[Vision2020] Mitt Romney's Pants are on Fire: Flame Retardant Suits Recommended for All Politicians

[Nicholas Gier]

Dear Visionaries:

This is my column/radio commentary for the week.  I especially had fun with
the alliterations and variations on "pants on fire."*
*

It's going to an interesting campaign. Could we ever hope for truth in
politics?

Nattering Naive Nick


*MITT ROMNEY’S PANTS ARE ON FIRE*

           Some of the most honest people I know are my Mormon relatives,
friends, attorneys, and university administrators, so why does Mitt Romney
have such difficulty with the truth?

I have consulted Politfact.com to see how the candidates have registered on
the Truth-O-Meter.  The base figure is the number of statements that
Politifact has checked or been asked to check.

Some quick calculations reveal that the worst offenders are Republicans.

·         Newt Gingrich leads the pack with 59 percent of his statements
registering mostly false, false, or pants on fire (10 of these).

·         Rick Santorum comes in second with 51 percent with 4 burning
trousers.

·         Mitt Romney is third with 41 percent but a record 13 flaming
suits.

·         The straight-speaking Ron Paul still does poorly at 36 percent.
Paul's pants even caught fire three times.

Out of 358 statements only 28 percent of Obama’s were mostly false, false,
or combustible (5).  I think that all of us are surprised that Joe Biden
did better than Paul at 35%.

My favorite Mitt-Mistakes are the following:

·         Obama will cut $500 billion from Medicare. The Affordable Care
Act does not delete any Medicare funds; rather, but it projects cost
savings of $500 billion over ten years.  A delicious irony is that the Ryan
budget would do exactly the same thing.

·         Obama “gave the auto companies to the UAW.”  The stock that the
union received in return for its negotiated health benefits has been placed
in an independent trust that the union can use only for that purpose.  UAW
equity is not risk free because of the volatility of the stock market.

·          “More Americans have lost their jobs under Barack Obama than any
president in modern history.”  Exempting the first year of all presidents
since World War II, a reasonable proviso that Politifact proposed, George
W. Bush was the only one who had a net loss of jobs—1.31 million.  Obama
was responsible, thanks to the stimulus and auto bail-out, for 2.62 million
net jobs gained.

·         Ending “Obamacare saves $95 billion a year.” Unlike Romney, the
people at Politifact read to the end the Congressional Budget Office’s
analysis, which found that 10 years after repeal the budget deficit would
have increased by $210 billion.

While Romney had a record 13 flaming falsehoods, Obama’s pants were on fire
five times.  Obama’s worst whopper was “Romney, Perry, and Gingrich all say
they would cut foreign aid to Israel—and every other country—to zero.” If
we sort out the scorched suits, 70 percent will go on the pachyderm pile,
and the rest to the donkeys.

Three of Romney’s riveting ringers were the following:

·         “Obama is ending Medicare as we know it.” Romney supports the
Ryan budget that truly does end it.

·          “The U.S. military is at risk of losing its military superiority
because our Navy and Air Force are smaller.” The U.S. defense budget is
still larger than all the world’s combined.

·         In his 2012 State of the Union Address, Obama “didn’t even
mention the deficit or debt.”  If Romney had read the text, he would have
found six references.

My very favorite Romney blooper was his dire warning that “we are only
inches away from no longer being a free economy.” According to the
libertarian Cato Institute, the largest decrease in economic freedom since
World War II came during the Bush II era, when U.S. dropped from 8.55 to
8.04 on a scale of 10.

During Obama’s first year, the Cato rating climbed to 8.06, fell to 7.96 in
2010, and then to 7.8 in 2011. (The U.S. is now in 10th place just ahead of
Denmark).  If the Cato scale was a yard stick, one inch of losing our
economic freedom would be a score of .277, which is far, far below the
worst Cato score of 4.08 for Zimbabwe.

I’ve made my own list of Romney’s errors, and the following are the two
major ones. At the GOP debate on January 7, Romney declared that Americans
make 50 percent more than Europeans do. This of course is not true.

According to data from the CIA, average incomes per person are higher in
Luxembourg and Norway, and 10 other European countries are within 50
percent or less of the U.S. Without adjusting for purchasing power, this
list would have been much longer. Most European countries have higher costs
of living.

Politifact ignited Rick Perry’s backside with his “ridiculous distortion”
that Obama is a socialist, but the entire right-wing ought to be scorched
for that one.  Owning stock in GM, which will be sold as soon as it is
prudent to do so, certainly does not constitute the ownership of the means
of production, the dictionary definition of socialism.

Romney constantly complains that President Barack Obama wants to make the
U.S.  a European welfare state. This of course is false. Most European
welfare states have paid maternity/paternity leave (up to 18 months),
universal child care, universal health care, and universal elder care. I
challenge anyone to point out where Obama has committed the country to
these admirable goals.

The Republicans’ problems with truth began in earnest with Richard Nixon,
but Ronald Reagan continued the tradition, more by bumbling than by
cunning.  (His constant exaggerations of Soviet military build-up, however,
were deliberate deception.) Mark Green’s *Ronald Reagan’s Reign of
Error*substantiates over 300 major falsehoods that the Great
Communicator made
during this political career until 1986.

With 102 Politifact errors Obama will probably not beat Reagan, especially
if he loses to Romney.  A President Mitt-Mistakes would give the Gipper a
good run, but only for a $10,000 bet. With all that corporate money coming
in, I would suggest that GOP advisers consider buying some flame resistant
suits and skirts.  The Democrats could use a few as well.

Nick Gier taught philosophy at the University of Idaho for 31 years.
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