Quote:

---

Thomas Hobbes’ oft-cited phrase from 1651, “nasty, brutish and short,” does not describe the 2012 presidential campaign — unfortunately. The contest so far has been nasty all right, and disregard for the truth has been brutish on both sides, in our judgment. But alas, it won’t be over until Nov. 6.

So many false and misleading claims have already surfaced that, once again, we are moving up the clock on our annual wrap-up of the campaign season’s worst political whoppers, as we did four years ago. We’d like to think there would be no need for a “Whoppers, Volume 2,” but for the record, we wrote a sequel in 2008.

We’re also permitting ourselves a rare bit of editorializing about the deplorable tone of this particular campaign. Besides being marked by a cavalier disregard for facts on both sides, the campaign also has become bitter and trivial. It is failing to engage the public in a fact-based discussion of the hard choices that will very soon be forced on Washington.

In its triviality, the 2012 campaign so far resembles the infamous 1988 contest that pitted George H.W. Bush against Michael Dukakis. The “issues” featured then included Dukakis’ support for a state prison furlough program and Bush’s knowledge (or lack of it) about aid to Nicaraguan rebels. Neither side said much about an unfolding debacle in the U.S. Savings and Loan industry, which eventually cost taxpayers more than $130 billion.

This time the real issues facing the country are much bigger: A lagging recovery from the worst recession since the 1930s, a string of $1-trillion-plus deficits, inexorably rising medical costs that burden both state and federal taxpayers, and a Social Security system unable to pay full benefits for more than another 20 years or so. Just to name a few.

And what are the candidates and their allies talking about?

In Chicago, the Obama campaign for weeks has been consumed with the date (1999 or 2001?) of Romney’s departure from Bain Capital, the venture-capital firm he founded. The reason? The Obama campaign wants to blame Romney for management decisions made after Feb. 11, 1999, at a few of the companies in which Bain invested. Romney did retain ownership and corporate titles listed in routine SEC filings after February 1999, but no evidence has yet shown that he exercised any active control over Bain’s investment decisions during this time. Romney was working 12-hour days, six days a week, as president of the 2002 Winter Olympics committee and was not actively involved in Bain.

Obama has even stooped to make a false claim that Romney favored banning abortion in cases of rape or incest, as though the contrast between their actual positions was not sufficiently clear. In doing so, the president mirrors the distortions of opponents who once accused him of favoring “infanticide.”

For his part, Romney has claimed to have created as many as 100,000 jobs while at Bain, happily taking credit for hiring that happened long after he left (and offering no actual accounting for the figure). He has accused Obama of waging a “war on women” based on job losses from a recession that started more than a year before Obama took office. He has falsely stated in a TV ad that an inspector general found stimulus contracts “were steered to ‘friends and family,’ ” when the IG made no such finding. And he has repeatedly misrepresented Obama’s new health care law.

Meanwhile the tone of the campaign becomes ever more nasty. Obama campaign aides recently suggested Romney was guilty of a “felony,” while a Romney surrogate said the president should “learn to be an American.”

And neither candidate speaks candidly of what he would actually do if elected. Romney won’t say how he plans to cut taxes further without losing revenues. Cutting or eliminating the deduction for home mortgages or for state income taxes? Obama says nothing about how Social Security is to be preserved. Raising the payroll tax?

Perhaps we’ll hear more in the 109 campaigning days to come. Perhaps the candidates will become less personal, more substantive, and more forthcoming about their plans for leading the nation. We remain hopeful. But, based on the facts so far, we’re not optimistic.

---

Quote:

---

Originally posted by 1kiki:
And yet ...

"In Chicago, the Obama campaign for weeks has been consumed with the date (1999 or 2001?) of Romney’s departure from Bain Capital, the venture-capital firm he founded."

Is there a fact in dispute?

---

Quote:

---

"Obama has even stooped to make a false claim that Romney favored banning abortion in cases of rape or incest, as though the contrast between their actual positions was not sufficiently clear."

“If hypothetically, Roe v. Wade was overturned, and the Congress passed a federal ban on all abortions and it came to your desk, would you sign it? Yes or no?” Debate moderator Anderson Cooper pressed him to answer the question directly, asking: “Would you sign the bill?” Here’s Romney’s response: “I’d be delighted to sign that bill."


I did some editing, but the question and answer were pretty clearly at least one of the positions Romney’s taken on the issue.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact-checker/post/did-romney-back-
a-law-to-ban-all-abortions/2012/07/12/gJQAjEuLfW_blog.html

---

Quote:

---

Originally posted by Niki2:
Ahh, our favorite "Nonpartisan" speaks up again...strangely, supporting the right while dissing the left. How surprising.

---

Quote:

---

The FACT remains that Romney said what he did; that he has said other things at other times means nothing when arguing the FACT that he said he would SUPPORT a law that overturned Roe v. Wade. That no such law exists is also irrelevant.

---

Quote:

---

Originally posted by Niki2:
How strange that you can't seem to comprehend the simple facts of this issue:

---