Romney’s Inexplicable Debate Fibs

Mitt Romney’s generally strong debate performance was marred by two small and inexplicable shadings of fact — moments that left reporters, rivals, and allies shaking their heads and wondering why he he couldn’t just give a straight and obvious answer to relatively trivial questions.

The first lie was that he had dropped out of politics and gone back into business in 2006, when he left the governor’s office, when in fact he ran for President. In another obvious fib, he at first claimed he hadn’t seen a particular campaign ad, and then seconds later he described the ad.

So I did some googling, and there are all kinds of articles on the Web describing pathological liar as someone who lies habitually, or reflexively, because he just prefers to. Here’s one:

A compulsive liar is defined as someone who lies out of habit. Lying is their normal and reflexive way of responding to questions. Compulsive liars bend the truth about everything, large and small. For a compulsive liar, telling the truth is very awkward and uncomfortable while lying feels right. Compulsive lying is usually thought to develop in early childhood, due to being placed in an environment where lying was necessary. For the most part, compulsive liars are not overly manipulative and cunning (unlike sociopaths), rather they simply lie out of habit – an automatic response which is hard to break and one that takes its toll on a relationship (see, how to cope with a compulsive liar).

There are several kinds of pathological liars, and IMO Romney sounds more like a habitual liar than anything else:

Habitual pathological lying is, as the name suggest, habitual. Habitual liar lies so frequently, that it becomes a habit, as a result, he/she puts very little effort in giving a thought about what the output is going to be, nor does he/she care much to process whether it’s a lie or not, it’s simply a reflex & very often can be completely unnecessary or even opposite to his/her own needs. If he/she stops & thinks about it, he/she knows clearly it’s a lie.

Now he’s going around telling audience he knows what it feels like to be afraid of losing a job. Huh?

There’s something seriously wrong with this guy.

Steve Benen is keeping track of Mitt’s mendacity. It’s a big job not enough people are doing. Mittens’s famous flip-flopping is almost a virtue in comparison.

And then there are the folks laid off by Mitt’s Bain Capital company.

Here’s the long version:

See also Paul Krugman, “Bain, Barack and Jobs.”

And don’t forget — Mitt wants to cut taxes on the wealthy even more.

Great Iowa Caucus postmortem — Necropolis Now.

© Karen Roach | Dreamstime.com

Today Brooks writes of Rick Santorum, “I’m delighted that Santorum is making a splash in this presidential campaign. He is far closer to developing a new 21st-century philosophy of government than most leaders out there.”

Seriously. And what philosophy would that be? Giving lobbyists votes in Congress?

Brooks describes Santorum as a Catholic scholar-philosopher, a modern-day Thomas Aquinas, and not the bigoted, corrupt yahoo that he actually is. But in truth, the pig in this case isn’t so much Santorum as the Republican party itself. Santorum’s rise to near-frontrunner status is the stuff slapstick comedy is made of. It is a joke played by the cosmos. And, sadly, we are all the butts of it.

Update: Michael Gerson likewise applies tinted emollient to the lips of an even-toed ungulate —

Rick Santorum is not just an outspoken social conservative; he is the Republican candidate who addresses the struggles of blue-collar workers and the need for greater economic mobility. He talks not only of the rights of the individual but also of the health of social institutions, particularly the family. He draws out the public consequences of a belief in human dignity — a pro-life view applied to the unborn and to victims of AIDS in Africa.

Is it me, or is it getting frothy out there?

Today in New Hampshire —

“I will go to the NAACP convention, and explain to the African-American community why they should demand paychecks instead of food stamps,” said Gingrich.

I’m a nonviolent person, but I honestly think some tar and feathers might improve Newt some.

Charles Pierce:

This is the beginning of a watershed election in the history of the country. It is the first presidential campaign that we have had since the turn of the last century that has to be contested while everyone involved has to cooperate in the fiction that the whole process isn’t completely for sale.

I watched this happen in Iowa over the last three days, and I continue to be astonished why this isn’t the only story being told. This is something epochal. It is something that happens very, very rarely. It is the dawn of the age of thoroughly weaponized money, encouraged by every branch of the national government, most especially including the judiciary. Remember back all those years when Barack Obama looked down at the justices from the podium in the House chamber and read them out for Citizens United, and Sam Alito shook his head and mouthed, “Not true” visibly on TV?

Not true?

In Iowa, Mitt Romney’s super-PAC outspent the actual Romney campaign by a 2-1 margin.

Not true?

How do you like your blue-eyed boy, Mr. Death?

Romney wins by 8 votes, and Dick Morris calls it a “huge win.” This is bare naked spin, of course.

According to number crunchers, Romney spent $113.07 for each vote, while Santorum paid only $1.65. Romney’s percentage of the vote was actually less than in 2008.

Charles Pierce again:

Not that this won’t be entertaining, but Santorum’s year-long schmoozing with the evangelical base here garnered him exactly the same amount of support that Willard Romney managed to produce with a few weeks of an advertising blitz. That would not have been possible in 2008. We will see going forward how far Santorum’s sweater-vest and his gooey piety gets him when he starts wearing the bullseye, which should begin about 22 seconds from now.

