Greasy

All of a sudden, right-wingers love polls again.

And, as always, the so-called liberal media are not liberal at all. The news business is about business and this week the business involves Romney’s “stunning” comeback. The reversal in fortune will, no doubt, generate interest and thus revenue.

The source for all the Romney hype is a Pew Research Center poll that shows a dramatic turnaround in the horse race:

That same polling firm conducted a poll before the first debate, and it showed Obama with a 51-43 lead.

And now the gender gap is gone. Yes, gone. Almost overnight, according to this poll, the 18 point advantage President Obama had among women voters has disappeared. It’s 47-47 now, droves of women apparently now enlisting on the side of the aggressors in the War On Women.

One glaring micro-result of this poll is that before the debate Mr. Obama enjoyed a 52-35 advantage over Romney on being “a strong leader,” and now it is 44-44. That is breathtaking, and shows how much damage Obama’s debate performance did to his reputation.

Perhaps more telling, though, is that Mr. Obama has lost ground to Romney on the “Is honest and truthful” polling. Again, that is not a typo. Before the debate Obama was considered much more honest and truthful, enjoying a 14 point advantage. The latest results show the President with only a 5 point advantage.

That’s right. After all the Romney-Ryan campaign subterfuge, after all the lies Romney has told, after all the flips and flops he has engineered, after that unbelievably revealing “47%” secretly-recorded video, voters almost see him as honest and truthful as Mr. Obama. That, to me, is the real news in this poll.

And although the President did have a poor debate performance, that performance is not the cause of the change in these honest-truthful numbers. Romney lied through his pearly whites during that debate, and although Mr. Obama failed to call him out on most of them, journalists—mainstream journalists—have failed to do their job and point out the lies to the wider public who doesn’t get their news from MSNBC or The Huffington Post.

Instead, the Beltway Press gives us a variant of “both sides do it.” Both sides fudge the truth and round off the corners of the facts. Both sides. One is no worse than the other. That’s what I hear in the mainstream press.

Oh, you can tune into some programs on MSNBC and hear a lot of chatter about Romney’s utter untruthfulness. You can see his false statements juxtaposed with the truth or his prior statements compared to his present statements, which in many cases are complete reversals. You can visit HuffPo and see the same thing.

But mostly in the mainstream press the idea is that Romney and Obama are both—equally—guilty of spinning, of misleading, of lying. All of which allows Romney to say one thing one day and say another thing on another day, and when the Obama campaign calls him on it, it gets lost in the noise about “both sides do it.”

I will give you just one example of how Romney can say something in September (at least that is when it was discovered) and then completely contradict it in October, without so much as a whimper from big-time journalists on television.

On Monday, Romney gave a much-touted foreign policy speech. Here is the headline from a piece by Rick Ungar, “The Token Lefty” on Forbes:

“Lies and Reversals” is certainly what that speech entailed. Ungar listed as a lie Romney’s claim that Obama has not signed any new free-trade agreements in the past three years. But Obama signed agreements with South Korea, Panama, and Colombia a year ago. So, Romney told a bold-faced lie.

But Ungar, a liberal writer whose audience is numbered only in the thousands and not the millions the networks attract, makes a more important point about Romney’s foreign policy speech, one that should be important to all Americans. Remember when Romney said the following in his “47%” speech (highlight mine):

I look at the Palestinians not wanting to see peace anyway, for political purposes, committed to the destruction and elimination of Israel, and these thorny issues, and I say there’s just no way. So what you do is, you say, you move things along the best way you can. You hope for some degree of stability, but you recognize that this is going to remain an unsolved problem…and we kick the ball down the field and hope that ultimately, somehow, something will happen and resolve it.

Hope. Passivity. Romney’s statement, for which he received some criticism when it was revealed, announces hope and passivity as his strategy on those “thorny issues” in the Middle East.

Yet on Monday, Romney criticized Mr. Obama this way:

I know the President hopes for a safer, freer, and a more prosperous Middle East allied with the United States. I share this hope. But hope is not a strategy. We cannot support our friends and defeat our enemies in the Middle East when our words are not backed up by deeds, when our defense spending is being arbitrarily and deeply cut, when we have no trade agenda to speak of, and the perception of our strategy is not one of partnership, but of passivity.

Not only did Romney slander President Obama with the charge about defense spending “being arbitrarily and deeply cut” (it is not) and the charge about the trade agenda (which, as we have seen was based on a lie), but Romney repudiated his own prior stated position on hope and passivity, instead attributing it to President Obama! This guy is unbleepingbelievable.

Now, at the very least, one would expect that the morning after such a breathtaking reversal of a position Romney advanced in secret, behind closed doors, when he thought only fat cats were listening, that the mainstream press would call out Romney and his campaign for such a self-serving maneuver, especially on such an important issue.

Uh, no. Just this morning I surveyed mainstream news coverage—I’m talking mainstream news coverage here not partisan programming—via the CBS and NBC morning shows (these two networks also happen to be “liberal” in the minds of hysterical media critics in the conservative talkosphere).

Beginning the 7:00am C.S.T. segment, Rudy Giuliani was on CBS and John McCain, making his one-millionth TV appearance, was on NBC. These two gentlemen specialize in slandering the President, which they do often and well. The topics were, naturally, the debate “bounce” and Romney’s foreign policy speech yesterday. Here’s the respective headlines from those appearances:

You can read these articles and you can watch the segments, but you will not see any mention of that “47%” speech in which Romney talked about hope and passivity in the Middle East. Not a word. Not one bleeping word. Thus these Romney surrogates were not challenged on that issue in front of the millions of viewers who get their news in the morning via “trusted” news sources, CBS and NBC. Thus Romney gets away with yet another flop, another round of deceit.

Thus it is that folks begin to see Obama and Romney as pretty much equally “honest and truthful,” which can only work to Romney’s advantage, especially since he has shown, as I have said from the beginning, his willingness to say anything, absolutely anything, to become president.

With help from mainstream journalists, grease guns in hand, Romney may enter the White’s House as the greasiest presidential candidate in modern history.

Posted by R. Duane Graham on October 9, 2012

https://duanegraham.wordpress.com/2012/10/09/greasy/