Posted by AzBlueMeanie:
Mitt Romney's senior adviser is Ed Gillespie, formerly White House Counselor to George W. Bush, who was brought on in 2007 to orchestrate a PR unit dedicated to "selling the Iraq War troop surge to American voters and the media." Gillespie previously served as senior communications advisor to the presidential campaign of George W. Bush, and played an aggressive role as spokesman for the Bush campaign during the vote recount in Florida, for which he was rewarded with the Chairmanship of the RNC in 2003.
Haven't Americans had to endure this insufferable asshole long enough? (Romney has surrounded himself with George W. Bush appointees and advisors -- he represents a return to the Bush years.)
Gillespie's latest PR stunt is the Romney campaign's "I'm rubber, you're glue" psychological projection strategy for Romney's "gender gap" problem. The Romney campaign is asserting that the Obama administration is waging a "war on women," not Tea-Publicans in Congress and in state legislatures across the country.
This strategy is effective only with two groups of people: low information voters who are partisan-inclined to believe anything that a Tea-Publican says; and the feckless corporate media villagers who create false equivalencies and manufacture controversy to fill air time and column space, and are genetically incapable of calling the pathological liar Willard "Mittens" Romney a liar.
Maybe there is hope. Chris Wallace of FAUX News whose father, the legendary Mike Wallace died Sunday a week ago, must be feeling the weight of his father's legacy on his shoulders. Chris manned up on Sunday and told Ed Gillespie to his face that "Mittens" is full-o'-crap with his "I'm rubber, you're glue" psychological projection strategy on the "war on women." Romney Adviser Ed Gillespie Struggles To Defend Campaign’s Major Economic Claim:
Mitt Romney senior adviser Ed Gillespie struggled to defend his campaign’s central piece of evidence supporting its claim that President Obama is waging a war on women today. The claim — that 92 percent of jobs lost under Obama where lost by women — has been called highly misleading and “mostly false” by Politifact (twice), the Washington Post’s fact checker, an AP fact checker, and even the rabidly conservative Daily Caller.
Even Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace saw the problem with the claim and pressed Gillespie when he mentioned the figure this morning. “It is not true,” Wallace said of the larger Romney argument, calling the 92 percent figure a “little bit of an accounting trick” and noting that “all the independent fact checkers have said it’s misleading.”
The best defense Gillespie could muster was to claim that some of the economists quoted by the Washington Post’s fact checker were liberals. Oooohh! the liberal boogeyman! What, no George Soros?
Gillespie doesn’t even attempt to defend the substance of the claim because there is little substance to it. (Video below the fold).
The 92 percent figure obscures the fact that many more men than women lost jobs in the recession [that's why some dubbed it the "Mancession," The End of The Mancession (Slate, January 2011)], as Wallaces forces Gillespie to admit. The key is timing. Men tend to be concentrated in industries that were hit first, like construction, so they lost their jobs first, while women tend to be contracted in the public sector, which had layoffs later on when [Tea-Publican controlled] state and local governments slashed their budgets.
In fact, it was Republican lawmakers and governors who led this effort [with GOP austerity measures], accounting for over 70 of percent state layoffs, so Romney’s claim is effectively blaming Obama for policies that Romney supports (cutting government workforces).
Greg Sargent at the Plum Line had more on "Mitt Math" fun with facts and figures last week. Keep an Eye on The Big Lie:
I’m glad to see that there’s been a moderately aggressive media response to Mitt Romney’s latest falsehood: The claim that 92 percent of the people who have lost jobs on Obama’s watch are women.
The argument, which his campaign is now making regularly, is central to Romney’s effort to win back women who were apparently alienated by the primary.
The assertion has now been debunked by Politifact, the Post’s Glenn Kessler, and NBC’s Domenico Montanaro. All three of them point out, among other things, that the claim relies on a net overall job loss calculation that uses January 2009 as a starting point. It factors in the huge amount of jobs lost when the economy was in free fall in the first months when Obama was in office, before his policies took effect.
As Politifact said of Romney’s female job loss claim: “One could reasonably argue that January 2009 employment figures are more a result of President George W. Bush’s policies, at least as far as any president can be blamed or credited for private-sector hiring.”
Good work! But here’s the thing about this. Romney’s use of the basic fallacy on display here goes well beyond this one claim about women. It’s central to virtually his entire case against Obama’s economic record.
Romney has been arguing in every conceivable forum for many months that jobs were lost on Obama’s watch, proving that he is a job destroyer and that his policies failed. To do this, he’s using that same metric to prove this point — even though that metric factors in job losses that occurred before those policies took effect.
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But as the new fact checks of Romney’s claim about women drive home, this methodology is thoroughly bogus. And it goes far beyond this one assertion about women. It is central to Romney’s whole candidacy.
"[I]t’s good to see that the current dust-up over female job loss may be awakening more media people to the far larger falsehood at the center of his whole argument." Hello, media villagers? Anyone out there? Hello?
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