Thursday, April 12, 2012

Why calling "liar" is critical to Democratic success

This graph based on numbers from the Federal Reserve, from Kevin Drum of Mother Jones (via Maddow Blog) is the clearest explanation of the deceit that Romney was doing with his claims that 92% of job losses since Obama came into office were to women. The reality is that there have been more losses to men, but the men's employment has also recovered more. The recovery is indicated by the falling line of men's unemployment. If the number were given of total jobs lost, not counting regains, men's is far higher. That honest number would be indicated by the area under the curves, not the difference between a starting and ending point—and the area under the men's unemployment curve is obviously greater.[Correction, the area is not the correct measure, partly because Drum's graph doesn't have unemployment per month numbers, but total employment numbers. More to come....

As Krugman argues, maybe the most important development is that the mainstream press are starting to call Romney for his deceit.

I think that the critical thing is for the Democrats to start calling Romney a liar. This is not polite, but when someone is trying to destroy you through lies, it is ethical to fight back and call them a liar. Furthermore, it is the only effective response. If you try simply to combat each "untruth," you get buried in an avalanche of lies. You have to combat the *narrative* of lies, and expose it for what it is.

Most importantly, if the Democrats make calling "liar" an issue, the press will be forced to deal with it and stop evading their responsibility to label the truth as truth and lies as lies.

It is also remarkable how bad a liar Romney is. He always goes overboard in his lies, and makes them not credible, so that he is very vulnerable on charges such as that Obama made the recession worse—a bare faced lie.

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