It is one thing to stretch the truth a little bit; to tell a "white lie," as if there were such a thing. It's quite another to live a lie, to pretend to be something fundamentally different from what you really are.
Romney is not merely a person who lies. Although he may be capable of telling the truth, he can tell a lie just as easily if it suits his purpose(s). His system of ethics is bereft of the ability to care about the difference between what is true and right and what is false and wrong. Perhaps he does not realize this fact. Perhaps he was brought up to believe that as a Mormon everything he did and said was justified whether or not it accorded with the facts or with what was just or what was honest.
Certainly, he is a complicated man. But we are all complicated people. That does not excuse his perpetual lies. He is a convoluted man, often appearing to be driven more by greed than anything else. His career, especially as it unfolded at Bain Capital, would seem to be confirmation of that. He is also driven by a lust for power, as we have seen in his campaign to attain the presidency. Lust, in whatever form, is a force that has destroyed many a basically decent person, but lust for power in someone who is fundamentally a liar is particularly potent and disturbing.
Romney's lies are well documented. [Read through the other posts on this blog]. He's lied about his record as governor of Massachusetts. He's said he was a job creator but his tenure at Bain led to the destruction of thousands of jobs for which he was richly rewarded! He's lied about his tenure as an Olympic official. He's lied about President Obama on so many different occasions we'd need a calculator to add them all up. For example, he lied when he said Obama cut millions from Medicare to bolster Obamacare. He lied about his position on the bailout - his opposition to it and then he lied by saying he was at least partly responsible for Detroit's recovery. He lied by charging Obama with sending auto companies into bankruptcy and suggesting that the president arranged to have Jeeps made in China.
He's changed his position and colors as easily as a chameleon. He was pro-choice, and now he's a hard-line anti-abortion candidate. Or maybe he's back to pro-choice? He was anti-FEMA and now he's pro-FEMA. He lied by pretending his Massachusetts health-care program was nothing like Obamacare when Obama's plan was modeled after the Massachusetts program.
But perhaps a recent example is most telling as to exactly what kind of person is Mr. Romney. What follows comes from an article at Salon.com by Jillian Rayfield, titled "Romney Camp spent $5,000 to stage storm relief event."
A couple of days ago, while watching TV, I saw a video of Romney in Dayton, Ohio, busily collecting "donated" supplies for the victims of Hurricane Sandy. At the time, I didn't think much of it, other than to wonder if this was a ploy as was Ryan's soup kitchen fiasco a few weeks earlier.
Well, it turns out to indeed have been a ploy to play on the sympathies of voters (especially "undecided" ones) in the state of Ohio! The whole thing was a setup. It began as a campaign event but Romney and friends decided they could and should try to set things up so as to make it appear that the candidate had a great heart and really cared about the "47 percent" that he disparaged not long before.
What happened, according to Ms. Rayfield, is that the Romney bunch bought $5,000 worth of "goodies" at a local Walmart which were promptly "put on display" as "donations."
"Supporters were told to bring supplies to the event and then bring them up to a table where Romney would be sitting with Ohio Sen. Rob Portman. 'To complete the photo-op, Romney would lead his crew carrying the goods out of the gymnasium and into the Penske rental truck parked outside,' McKay Coppins of Buzzfeed writes."
It worked like this: Volunteers would grab one of these "donations," and then walk up and give them to Romney who "took them, smiled, and offered an earnest 'Thank You.'"
It was all a lie! But the final straw perhaps, was that those working on Hurricane Sandy's "battlefields," didn't want these kinds of donations. They didn't know how to get them in place, or where to store them and didn't have the labor necessary to deal with them. What they needed were monetary donations.
So, while Romney's smiling for the cameras and pretending that people are actually donating goods for those suffering from Sandy's destructive power, the real "rescuers" are saying "Don't send that stuff! Send money!"
