Steve Benen, relentlessly pounding the pavement on the Slippery Mitt’s mendacity beat, catches this little Rmoneyism.
Mitt Romney sat down with CNBC’s Larry Kudlow, and made a curious observation. He said voters who want a strong economy should vote for him, but Americans “ought to give, whichever president is going to be elected, at least six months or a year to get those policies in place.”
So let’s apply that standard to President Obama’s job creation record, shall we?
But look what happens when we start the clock, as Romney suggests, six months to a year after President Obama was sworn in. In fact, if we don’t hold Obama’s first year against him, the economy has added over 3.7 million jobs overall during his presidency, and over 4.2 million in the private sector.
Mitt makes that case eloquently in the hilarious “Up With Chris Hayes” video at the link. Of course, that Rmoney standard only applies to him, not to the rest of “you people.” And especially not to that Muslim, Kenyan, Commie, Marxist, Apologizer guy currently occupying Mitt’s rightfully ordained place in the White House.
Evolving Deep Southerner
“Up With Chris Hayes” reminds me way too much of the “Up With People” shows I was forced to watch at Six Flags Over Georgia as a child.
Evolving Deep Southerner
And I was the first post in response, too, in case anybody missed that. Just pointing that out if anybody did.
danimal
Since I don’t believe that Rmoney is stupid, I can only conclude the man is a liar, a sociopath, or both. There is no way to reconcile using the Rmoney 6 to 12 month delay standard in 2013 but not giving Obama use of the same standard in 2009 in the midst of an accelerating global meltdown.
Either a president (or MA Gov, for that matter) is responsible for the economic performance every day of his presidency or he’s not.
One standard, asshole.
Baud
Obama’s done yeoman’s work considering everything he inherited and everything he’s been up against since day one. If he isn’t reelected, it’ll be one of the biggest political travesties in the nation’s history.
Hill Dweller
Notice the difference between the private sector numbers and the overall numbers? That is almost entirely due to public sector job losses in Republican controlled states.
The wingnuts have undermined the recovery, and it needs to be shouted from the rooftops.
Raven
@Evolving Deep Southerner: Bored?
BGinCHI
Too many Americans want a genuine, bona fide Daddy Warbucks figure and will vote for anyone with money falling out of their pockets. No matter how they earned (or didn’t earn) it.
Wait, I just looked up Daddy Warbucks and it turns out he was a much better and nicer capitalist than Mitt.
Fucking hell.
SiubhanDuinne
More and more — really, with every day that passes — I think if Rmoney were actually to win the popular and/or electoral college vote in November, the first thing he would do — in the immortal precedent set by William F. Buckley Jr — is to ask for a recount. Because seriously dude.
Steeplejack
@Evolving Deep Southerner:
And aren’t you ashamed you wasted that “first” on an Up with People reference? It was your time, man.
Evolving Deep Southerner
@Raven: I reckon. These quotidian “outrages/contradictions” that ain’t going to go anywhere never get me too excited. Let’s get to debate season and then we’ll talk. Of course, even if Rmoney’s head spun 360 degrees and he was projectile vomiting pea soup Blair-Whatever-Her-Name-Is wouldn’t change the final popular vote outcome by more than a percentage point or two down in this neck of the woods. It’s depressing that the region of the country that would benefit most from a second term supports it least.
Evolving Deep Southerner
@Steeplejack: I am ashamed. Deeply so.
jl
Krazy Train acomin’, Mitt. You in the headlights, and you can’t even spit out your BS now without choking. How you gonna be ready? How?
Joe Biden: GOP ‘dead wrong’ on economy in 2012
http://youtu.be/brZwJzHw4t0
SiubhanDuinne
More and more — really, with every day that passes — I think if Rmoney were actually to win the popular and/or electoral college vote in November, the first thing he would do — in the immortal precedent set by William F. Buckley Jr — is to demand a recount. Because seriously dude.
Raven
@Evolving Deep Southerner: Fuckin A Dawg. I’m still wired on Maui and it’s 39 days till suck ass Georgia’s football season starts. And the Olympics! Two fish in a bucket if the sun don’t shine, fuck it!
Raven
@SiubhanDuinne: If he wins we’ll have another dick-head in office. All this “It’s the most important election of out time” is just so much ragtime. He’ll betray the wingnuts fucks just like every other one of these people betray whoever the fuck thinks they really will do what they say. Don’t mean nothin. . .