Another interesting bit of info — last night the teevee bobbleheads were calling the turnout “record.” But this morning I read that the number of Republicans participating in the caucus actually was lower than in 2008:

If you read that Weigel post and do the math, 91,000 Republicans voted last night, versus 102,000 in 2008. The raw vote count was slightly higher this year, but that’s because Democrats and Independents decided to vote in the caucus, either due to Paulism or lack of anything better to do on a cold winter night.

The “Weigel post” is “Rickrolled: Three Lessons From Iowa.” The third lessons, already covered, is that Republican enthusiasm is much overrated. The first lesson is that the voters who identified themselves with the Tea Party are not small government libertarians after all; they more than not voted for Santorum. “Rick Perry, who campaigned desparately on the issues Tea Partiers say they care about — no earmarks! Term limits! Part time Congress! — got 14 percent of this vote. Michele Bachmann got 9 percent of it.”

The second lesson is that when money is speech, people can ignore it. Rick Perry spent $4 million in ads — $817 per vote — trying to sell himself as the guy who will protect us from gay soldiers, and came away with 10 percent.

But doesn’t that mean money doesn’t matter? Peter Hamby writes that the Newt surge “was torpedoed by a barrage of negative ads and mailers from Ron Paul’s campaign and ‘super PACs’ backing Mitt Romney.” And one could assume that if they’d had a couple more weeks, the same forces could have torpedoed the Santorum surge as well.

One might also assume there is a lot of giggling in the White House right about now.

Latest news — Bachmann is dropping out. No big surprise. Bachmann supporters are more likely to gravitate to Santorum than to Romney, but we’re not talking vast numbers of people here. Perry is expected to drop out any minute now. Word is that Newt is going to run negative ads against Romney, to try to take him down.

And as for Ron Paul, do read Ta-Nehisi Coates.

Update: Good discussion in the comments with Ta-Nehisi Coates’s post. The demonization of Obama and consecration of Paul going on on the Left both come from the intense desire to find the one magic candidate, the “savior,” who will single-handedly fix everything. Ironically, those of us who still support Obama more often than not are not the “Obamabots” but people who saw him realistically to begin with.

Likewise, it’s not hard to see that if Paul were elected President, his supporters would be profoundly disappointed and soon turn to someone else to “save” them.

I’m not going to stay up waiting for the winner, but if I had to guess right now, I’d say the finish is going to be Santorum, Romney, Paul. Of course, anything is possible.

Some follow ups [update: most specifically, this post is a follow up to this post, so please read the earlier post before you try to argue with me about this one — Echidne of the Snakes argues that the kewl kids like Stoller and Greenwald think other people — women and minorities — should sacrifice their rights to life and liberty “to save the world from American military and corporate assaults.”

Here and there in various comment thread forums I have actually seen the argument from self-identified progressives that voiding Roe v. Wade and returning the abortion issue to the states wouldn’t really change anything. This tells me many self-identified progressives are idiots.

I am not arguing against the inherent dilemmas in how one chooses a presidential candidate to vote for. They are real. But it is important to note that we are making deals with the devil, partly because of the way the two-party system operates (you get the fixed menus) and partly because both the quoted articles set the possible loss of rights for someone else in one cup of the scales and the deaths in wars in the other cup of the scales. And also because it is highly unlikely that the Powers That Be would let Ron Paul run the kind of foreign policy he promises to run.

All this reminded me of Ursula le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas“. Who is it that we should keep in the basement, mistreated, for the happiness of the rest of us? That is the real question Stoller and Greenwald seem to ask.

Don’t miss Tom Watson’s commentary if you haven’t read it already.

Elsewhere — righties are still in denial about St. Ronald’s tax increases.

I missed Eric Cantor’s 60 Minute interview, but as Steve Benen describes it, it must have been pretty creepy.

It led to this exchange:

Stahl: But you know, your idol, as I’ve read anyway, was Ronald Reagan. And he compromised.

Cantor: He never compromised his principles.

Stahl: Well, he raised taxes and it was one of his principles not to raise taxes.

Cantor: Well, he — he also cut taxes.

Stahl: But he did compromise —

Cantor: Well I —

At that point, Cantor’s press secretary, off camera, interrupted the interview, yelling that Stahl was lying when she said Reagan raised taxes. As Stahl told “60 Minutes” viewers, “There seemed to be some difficulty accepting the fact that even though Ronald Reagan cut taxes, he also pushed through several tax increases, including one in 1982 during a recession.”

Benen goes on to (one more time) document the many ways Reagan raised taxes. Reagan was behind the largest single tax increase in American history, in fact.

Meanwhile — having run through every other not-Mittens candidate except Huntsman, the Iowa Repubicans now appear to be surging for Rick Santorum. Public Policy Polling shows a three-way tie among Paul, Mittens and Santorum. Very creepy. See also Nate Silver.

But the Iowa Caucus is tomorrow, so soon we can be done with it and go on to the New Hampshire primary on January 10, the South Carolina primary on January 21, and the Florida primary on January 31. And I think by then if Mittens hasn’t begun to build a lead, then maybe we really will have a brokered convention. And that could get very messy. But no point speculating about that for a few weeks yet.

Joe Nocera, “The Big Lie.” Must read. Gail Collins is pretty good today, too.