Monday, January 09, 2012

Should Liberals Lie About Romney's "I Like Being Able To Fire People" Comment?

Drum asks the question, but thinks the answer is in the negative...er, that's my hypothesis based on reading him all the time...not his words. But I'm what you'd call sure about it...

Sullivan, peace be upon him, admits that it's a misrepresentation, which is good. Unfortunately, he then gestures at one of the slimiest defenses of such misrepresentations, the ol' he-should-know-better-than-to-say-something-people-like-me-will-misrepresent defense, writing:
...it's still a dumb statement for Mitt Bain Romney to be saying in this climate.
 No, no, no Sully. Bad Sully.You know better than that, dude. That's almost as lame as trying to pretend that he meant the bad thing that he didn't mean instead of the reasonable thing that he meant.

Should liberals misrepresent what conservatives say in cases like this? After all, they're doing it to us. They cannot win without doing so, and they do it all the time. It is their current default strategy.

And: in this case, we're right, they're wrong. We need Obama, we need non-Romney. And their only chance of winning requires them to misrepresent the facts. Shouldn't we do it too? Just enough, perhaps, to off-set their ill-gotten advantage. How about that? We don't have to say that Mitt Romney was born in Kenya or anything... Hell, dude really is a kind of robber-baron scumbag. Couldn't we just...y'know...this once...do to them what they do to us all the freaking time?

How about if I represent, at least right now, the side of our minds that says that the answer is no?

Our friends across the aisle didn't go crazy all at once you know... They went crazy step by incremental step...and there was no particular one that seemed all that, y'know, bad...


Just sayin'...

9 Comments:

Blogger The Mystic said...

But...we don't even need to lie. As you put it earlier, the facts are in our favor, and it is they who must obscure them to succeed.

So, no, we shouldn't lie. Why bother giving them an opportunity for riposte with such a risky maneuver when they're leaving so much of their attack surface wide open?

2:48 PM  
Blogger Winston Smith said...

Prudential considerations?

For shame...

3:21 PM  
Blogger The Mystic said...

lol! Your entire post was a prudential consideration!

3:35 PM  
Blogger Winston Smith said...

Take it back, butthole.

3:47 PM  
Blogger The Mystic said...

I can't. It's on the Internet.

And if I could, I totally wouldn't.

Next time you start waxing hypothetical about situations in which obvious immorality is acceptable, I'll just say, "Don't be such a gingrich."

THERE'S a prudential consideration for ya. Think you could take that? Do ya? Do ya think you could take it?

Further prudential considerations against promoting obvious immorality for WS: I still have my free ass-kicking in MINT condition. MINT.

8:33 PM  
Blogger Winston Smith said...

Damn, hoped you'd forgotten about that free ass-kicking...

9:25 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

I just can't grok your post. Consider the following mad lib:
I like being able to fire people who _________.
There's just no way to fill it in. The only people I have any chance of firing are people that I don't like firing. I'd love to be able to fire Mitt Romney, but I can't.
Even with the full statement, who ever talks about "firing" your doctor? You can shop around for a new one, but Ying your current one? I for one don't have any doctors on my payroll...or any one else for that matter.
Summary: you are wrong on this and Newt Gingrich is right.

-mac

4:24 AM  
Blogger The Mystic said...

Mac, I don't really understand your post, and perhaps that's because I don't really know (or care about) what Romney said...

But that summary is the most terrifying one-line summary I've seen on the Internet in some time. Kudos.

2:48 PM  
Blogger Winston Smith said...

Et tu, mac?

2:57 PM  

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