SiubhanDuinne
@Evolving Deep Southerner: Fifty years ago, or more, the predecessor organization to Up With People used to come to Atlanta every year and do three- and four-week stands. It was called Moral Re-Armament (MRA) and they used to do these huge shows at the Fox every night, using musicians from the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra to supplement their core pit band.
My father was a cellist with the ASO at that time, and he and most of his fellow musicians hated the MRA crew, but a gig’s a gig, right? So every night during intermission they would wait until the conductor had left the pit, then quietly take the conductor’s baton and shave maybe 1/8 or 1/4 of an inch off the tip — not enough to be noticeable in the dim pit orchestra lighting, but within a few days very apparent in the heft of the stick. According to my dad (who is long gone and not able to verify or correct this account) they did this year after year, and the MRA guy was just super cheerful and Christian about everything. Did he know what was going on? Probably. Did he know who was responsible? Maybe, maybe not. Hardly matters. Me, I just crack up at the idea of the MRA conductor waving a tiny little stump of a baton by the end of week four of the Atlanta gig.
Raven
@SiubhanDuinne: Cool!
Evolving Deep Southerner
@SiubhanDuinne: He probably just thought he was wearing the slender son of a bitch out through his enthusiastic waving of it. Just the natural life cycle of a little stick in the hand of a man slinging it about in the name of Righteousness, you know?
Evolving Deep Southerner
Moral Re-Armament would be a damn fine name for a rock band, by the way. If I could play anything or sing, I’d form a band with that name. But I’m not just ill-equipped but non-equipped to do so.
Amir Khalid
@Evolving Deep Southerner:
That show title reminds me of those 7-Up commercials Orlando Jones did in the 1990s. They went something like this:
Jones: “Make 7-Up yours!”
Bystander: “Hey, up yours too, asshole!”
Eric Lindholm
Holy cow, Obama’s a miracle worker! A million new jobs a year is only about one-third of what we need just to keep up with population growth in this country.
Hey and didn’t Obama’s economic team promise we’d be below 6% unemployment if we just spend a trillion dollars in “stimulus.” Good times.
Pen
@Eric Lindholm: I know I’m committing a cardinal sin and feeding an obvious troll, but really dude? Bullshit like that might work on Fox or at RedState, but you really don’t want to tussle with this crowd if that’s the best you’ve got.
SiubhanDuinne
@Eric Lindholm:
Hiya Derf!!
Killjoy
@Eric Lindholm: Meanwhile, conservatives’ preferred austerity is precipitating a catastrophic European economic collapse. Keep fucking that chicken, Eric.
NotMax
“No one can earn a million dollars honestly.”
- William Jennings Bryan
jl
The US has not, in fact, spent a trillion on fiscal stimulus, so not sure what the point is of certain outbursts. Why respond to a counterfactual that is claimed to be fact?
Mnemosyne
@Eric Lindholm:
They did, and yet Congress decided to spend only $152 billion.
Imagine how much better we’d be doing if Congress had listened to Obama and authorized the trillion he asked for rather than trying to do things on the cheap. You get what you pay for.
Mnemosyne
@jl:
Because it’s really quite perfect — the fact that we did not spend a trillion on stimulus and thus had a slow recovery pretty much proves that the Obama team was right and we’d be doing a lot better right now if Congress hadn’t decided to practice some false economy and cut the stimulus unnecessarily.
I know people like EL — they buy a Yugo because the sticker price is so much less than a Toyota, and then they bitch and moan because it’s constantly breaking down. Well, no shit, Sherlock — that’s what you get for only looking at the price tag and not looking under the hood to see what kind of quality you’re getting for your dollar. Price isn’t everything.
Eric Lindholm
Quick question, geniuses: who was in charge of both houses of Congress when it only spent 15% of the stimulus?
Keynesian stimulus calls for spending to be done quickly and massively. For the first two years of Obama’s presidency, he had a filibuster-free majority in Congress. So why didn’t the Democrats spend that cash?
Yeah, I’m real afraid of this crowd, what with its tenuous grasp of facts and stuff.
jl
@Eric Lindholm: you just changed the subject because you your first lame decrepit outburst was flat wrong, dude.
Eric Lindholm
JL: huh? Which factual fact did I state was wrong? Name it.
PeakVT
For the first two years of Obama’s presidency, he had a filibuster-free majority in Congress.
Liar.
El Cid
@Eric Lindholm:
Well of course you shouldn’t be afraid of ‘this crowd,’ because you’re on a fucking internet blog comments section, and therefore outside the realm of gutsiness or threat.
