, realize that they are ideologues or insane. These are not the kind of people whom anyone should take seriously or ever entrust with our government and the economy ever again.
Republicans and Conservatives should be exiled to wander in the political wilderness for generations to come for the damage they have done.
As for the Obama economic policies "not working," while the economy has not recovered as fast as anyone would like to see due to the fact "that Republicans in the Congress have done everything in their power to either obstruct or water down any stimulus or efforts to get Americans back to work" (h/t crooksandliars.com), since the enactment of the Obama "economic stimulus" plan, the private sector economy has grown for 25 consecutive months.
Public sector employment has been a drag on the economy only because of the "austerity" budget cutting measures of GOP dominated state legislatures. Daily Kos: States cut their way to ... increased unemployment. But in "Romney World," these Tea-Publicans are blameless -- it is all President Obama's fault.
"Not working"? I post the job numbers every month. March job numbers: In like a lion, out like a lamb:
The overall economy has now added over 1.9 million jobs over the last year, and nearly 3.5 million jobs over the last three years. For America's private sector, it's 2.2 million over the last year, and 4 million over the last three years.
Here's another chart, this one showing monthly job losses/gains in just the private sector since the start of the Great Recession.
So let's review: The Bush Years Were a Lost Decade, but the Obama years have created 4 million jobs over the past three years. But according to the Romney campaign, the Bush Great Recession that President Obama inherited, which was the result of faith based supply-side "trickle down" GOP economics, was not the fault of George W. Bush and Republicans, but rather is exclusively the fault of Barack Obama since his inauguration on January 20, 2009. And those 4 million jobs created in the past three years? President Obama is not worthy of any praise for anything good that has occurred during his term. This is insanity.
But there is something even more nefarious at work here with the "Obama isn't working" campaign theme of the Romney campaign. Ed Kilgore explains:
[Y]ou don’t have to be especially cynical (or partisan, for that matter) to suspect that this slogan has a slightly different connotation when applied to Barack Obama as opposed to former British Prime Minister “Sunny Jim” Callaghan. At Mediaite, columnist Tommy Christopher suggests the Romney slogan is a “multiple entendre,” but that it’s very difficult to deny that one of its layered “meanings” is to evoke the stereotype of the lazy black man:
Just to be sure it wasn’t just me, though, I asked several friends about the banner, and four out of four pointed out, unprompted, the stereotype of the “lazy,” “shiftless” black man. One of the people I called was cable news fixture Goldie Taylor, who, upon hearing my description of the banner, said “Are you kidding me? You have got to be kidding me.”
Christopher’s suspicions are buttressed by the recent efforts of the Romney campaign and its candidate to attack Obama for “elaborate vacations” and golf outings. Such talk in turn reflects the ideological pressuposition of much conservative agitprop about the economy: the economy would do just fine if Obama would take the simple, obvious steps to remove the jackboot of Big Government from the throats of “job creators.”
In the end, it probably doesn’t matter whether Romney’s wizards are consciously promoting racial stereotypes, or if instead, contemporary conservative notions about the moral underpinnings of economic life are so completely intertwined with racial, class, and religious animosities that one follows the other almost automatically.
* * *
Many regular folks seeing or hearing this slogan, personalized as it is to the president, are most likely to take it very literally: Barack Obama could fix the economy, but is too lazy to try. People in politics who blow dog whistles invariably deny it and usually express great umbrage at the very suggestion they don’t mean exactly what they are saying and nothing more.
The GOP has used the Southern Strategy of appealing to racial animus in every election since Barry Goldwater in 1964. Speaking in dog whistle code is what they do. It is up to our feckless corporate media to call out Romney for what he is doing and condemn this long-standing GOP tactic.
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