Ads Up

If I had the skills, I'd make a campaign ad for President Obama, post it to YouTube, and make it go viral. Like the videos I posted recently, it'd show a few of Mitt Romney's most staggering lies, maybe a silent clip of him talking, or a picture with mouth moving, Jib-Jab-like, with titled words coming out of his mouth, his lies, one after the other, plastered over his picture until it's entirely covered by them. (There wouldn't be room for them all.) And there'd be a voice-over saying something like this:

In America we've gotten used to politicians lying. We give a pass to those who exaggerate, who stretch the truth. We've even made sure it's legal to do so. But Mitt Romney's lies are different. They're constant, they're obvious, they're beyond anything we've ever seen. He seems physically unable to tell the truth, about himself, about his opponents. Think about it. Do we really want such a blatant and easy liar sitting in the Oval Office? Someone to whom the truth seems to be literally irrelevant? Seriously. Think about it.

Do I harp on Romney's lies too much? Maybe, although I think it's central to who he is. And it's not just me who sees it and finds it alarming. Here's one who may have a better way of looking at it than my view that it's pathological:

A marathon of debates and an eon of campaigning have toughened and honed Romney. He commands the heights of great assurance, and he knows, as some of us learn too late in life, that the truth is not always a moral obligation but sometimes merely what works. He often cites his business background as commending him for the presidency. That’s his forgivable absurdity. Instead, what his career has given him is the businessman’s concept of self — that what he does is not who he is. This is what enables the slumlord to be a charitable man. This is what enables the corporate raider to endow his university. Business is business. It’s what you do. It is not who you are. Lying isn’t a sin. It’s a business plan.