Romney lies about Obama's commitment to capitalism

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Mitt just can't help himself, it seems. He's a dishonest, bullshit-spewing prick.

I get that political rhetoric in the heat of a campaign often bears little relation to the truth, but this is just absurd:

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney on Thursday suggested that Barack Obama had been governing as a "president of doubt and deception."

At a campaign event in Saint Louis, the former Massachusetts governor blasted Obama for not understanding the "free enterprise system."

"Sadly, it's become clear that this president simply doesn't understand or appreciate these fundamental truths of our economic system," he insisted. "Our government has a moral commitment to help every American to help himself -- him and herself. And that commitment has been broken."

"I don't believe, by the way, that it was done with evil intent or ill will," he continued. "As your president starting on day one, I will do everything in my power to end these days of drift and disappointment."

Romney noted that something was "fundamentally wrong when there over 23 million Americans who are unemployed, underemployed or have stopped looking for work."

"And yet, the president tells us he's doing a great job," the candidate pointed out. "Forward, he says. Off a cliff."

"I will not be that president of doubt and deception!"

Apparently he thinks he can say anything and get away with it. (It's another of those George Costanza rules: It's not a lie if you believe it.)

So Obama is an enemy of capitalism and the American Way. Why? Because he says so.

We're used to this by now, of course. Republicans have spent much of the last four years breathlessly telling us that Obama is a socialist who wants government to crush the market and control every last inch of our lives.

But where's the evidence -- in this case, the evidence that Obama "doesn't understand or appreciate these fundamental truths" of American capitalism, that somehow Obama doesn't believe in this "moral commitment" to help people succeed in the free market?

If anything, if we look back over his first term, the president has been overly committed to the market at the expense of meaningful regulation and the protection of non-wealthy Americans. Otherwise, his policies have all been about protecting "our economic system" from itself and building it up again: the stimulus package (not large enough but probably as much as he could get given Republican opposition at the time), the auto bailout, the refusal post-TARP to hold Wall Street appropriately responsible for its actions (and crimes), market-oriented, pro-Big Insurance health-care reform based on Romney's own reforms in Massachusetts (not a single-payer system), etc. Where in all that is evidence of anything even remotely resembling opposition to American capitalism?

Has the economy continued to struggle under Obama? But consider how much worse it would have gotten, and would be today, if not for what Obama did to reverse it's downward spiral, the condition he found the economy in when he took office -- all that he did in the face of Republican opposition and obstructionism. Consider what it would be like now if Republicans had gotten their way, if there had been no auto bailout, no stimulus, nothing at all to get the economy moving in the right direction, just more tax cuts for the wealthy, like Romney, and further deregulation of a financial system that almost destroyed itself, globally, precisely because there was not enough regulation.

But that hardly matters to Romney. This is the guy who wanted the auto industry to go bankrupt and who is now taking credit for saving it. He's shameless, and relentless.

And a fucking liar.