On the other hand GIMME MAH 15 CENT I DUN POSTED GOOD I KIN DO IT AGIN TOO C’MON GIMME MUNEE
tybee
@Evolving Deep Southerner:
you, too, eh?
jl
Oh, for God’s sake. Sad.
Eric Lindholm
PeakVT: whoops, you’re right. Obama had a filibuster-proof majority only for the first year of his presidency.
In February 2010, Massachusetts voted to replace Ted Kennedy’s former seat with Scott Brown. How this somehow prevented Congress from spending previously-approved “stimulus” funds, we’ll never know.
Pen
@PeakVT: Shhhh!!! He’s probably one of the dumbasses who claims that there wasn’t a single filibuster in 2009 because a forced cloture vote “isn’t a filibuster”.
Eric Lindholm
JL & El Cid – nice comebacks. Well-founded.
Pen
@Eric Lindholm: At no point in the 111th Congress did Democrats have a 60+ member majority. Above 50? Sure, but that’s irrelevent given the 60 member requirement for cloture bring a motion up for vote.
The modern Senate, thanks to the GOP, isn’t a majority rules institution. It should be, but it isn’t. It’s a place where you need 60+ members to agree to vote on anything, and the GOP’s been abusing the hell out of that “rule”.
jl
@Eric Lindholm: Damn straight. Can you go look up how large the fiscal stimulus was and how much has been spent so far and report back, with a references?
I am generous and will give you an incomplete, rather than an F.
You are welcome.
PeakVT
Obama had a filibuster-proof majority only for the first year of his presidency.
Now you’re only half wrong.
One more chance to get it right…
Eric Lindholm
Obama didn’t have a 60-vote majority in the Senate when he crammed Obamacare through Congress before Scott Brown could take office? Hmmm…I must have mis-remembered that.
As for the “stimulus”, what difference does it matter how many Republicans were in Congress? This was $848 billion in allocated money that a Democrat-majority House and Senate were incapable of spending in a way that would actually stimulate the economy.
Oh, and here’s your data from the CBO: “At the close of fiscal year 2009, agencies reported spending a little under $108 billion in ARRA funds.” That’s lessthan 15% in the first year of the “stimulus.”
http://www.cbo.gov/publication/24988
OK, it’s been fun kids. Good night.
Jay in Oregon
This story about Romney needing 6-12 months to really get to work solving the economic problems lends further credence to my pet theory that Romney sees the White House as some ceremonial position, rather than a hard, thankless fucking job.
I don’t know of any job where you get to coast for 6 GODDAMN MONTHS before getting to work. And frankly, it’s an insult to the millions of unemployed people in this country who have been needing relief for a lot longer than that, pretending that their livelihoods and the well-being of their families are a line on a “to do” list.
No thanks, Romney. I’ll vote for the guy who is ready to get to work on day one–the one that’s been cleaning up the mess the last entitled, egotistical GOP fuckwit left us four years ago.
Pen
@Jay in Oregon: Work, work, work. When’s a guy supposed to find time to go brush clearing and work on his fake “Real Murkin” twang with all that work?
Jay in Oregon
Seriously, though, that 6-12 month thing has got to be good for an attack ad.
“Why does Mitt Romney think that millions of unemployed people in this country can afford to wait 6-12 months for relief? People like the ones whose livelihoods were destroyed by the kind of decisions Mitt made while running Bain Capital, putting good American companies out of business and shipping their jobs overseas.”
PeakVT
Hmmm…I must have mis-remembered that.
Yes, you did. Democrats had 60 seats from when Al Franken was sworn in on Jul 7, 2009 until Ted Kennedy died on August 25, 2009, and then from Sept. 24, 2009 when Paul Kirk was sworn in until February 4, 2010 when Scott was sworn in.
Here’s a clue, kid: it helps to know WTF you are talking about before you open your yap.
Another Halocene Human
@Eric Lindholm: Wait, you knocked off already? Breitbart’s ghost and Little Lord Romenel were counting on you! How dare you sleep on the job!
Mnemosyne
@Eric Lindholm:
I have to say, that’s the fastest goalpost-moving I’ve ever seen on this blog, and I’ve seen a lot of them.
They probably heard the sonic boom three counties over.
TenguPhule
That right there is enough bullshit to power a rocket to the moon and back. Preferably with Eric son of Eric’s lying ass on it.
TenguPhule
Bain Capital.
TenguPhule
One is one too many as each senator wields power far out of proportion to their number.
Also, they like to shit in bills too often.