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Rand Simberg on how Romney can fight the Democrat’s false narratives.
How Romney can fight back against “The Big Lie.”
We know what we’re going to hear from the Democrats this week at their convention, and for the next nine weeks until the election. They clearly are having trouble making the case for their tenure, not even being able to articulate a consistent and coherent answer to the question of whether we’re better off than we were four years ago.
So they are going to have to somehow make the voters fear the unknown over their recent bitter economic experience. We’ve already heard the talking point from the president himself: that Romney is proposing that we go back to the bad, old, failed Bush policies that created the mess we’re currently in. In fact (like much of the Obama campaign strategy), it is a retread from 2008, when (on zero basis) the theme was that a McCain victory would be a continuation of the Bush administration.
Accepting this argument requires that two premises be acknowledged: First, that it was the Bush policies that created the mess; and second, that Romney’s proposals are a return to them. Both of these premises are false, but the Republicans have done a poor job of pushing back against either of them. If they don’t do a better one, there is some danger that they will actually gain traction with swing voters.
The first premise is not just false, but actually turns things on their head. …
… The real cause of the current mess (ignoring the upcoming fiscal disaster caused by uncontrolled spending and deficits) was the housing boom and bust. The boom was caused by policies going back decades to encourage people to buy houses they couldn’t afford and to coerce and extort banks to lend them the money to do so. While this had some support from Republicans, it was a policy primarily driven by Democrats. It wasn’t just the free hand given to Fannie and Freddie, something that the Bush administration attempted to rein in, but to no avail thanks to corrupt Democrats like Chris Dodd and Barney Frank. It was also the action of “community organizers” like Barack Obama, who himself sued Citibank in the 1990s to compel them to give out loans to people who couldn’t afford them. As The Independent pointed out four years ago, Democratic fingerprints were all over the housing crisis: …
IBD Editors lay the blame for the real estate bust at Clinton’s feet.
History has rarely seen anything as surreal as former President Clinton riding into Charlotte as a hero rescuing America and President Obama from failed Republican economic policies.
Clinton was the architect of the financial crisis, yet he was able to use the Democratic National Convention to polish his phony credentials as economic genius.
He brazenly warned that GOP challengers Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan would wreck the economy by going back to “the same old policies that got us in trouble in the first place.”
“They want to cut taxes for high-income Americans even more than President Bush did. They want to get rid of those pesky financial regulations designed to prevent another crash and prohibit federal bailouts.”
This may be Clinton’s biggest whopper yet. Truth is, it was his own reckless housing policies that wrecked the economy.
Compared to his plan to nationalize the health care system, his housing policy seemed a small and rather innocuous plank in his domestic agenda, and few paid it much mind. But under his National Homeownership Strategy, Clinton took more than 100 executive actions to pry bank lending windows wide open.
First, using his executive order powers, he marshaled 10 federal agencies under the little-known Interagency Task Force on Fair Lending to enforce new “flexible” mortgage underwriting guidelines to combat “lending discrimination in any form.”
For the first time, banks were ordered to qualify low-income minorities with spotty credit.
The 1994 policy planted the seeds of the mortgage crisis, as lenders abandoned prudent underwriting standards altogether. …
Jennifer Rubin lists 10 surprises at the conventions.
Political conventions are heavily scripted and hardly ever make news. But the Democratic and Republican conventions did have their share of surprises. Here are my favorites:
1. Clint Eastwood’s remarks were more memorable and more effective than President Obama’s. The empty-chair metaphor never seemed so apt as during the Obama drone-a-thon.
2. The press, even liberal commentators, admitted that Obama had bombed. Sure, there were bitter-enders who claimed all was fine, but the cable TV talking heads and the vast majority of columnists were brutally honest. MSNBC personalities were downright glum.
3. Knowing the president has a problem with pro-Israel voters, the Obama campaign made a mess for itself by fiddling with platform language and then allowed the matter to fester for two days. The display of booing and confusion when the language was reinstated may be the most memorable thing about the 2012 Democratic National Convention. Even more surprising, Obama did not mention Jerusalem and gave short shrift to both Israel and Iran in his speech. …
Peggy Noonan outlines the soft extremism of the Dems convention.
