It's all a lie. It's balatant. They don't care that they are lying. And they don't care if people say, "Hey, you're just telling lies now". Nope. They will not stop. The idea is to throw so much noise out there that it has some residual effect. The average voter may not pay much attention, but in two months they will have a vague idea that Romney is not like them. In response to Romney's protests Team Obama will soon be complaining that the Republicans are calling them liars. It won't matter if the charge is accurate. The average voter doesn't pay that much attention.
We may like to think our political heros were able to simply rise above negative politics and win the battle of ideas, but that has never been the case. Ronnie went after Jimmuh with both barrels at Liberty State Park almost 32 years ago to the day:
The Carter record is a litany of despair, of broken promises, of sacred trusts abandoned and forgotten. His answer to all this misery? He tries to tell us that we're only in a recession, not a depression -- as if definitions -- words -- relieve our suffering. Let it show on the record that when the American people cried out for economic help, Jimmy Carter took refuge behind a dictionary. Well, if it's a definition he wants, I'll give him one: A recession is when your neighbor loses his job. A depression is when you lose yours. And recovery is when Jimmy Carter loses his!
I have talked with unemployed workers all across this country. I've heard their views on what Jimmy Carter has done to them and their families. Let Mr. Carter go to their homes, look their children in the eyes, and argue with them that it's only a recession that put dad or mom out of work. Let him go to the unemployment lines and lecture those workers who have been betrayed on what is the proper definition for their widespread economic misery. Human tragedy, human misery, the crushing of the human spirit. They do not need defining; they need action. Call this human tragedy whatever you want. Whatever it is, it's Jimmy Carter's. He caused it, he tolerates it, and he's going to appearance to the American people for it.
I'm looking forward to meeting Mr. Carter in debate, confronting him with the whole sorry record of his administration -- the record he prefers not to mention. If he ever finally agrees to the kind of first debate the American people want, which I'm beginning to doubt, he'll answer to them and to me. This country needs a new administration with a renewed dedication to the dream of America, an administration that will give that dream new life and make America great again.
Democrats claim that, after a 50 year failed experiment in borrowing from our children and grandchildren to finance our own lives, any attempt to control spending, even the fairly timid Paul Ryan attempt, is advocacy of a return to Social Darwinism supposedly rampant in the 19th Century.
This is all a lie. We have no choice to reduce spending. Common sense tells us that we cannot keep borrowing 40% of what we spend. We will be Greece if we do not start showing some responsibility now. Besides, it is morally reprehensible to borrow from our children to finance our current expenses.
Increasing taxes on those who make more than $200,000 per year will not help. There are simply too few of them to make a difference, and depleting our supply of investable capital will retard growth at a time when growth is the only relatively painless way out of our predicament. The politics of envy is as wrongheaded as it is ugly.
Social Darwinism really never did exist. Before Progressivism demonized religion and posited that pretty much everything is a right to be secured by government, private charities, many of them church based, did a pretty good job of providing a safety net.
Speaking of the safety net, it has become a hammock. The Central Valley of California has an unemployment rate in the teens, but the growers can't find enough pickers. Many people, my wife and I among them, have personal experiences with folks who have declined perfectly fine jobs during the recession and the "recovery" because living on the dole was easier and/or more convenient.
The safety net has become incredibly wasteful and riven with fraud. Medicaid alone will bankrupt us but is a poster child for a massive program that promises much, costs a bunch, and delivers very little if any value. What kind of empathy relegates the poor to such a program?