It really says something that the theme of the first night of the Republican National Convention is based off of a lie the Republican party continues to propagate.  The theme tonight was “We built this!”.  The big lie is how frequently the Romney campaign has tried to take words that President Obama said … crop out certain things and then piece together a sentence that he never said in order to create a theme of “We built this”.  It is pretty pathetic to imagine that this is the best they could come up with considering it’s 100% false.  I guess President Obama’s record can’t be that bad if the person they’re really running against is bizarro Obama in some alternative Republican universe.

We have written about the whole “You didn’t build that” lie that Romney continues to repeat without any sense of shame or decency HERE and HERE.

Romney continues to air this ad:

President Obama can be heard on the video saying:

Just like we’ve tried their plan, we tried our plan — and it worked. That’s the difference. That’s the choice in this election. That’s why I’m running for a second term.

But he ACTUALLY said:

I’ll cut out government spending that’s not working, that we can’t afford, but I’m also going to ask anybody making over $250,000 a year to go back to the tax rates they were paying under Bill Clinton, back when our economy created 23 million new jobs, the biggest budget surplus in history and everybody did well. Just like we’ve tried their plan, we tried our plan — and it worked. That’s the difference. That’s the choice in this election. That’s why I’m running for a second term.

But …. this would be hilarious if it weren’t so sad.  Just a couple of weeks ago – Mitt Romney said this:

“You know, in the past, when people pointed out that something was inaccurate, why, campaigns pulled the ad.  They were embarrassed. Today, they just blast ahead. You know, the various fact checkers look at some of these charges in the Obama ads and they say that they’re wrong, and inaccurate, and yet he just keeps on running them.”

So – fact checkers actually fact checked his ads and the “you didn’t build that” ad; Politifact rated it as false HERE:

And after the fact checking … now the Romney campaign has told Buzzfeed HERE:

“We’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact checkers.”

To add to the irony – the stadium they convened in to pronounce their self dependence from government tyranny was in fact financed with $86 million in public funds.  The Raw Story details 11 different GOP convention speakers who received help from the federal government in some way showing that they in fact “didn’t build that” by themselves.  Article HERE.

NPR interviewed Romney’s political director Rich Beeson about another dishonest Romney ad HERE; an excerpt:

STEVE INSKEEP (NPR): “Doesn’t the change mean that the governors can choose or can apply to change the work requirement as opposed to being forced to remove it?”

BEESON: “Again, that still is a change.”

INSKEEP: “But it’s not, quote, ‘they just send you your check,’ which is what the ad says.”

BEESON: (laughs) “I think reasonable people can have a disagreement over this but he [Obama] has significantly changed what President Clinton put in in 1996.”

We’ve written about the Romney campaign continuing to lie about Obama eliminating work requirements for welfare HERE.

Romney comes out with several ads rated as “False” and “Pants on Fire” Lie.  Not only does he pay millions to play these ads on tv – he also repeats these lies repeatedly.  You can find all of Romney’s Pants on Fire lies HERE and his 100% false statements HERE as reviewed by fact checker Politifact.

And Steve Benen at MaddowBlog sums all this up rather succinctly in terms of the precedent this would set if Romney is allowed to lie like this and get away with it; article HERE:

I was always taught that campaigns can spin, slice, fudge, and distort the truth, but they couldn’t literally make stuff up. The political fabric of our democracy tolerates a generous amount of duplicity — so long as there’s at least a kernel of truth in the claim somewhere — but demonstrable lies are unacceptable.

Romney believes the old norms are irrelevant. I wonder if he’s right.

If Romney wins, make no mistake, it will establish a new precedent, and campaigns will receive an unmistakable lesson — go ahead and lie; you’ll be rewarded for it.

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