I Still Don't Get It. Help Me Understand WHY You Would Vote for Mitt.

I have yet to have one of my Republican or conservative-leaning friends accept my challenge to explain to me WHY they support Mitt Romney, a proven liar, whose entire economic plan has been debunked not only by economic analysts who say his math doesn't add up, but now by the Congressional Research Service, which debunks its entire premise. I repeat the challenge here, three days before the election -- please explain why you support him.

I will throw a little detail into my challenge.

1) Explain how you justify the absolute lies he has been telling in the last two weeks about Jeep moving production to China. This has been definitely debunked by Chrysler itself, whose top executives have expressly called Romney a liar over this, and by the CEO of General Motors, who called Romney's actions "cynical politics at their worst."

2) Explain how you justify Romney's flagrant lie about Obama "gutting welfare reform." This has been thoroughly debunked and proven to be a total lie, and yet Romney continues to run ads repeating it.

3) Explain how you justify his support of a Constitutional Amendment banning same-sex marriage. This is a key one, and the one that will take the most courage for you to answer, as I find support for this beyond objectionable, and 100% intolerable on every level.

4) Explain how you justify his attacks on President Obama for "throwing Israel under the bus," when both the Jerusalem Post and Ha'artez have ringingly endorsed him as being good for Israel, and Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak has definitively stated that the Obama administration has been far and away the most supportive American administration in history - a claim that can be backed up  by the material evidence of support provided.

5) Explain your acceptance of his seemingly magical claim that the economy will get better JUST by the fact of his election? Explain also how you can agree that Obama has made the economy worse (a claim Romney has made over and over again) when he halted the worst economic downturn in 80 years within one year, and has produced over 30 months of consecutive job gains, including over a half million in the last three months alone. Don't try to tell me that the unemployment rate was 7.8% when he took office and 7.9% now - what's important is that in those first few months of Obama's administration, long before his policies could take effect, the unemployment rate had soared well above 10%.

6) Explain how Romney can claim that Obama's policies have "failed," when not only are they succeeding on every economic metric (employment, consumer confidence, housing prices, the stock market rebound, etc), but they have done so in spite of unprecedented obstruction from Congress, including failure to pass Obama's jobs act that would have put over a million additional people back to work.

7) Explain how you believe that Romney will balance the budget and work in a bipartisan way, when no Republican since Eisenhower has balanced the budget, but Bill Clinton did so year after year, enacting some of the same taxation policies that Obama wants to enact now.  

8) Explain how you think that Romney will be better for job creation, when his own record as Governor of Massachusetts was a colossal failure on this metric, plunging the state to 47th in the nation on job creation.

9) Explain how you believe his attempted tack to the middle, after going all out during the primaries to appease the far-right wing of his party, saying, for instance, that he would be happy to sign a bill that would ban ALL abortions, including in cases of rape or incest. You have to believe one thing or another here - either that he was telling the truth the first time, and really is that radical, or that, now that he says something quite different, he's a shameless liar and panderer.

10) And finally, explain to me how you can justify his speech at the infamous fund-raiser in Boca Raton, where he referred to 47% of Americans who he says see themselves as "victims," who are unwilling to accept responsibility for their own lives. Do you realize who those 47% really are? They're senior citizens who paid into Social Security and Medicare their entire working lives, and are now collecting those payments - not government handouts, but payments of the insurance plans into which they paid for years. They're veterans who receive the benefits they have earned and that they well deserve for putting their lives on the line for our country. They're active military personnel. They're the working poor, who may work two or three jobs to take care of their families, but still don't earn enough to meet the minimum requirement for paying federal income tax but pay many other forms of taxation and do their part to the best of their ability. Then explain how, for weeks after that video became public, Romney defended his statements, saying they may have been inelegantly stated but that he stood by the content, then after he TANKED in the polls, largely because of the video, he turned around and recanted, saying he didn't mean to say that at all. Again, please explain how you can fail to call him a liar for this.

I could burden you with dozens more specific questions, but I seriously doubt that any of you will rise even to this challenge, so I will not waste additional space on them. As a matter of fact, I'll be satisfied if you simply answer the basic question - why do you support this lying sack of bat crap? I know that's a bit like asking "just when did you stop beating your wife," but the question is clear and I really want to know, because for the life of me, I simply cannot understand how anybody I care about or respect could support such a truly awful man, with such a wholly incorrect vision for America, and one that would specifically discriminate against me. Help me.