Romney’s Latest Lie, His Former Lies, and Why We Must Not Put Liars in the White House

robertreich.org — “We’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact-checkers,” says Neil Newhouse, a Romney pollster. It is not even being dictated by facts. There are two lessons here. First, lies financed by deep pockets are hard to refute, but they must be refuted. Otherwise, there is no accountability in our democracy. So far, the American media have not adequately refuted Romney’s lies. They seem to believe that dissembling is permissible, or that pointing out this extraordinary lying machine is itself an act of partisanship. Second, anyone who tells or countenances such lies cannot be trusted to hold the highest office in our land, because he has no compunctions about feeding false information to the public. In recent memory we’ve had a president who told us there were “weapons of mass destruction” in Iraq, when in fact there were none. We dare not risk another George W. Bush.

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