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Thursday, November 3, 2011
Boomer with Attitude Thom Tillis & Mitt Romney: Reality Deniers R Us
Posted By John Grooms on Thu, Nov 3, 2011 at 3:49 PM
House Speaker Thom Tillis and GOP presidential contender Mitt Romney have something in common besides party affiliation: they both deny reality in a way that’s positively Orwellian.
Let me explain, starting with Tillis, the Pride of Cornelius. He held another in his series of town hall meetings two days ago, this one in Hickory. Before the meeting, he got together with folks at the Hickory Record newspaper, where, once again, Tillis denied that cuts to the education budget enacted by the General Assembly have nothing to do with 1,853 public school teachers and teacher assistants being laid off, nor with the 4,000-plus teacher and TA positions that were eliminated.
Now, Tillis wants to — get this — hold hearings to determine why school superintendents cut teaching jobs. Hmm, Tom, was it maybe because you took a big slice out of their budgets? But here’s the kicker: according to the Hickory Record editors, Tillis indicated the problem could be that politics were involved in why teachers were canned, presumably in order to make the GOP look bad.
Huh?! It’s bad enough to not admit that cuts you directed in the legislature have cost thousands of teachers their jobs. But to come up with some cock-and-bull story about school superintendents laying off teachers to make you look bad is just, well, incredible — in every sense of the word, from “impossible to believe” and “far-fetched” to “astonishing” and “mind-boggling.”
Tillis’ hogwash about teacher layoffs is bad, but it pales before the “I’ll say absolutely anything to get elected” strategies of GOP presidential candidate Romney. The Robotic One has claimed that his tax plan would protect the middle class, but yesterday he took it even further on a Tampa TV news show, saying (with a straight face), “The policies I’ve put forward are tax cuts for the middle class. I’m proposing no tax cuts for the rich.”
To cut right to the chase, that's a flat-out lie. As Think Progress points out, Romney’s tax plan “consists of $6.6 trillion in tax cuts, the vast majority going to the wealthy and corporations.” And those middle class tax cuts? You’ll only get them if you pile up capital gains, which most middle-class families do not have.
It’s one thing for a politician to stretch the truth, but it’s quite another for him to simply lie through his teeth and deny the reality that everyone around him can see. In Romney’s case, the more I see him, the more he seems like someone to whom his own words don’t even mean much, especially considering the conglomeration of flip-flops, misdirections and outright lies he’s been throwing around. Just thought you'd like to know.
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