Willard sinks deeper into the gutter every day, it seems. Now he has chosen to lie about President Obama's approach to welfare. The story is here:
Mitt Romney’s campaign is seizing on a story that’s been percolating on conservative blogs for weeks, rolling out a new attack today against President Obama for “unilaterally dismantling” the bipartisan welfare reform regime signed into law by President Clinton. A new ad from the campaign states: “President Obama quietly announced a plan to gut welfare reform by dropping work requirements. Under Obama’s plan, you wouldn’t have to work and wouldn’t have to train for a job — they just send you your welfare check.”
As has already been widely noted, the line of attack is complicated by a few problems. First of all, it’s not true, or at least wildly misleading. Obama’s plan doesn’t end work requirements, but rather grants waivers to states that propose alternative requirements that suit them better than a one-size-fits-all federal plan, something conservatives usually support. As the Washington Post’s Ezra Klein wrote last month, when the story first started gaining traction on the right, “The Obama administration is not removing the bill’s work requirements at all. He’s changing them to allow states more flexibility. But the principle that welfare programs must require recipients to move toward employment isn’t going anywhere.”
Secondly, it’s a little tricky to slam Obama for handing out waivers when Romney himself supported the exact same proposal as governor of Massachusetts in 2005. That year, 29 governors, including Romney, signed a letter from the Republican Governors Association asking Congress for broader welfare waivers. Romney’s signature is the second one listed, right under a passage calling for “increased waiver authority” in the welfare program to provide more flexibility in “allowable work activities.” [My emphasis.]
Former President Clinton has denounced this lie already.
There's more than a whiff of racial dog-whistle in Romney's ugly accusation. Perhaps nothing fills the radical right with more rage than the image of lazy dark people living off the money of hard-working white people. It's a sick, dishonest caricature, but it works too often. Willard will use it because he'll throw anything at Barack Obama he can. And if he has to lie to do it, he has no problem with that.
He lies every single day about every single thing. That's what sociopaths like Willard do.
Romney is skating on some pretty thin ice. He's pissing off a lot of people.
ReplyDeleteOppression breeds violence.
Let's focus on getting out the vote first.
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