When Will They Call Romney A Liar?

Dear CBS, ABC, NBC, NPR, PBS, CNN, (forget FoxNews, we know what they're in the business of), AP, UPI, major national newspapers,

Watch this, it explains my complaint. It's footnoted.

When are you going to start calling Romney a liar? When do you plan to point out the lies?

And don't pretend both campaigns are lying equally. It's not fair to call a partisan argument or judgment or point of view a lie. Distorting someone's words, though, is a lie in the Mosaic sense. It's bearing false witness.

It would be more correct, more precise, to call Romney a persistent liar, a stubborn liar. Either way, he's a liar who refuses to belief the truth when he doesn't like the truth. He's said that. He knows what he says is untrue and yet he repeats it for personal gain.

Because telling the truth is what newspapers are supposed to do, you should explain that Romney is a liar. Repeat it as often as Romney repeats the lies.

And you should correct the lies, rather than just repeating them. His millions and his friends' millions are already repeating the lies on your air and in your pages.

There is the welfare lie, and there is the "you didn't build that" lie. There is some pretty good debunking out there. Here's an NPR fact check story scolding Romney. But people are busy. They count on the news to explain when someone is lying his way into office.

The "you didn't build that" distortion could, I suppose, be called a stupid misunderstanding. After a month and millions of dollars of ads wrapped around the stupid misunderstanding, you probably should start calling Romney stupid too. For refusing to understand what a normal thinking person would be able to understand after it's been patiently explained to him by people able to think and reason.

To be elaborately bend-over-backwards fair, you could convene a panel of eight year olds with decent grades and ask them if they understood Obama when he said: "those roads––if you have a business––you didn't build that". And then you could say whether Romney is as smart as an eight year old. I'm confident he is, but he behaves and speaks and buys ads that make it look like he isn't.

Participating in stupidity and lies makes a news organization and its reporters and editors into stupid liars too.