Hey Mitt, the Election’s Over

Mitt’s top strategist, Stuart Stevens (whom many blame for Mitt’s disastrous campaign and loss, but really there’s so much blame to go around) is kind of like those Japanese soldiers who fought on in the Pacific long after WWII was over.  But at least they had the excuse of not knowing the Allies had won.

Stevens is still fighting over Pinocchios, specifically the four that Mitt got from WaPo‘s fact checker Glenn Kessler for his ad claiming that Chrysler was moving American Jeep jobs to China.

In response to Stevens’ request for fewer wooden puppets, Kessler is sticking with his original four, the most you can receive.

Maybe Stevens would have done better last November if he’d focused more on his own wooden boy and less on Kessler’s.

Mitt Wins Something!

Unfortunately for him, Mitt wins for PolitiFact’s “Lie of the Year,” for his desperate, last-minute push to win Ohio by claiming that Chrysler was moving American jobs building Jeeps to China.

Auto Makers’ Criticism Can’t Stop Mitt’s Lies

Something a little unusual here.  We expect to see the campaigns fighting with each other, but now the Romney campaign is fighting with GM and Chrysler, who have called Mitt out on his lying ads about the auto industry, including his false claim that jobs making Jeeps here will be moved to China.

The Romney campaign is dismissing the auto makers’ pushback and continuing their sleazy ads.  All they care about is winning Ohio, and one in eight jobs there is auto-related.

It’s hard to call something a new low in presidential campaigning, but this may be it.

Mitt has shown us that he believes the end justifies the means.  When he was running in Massachusetts, he got permission from the Mormon Church to lie about his position on abortion and pretend to be pro-choice, so long as he wouldn’t govern that way if elected.

GM, Chrysler Hit Back at Lyin’ King Mitt

Both GM and Chrysler are hitting back at Mitt’s lies about the auto bailout in general and about Jeep moving U. S. jobs to China in particular.

GM says the Romney campaign is in a “parallel universe.”

It’s fine with me if he becomes president in that parallel universe, just not this one.

I can’t remember private companies calling out campaign ads for their lies in a presidential race before.

A New Low, Even for Mitt

What do you do when your campaign is caught in a shameless lie?  Turn it into an ad in Ohio, a state you must win and obviously don’t care how you do it.

From “F-you Dishonesty:  Romney and Jeep,” Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast:

“There’s basic dishonesty and then there’s f-you dishonesty–dishonesty so blatant, so consciously abusive of facts that everyone knows, that it deserves a category of its own.

“Romney’s new ad about Jeeps and Italy is f-you dishonest. You probably know the background. Bloomberg News moved a confusingly worded article last week suggesting, if you didn’t read it closely, that Jeep (under Chrysler, owned by Fiat) was sending all its production to China. Romney said this on the trail.

“I originally cut Romney a break here–some aide handed him a news article that was sloppily or strangely written, he read it on the fly, he decided to throw it in there.

“But then Chrysler ripped Romney and said no way, this is not true. Chrysler is thinking about putting plants in China down the road to try to increase market share there. But as for the here and now and the U.S. market, Chrysler is not only not cutting back domestic Jeep production but expanding it, investing $500 million in the Toledo, Ohio Jeep plant.

“At that point, even most political campaigns would have just dropped it. They wouldn’t apologize, because campaigns don’t do that, but a normal campaign would just drop it and try to move on.

“So what did Romney’s campaign do? It cut a TV ad doubling down on the claim, cleverly worded so as to suggest that the Obama administration sold out America (and Ohio) by selling Chrysler to the Italians who are moving production to China.”