FOD 2012.07.09

The one thing I cannot abide is a liar. A person who lies will also cheat, steal, and do Lord knows what else in order to get whatever he wants. I realize that politics is filled with liars, which is one reason I despise most politicians. But the current occupant of the Oval Office is in a class by himself when it comes to lying. Here's a recent example.

Undeterred by independent fact-checkers that have debunked the thrust of their claims, the Obama campaign is redoubling attacks on Mitt Romney as an "outsourcer" in a new TV ad airing in eight battleground states.

The Romney campaign called the latest ad a continuation of "desperate lies," citing reports by several independent fact-checkers that have discredited the suggestion that Romney himself had a direct role in relocating U.S. jobs overseas.

"We found no evidence to support the claim that Romney — while he was still running Bain Capital — shipped American jobs overseas," FactCheck.org concluded in a report last month.

Washington Post fact checker Glenn Kessler also concluded that while Bain-owned companies may have engaged in outsourcing, Romney's ties to the practice are tenuous.

The ad blitz comes in spite of Obama's comments to audiences on his bus tour last week decrying the negative tone of the campaign on TV.

"You guys are getting bombarded with all kinds of nonsense on TV. So I know that sometimes politics can be discouraging, and especially Washington politics can be discouraging, and it can seem small and it can seem petty," Obama said Friday.

Independent media monitors that track campaign advertising report that 76 percent of the TV ads Obama's campaign has aired over the past month have had a negative, "anti-Romney" message.

Not just a liar, but a hypocrite as well.

More evidence that you can't believe anything obama says - or writes: last month David Maraniss, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and Washington Post editor, published Barack Obama: The Story, a deeply researched 600-page study that compares and contrasts obama's autobiography (Dreams From My Father) with historical records and facts.

The result: "more than three-dozen instances of material discrepancy where Dreams fails to align with the facts."

A catalog to those lies, and others like them, can be found here.

While the individual lies are troubling in and of themselves, taking a big picture perspective reveals a couple of themes that are familiar, yet no less disturbing because of their familiarity.

One, obama is a serial, perhaps pathological, liar. Here's a particularly egregious example, taken from an obama statement during the 2008 debate.

For my mother to die of cancer at the age of 53 and have to spend the last months of her life in the hospital room arguing with insurance companies because they’re saying that this may be a pre-existing condition and they don’t have to pay her treatment, there’s something fundamentally wrong about that.

The problem with that statement is that in fact the expenses relating to his mother's cancer were paid by her health insurance - and obama knew it.

It bears repeating that the president knew this account was false because he served as his mother’s attorney in all her dealings with the insurance company.

This account was actually reported by no less than the New York Times, although they did bury it on page 14.

But that didn’t stop the Obama campaign from refloating the same falsehoods about Ms. Dunham having perished for lack of insurance coverage in an autobiographical campaign film narrated by Tom Hanks. Not only has the president never apologized for lying to the American people about his mother’s plight, he rightly assumed that even though the truth was uncovered by the New York Times, neither that paper nor the rest of the mainstream media would follow up on it as they undoubtedly would had a Republican ever tried to sell the voters such a transparent whopper.

That leads to the second theme, which is not surprising but is nonetheless troubling. It is painfully obvious that the mainstream media, rather than carrying our its watchdog function, has not only refused to expose the falsehoods but is helping to make excuses for them, or even cover them up. Consider that Maraniss himself never directly accuses obama of lying: "Some of what he did was the result of mythologies that were passed along from his family, and some were for the purposes of advancing themes in his book which had more to do with finding his racial identity."

Or consider what was said by Gerald Early, professor of English literature and African-American studies at Washington University in St. Louis:

"It really doesn't matter if he made up stuff."

Maybe it doesn't matter to you, Professor Early. Maybe you enjoy being lied to by the person responsible for leading our country. But it bothers the hell out of me. I have zero respect for anyone who intentionally and continuously twists, bends, obscures, and otherwise tortures the truth - much less a hypocritical lying scumbag who will write, say, and do anything to cling to the office for which he is so obviously unqualified.

That is most definitely NOT the type of person I want sitting in the Oval Office making decisions that affect me, my family, and our country, and representing America to the rest of the world...