Debbie Wasserman Schultz's talking points clone hath spoken:
Stephanie Cutter, the deputy campaign manager for President Barack Obama, said in an interview Monday that she stood by all of the president's television ads, despite the assertion from Obama himself that some of the spots have gone "overboard." "Absolutely, absolutely," Cutter said on CNN's "The Situation Room" when asked if she could back all of Obama's campaign ads ... "We take fact-checking very, very seriously. We spend a lot of time making sure that the facts up on the air, we're able to back them up. And, you know, just think about the contrast with the Romney campaign. Their chief strategist Neil Newhouse said they weren't going to be beholden by fact-checkers. There's a big difference. We take fact-checking very seriously."
Do you, now? Is this the same Stephanie Cutter who was caught red-handed outright lying about the despicable "Mitt Romney killed a woman" attack, which every fact-checker under the sun ripped to shreds? Ah, yes. It is. She even doubled down on the lie. And is this the same Stephanie Cutter who publicly suggested that Mitt Romney was a felon then refused to apologize, even after her beloved fact-checkers thoroughly dismantled her entire argument? And didn't the campaign keep airing the debunked, "Four Pinocchios," "no evidence" ads that fueled the controversy anyway? Come to think of it, wasn't an abortion-related ad that even left-leaning Politifact rated as "Pants On Fire" rank as one the Obama campaign's most-frequently run spots over several months? (Answers: Yes, yes, and yes). Say, wasn't it also Stephanie Cutter who made laughably false claims about the comparative number of jobs created under the Reagan and Obama recoveries? Yeah, that was her, too. I could go on, but you get the picture. The woman lies all the time. But she and the Obama campaign take fact-checking very, verrryy seriously. After all, she says so. The Romney campaign has a nice little mash-up of Cutter "absolutely" standing by every single one of the ads they've run, followed by Obama's 60 Minutes admission that some of the attacks have gone "overboard:"
Obama playing good cop doesn't get him off the hook, either. He refused to repudiate the vile 'cancer' ad run by his SuperPAC, and he's personally signed off on every spot his campaign has run -- "overboard" or otherwise. Incidentally, why would Romney polling director Neil Newhouse (quoted by Cutter) have said that the Republican campaign won't allow itself to be paralyzed by "fact-checkers"? Jonah Goldberg exposes the MSM's sham industry in a hilarious must-read piece:
Paul Ryan has been the most prominent victim of the fact-check schtick. A particularly odd form of madness overtook the so-called mainstream media the night Ryan gave his acceptance speech in Tampa. From the outside, it looked like the establishment political press was receiving Obama campaign tweets straight through their fillings: Ryan was a liar! "The verdict," reported the Washington Post, "rendered by a slew of media fact checkers, was immediate and unequivocal: In his first major speech before the American people, the Republican vice presidential nominee repeatedly left out key facts, ignored context and was blind to his own hypocrisy." Really? The fact-checkers diagnosed Ryan with blindness to his own hypocrisy? That's a neat trick. The only problem: Everything Ryan said was true. Nearly every charge of lying boiled down to Ryan's not raising counterarguments favorable to Obama -- a standard not normally applied to politicians, and certainly never considered the litmus test for truth-telling. Notoriously, Ryan noted that in 2008 Obama suggested that an auto plant in Ryan's district that was scheduled for closure would stay open for 100 years if he was elected. The fact-checkers and Obama campaign surrogates immediately cried foul: The plant, they said, actually closed under Bush! But the AP ignored its own (accurate) reporting on the plant's closing in 2009 in order to make its "fact check" as damning as possible. The second problem: Ryan's point was not that Obama's prediction was factually wrong, but that Obama over-promised. That's what Obama does: Fish gotta swim, bird gotta fly, Obama needs to promise the moon. The fact-checkers opted to twist Ryan's point into something he wasn't saying, and then charged him with lying for saying it.
More recently, a Washington Post fact-checker waded into a debate over Barack Obama's stance on abortion. After a long and convoluted discussion, the fact-checker conceded, reluctantly, that yes, Obama did oppose legislation that would protect babies who survived abortions. Obama has denied this and accused anyone who says otherwise of lying. But rather than give Obama a poor score, the fact-checker punted: "The evidence suggests we could have awarded Four Pinocchios [their worst score] to the former Illinois senator for his comments . . . but that interview is several years old now, and it's not the focus of this particular column." How convenient! The Post can't even identify Obama by name as the politician deserving of the dreaded four scarlet "P"s. He's merely the former Illinois senator who deserves to be called a liar about his support for infanticide -- but we're too sleepy to bother.
Hopeless. By the way, be sure to read Jonah's full column, lest you miss Anchorman references and delicious slams on the MSNBC set. I'll leave you with a final quotation from Stephanie Cutter:
That’s the other thing that you find most often with women. They’re not really concerned about what’s happened over the last four years, they really want to know what’s going to happen in the next four years.”
What a glowing endorsement of her boss' term in office. Who really cares what he's done in office? Forward to four more years! Anyone care to fact-check that?
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