Politics has always been a dirty business, and dissembling is standard practice on both sides of any given aisle. What's happened over the past few years, however, and has now gone turbo-charged under the rabid right-wing GOP, aided by lazy and incompetent media, is that the very premises on which arguments are made are utterly false, and nobody is quite calling them out on it. The conventional narratives are just assumed to be true, regardless of evidence to the contrary. What Romney has been doing, pretty much since he started campaigning (this time around) for the Presidency last year, is to make a patently untrue assertion about the motivations, goals, world views, and intentions of his opponents, and then run AGAINST those untrue assertions, as if they were real.
One clear example came early on, when Romney claimed that the President was "apologizing for America," and somehow belittling the notion of American exceptionalism. He also tried to portray the President as an appeaser in his approach to foreign policy. The facts speak for themselves, and completely belie the assertion. One might well take exception to some of the President's policies in this area (and I do - particularly his assertion of executive power to make targeted killings of certain suspected terrorists, even if they are U.S. citizens), but one can hardly call the man who defied the Pakistani government to find and kill Osama Bin Laden, enact the harshest sanctions to date on Iran, and by virtually every measure be anything BUT soft or overly cautious about foreign policy issues.
In just the last month Romney has taken on at least two new false premises, and run with them. In at least one of these cases, the media has taken some notice and called him out, but on the other he has gone largely unchecked and unchallenged. First he asserted that the President was attempting to strip veterans and active military personnel of their early voting rights in Ohio. The truth was diametrically the opposite. What the President was calling for was to restore the early voting rights of ALL Ohioans, including veterans and military personnel. Next came the infamous charge that the President was stripping the welfare program of its work requirements, and then running against him on that basis. Again -- completely false. This time Romney was called out by SOME in the media, but not strongly enough that he didn't run a new ad making the same entirely bogus assertion as recently as yesterday.
Perhaps the biggest false premise on which the GOP is resting the bulk of its case for political victory in November, and on which they have been coasting for a number of years now, is that they are the party looking to restore fiscal sanity and responsibility, to reduce the deficit and begin to pay off the crushing national debt. This is where the media has been the absolute laziest, as they've largely bought into this narrative, as well as into the narrative that Paul Ryan and his draconian budget plan are "serious" and "bold." Any rational, objective analysis of the Ryan budget shows that it not only fails to accomplish any sort of deficit reduction, but would actually INCREASE the deficit and the debt. To begin with, the plan, in its own language, relies on best case scenarios for even its base assumptions - scenarios that are highly unlikely, and without which the economics of the plan fall completely apart. Moreover, even if those best case scenarios were to be realized, the numbers don't add up. In order to give the outsized tax cuts to the wealthiest Americans and increase the defense budget as called for in the plan, the federal government would have to eliminate virtually EVERY other service (outside the eviscerated shells of Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security) that the government provides.
It's important to understand that Paul Ryan is not stupid. He can do the math as well as anybody else. He's just misrepresenting himself and his goals. This is entirely in line with Grover Norquist's infamous line about shrinking government to the size that it can be drowned in a bathtub. THAT is the goal of the GOP, Mitt Romney, and Paul Ryan. And until the media calls them out on this, as well as their denial of science, their embrace of the most radical elements of social conservatism, and their utter contempt for anybody but themselves, they will continue to survive as a party and as a movement. They will lose in November, to be sure, but they will just double down, and come roaring back with ever more extreme views, ever more false assertions, and ever smaller connection to reality.
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