… Beneath the funny hats, the sweet-faced delegates, the handsome speakers and the babies waving flags there was something disquieting. All three days were marked by a kind of soft, distracted extremism. It was unshowy and unobnoxious but also unsettling.
There was the relentless emphasis on Government as Community, as the thing that gives us spirit and makes us whole. But government isn’t what you love if you’re American, America is what you love. Government is what you have, need and hire. Its most essential duties—especially when it is bankrupt—involve defending rights and safety, not imposing views and values. We already have values. Democrats and Republicans don’t see all this the same way, and that’s fine—that’s what national politics is, the working out of this dispute in one direction or another every few years. But the Democrats convened in Charlotte seemed more extreme on the point, more accepting of the idea of government as the center of national life, than ever, at least to me.
The fight over including a single mention of God in the platform—that was extreme. The original removal of the single mention by the platform committee—extreme. The huge “No!” vote on restoring the mention of God, and including the administration’s own stand on Jerusalem—that wasn’t liberal, it was extreme. Comparing the Republicans to Nazis—extreme. The almost complete absence of a call to help education by facing down the powers that throw our least defended children under the school bus—this was extreme, not mainstream. …
Tough week for Debbie WasserFace. Or, as the Free Beacon calls her – Debbie Disaster.
… It has been a tough week for Wasserman Schultz. She told an audience in North Carolina that Israel’s ambassador to the United States, Michael Oren, had told her Republican policies were “dangerous” for Israel—a claim that the ambassador called an untruth in a sharply worded statement. Then she said the reporter who broke the story, Washington Examiner columnist Philip Klein, had “deliberately” misquoted her—a claim proven false by Klein’s audio recording of her remarks. Wasserman Schultz told Washington Free Beacon senior writer Adam Kredo that she had no intention of apologizing to Klein for impugning his character.
Wasserman Schultz was also involved in the negotiations that led initially to the words “God” and “Jerusalem” being removed from the Democratic Party platform—a decision later reversed after presidential intercession and amid widespread boos and catcalls from Democratic Party delegates. …
Victor Davis Hanson says some Dems are giving lying a bad name.
All politicians lie, at least in the sense of exaggerating their opponents’ lapses and downplaying their own. But there are a few rules of politically lying: the most important being that one cannot insult the intelligence of the listener by saying something that is demonstrably untrue and/or refuted by the speaker’s own mutually contradictory statements. Do that and we enter Baghdad Bob territory.
Not long ago on national television, Obama’s deputy campaign manager, Stephanie Cutter, asserted that she knew no details of Democratic super-PAC commercial-prop Joe Soptic’s life story — although Cutter herself, as an audio clip revealed, had earlier hosted an Obama conference call where Soptic had outlined in detail his bio as part of a general complaint against Mitt Romney. Cutter, in other words, simply lied that she was unfamiliar with something she was very familiar with — as the two tapes demonstrated. …
Chicago is having real problems these days and Mayor Rahm is fundraising for Obama. Contentions has the story.
The city of Chicago, the third largest in America, is crumbling into anarchy. The murder rate is so out of control that federal authorities have agreed to assist the Chicago Police Department in their efforts to curb soaring violence. The city has seen over a thirty-percent rise in its murder rate this year and in the last eight days of August, 82 people were killed or wounded by gun violence. With his city in a violent downward spiral, Mayor Rahm Emanuel has been focusing on what’s important: banning Chik-fil-A from Chicago.
On Wednesday, during Bill Clinton’s address to the DNC in Charlotte, cameras panned to Emanuel, laughing in the audience. While he was enjoying his stay in Charlotte at least three people were murdered back home in Chicago just that night. What could be more important than taking charge of one of the most violent cities in America? Apparently, for Emanuel, it’s fundraising for his old boss President Barack Obama. …
Maybe if Rahm Emanuel took care of business, people who move to Chicago from Gambia would not be thinking about moving back. SunTimes has the story.
They came to the U.S. from Gambia — in search of a better life.
But two tough decades later, some of Kenwood Academy High School student Muhammed Kebbeh’s family say they are considering going back to Africa after he became the city’s 370th murder victim this year and second of his six siblings to be gunned down on the South Side in the last six months.
“I want to pack everything up and go back,” his oldest brother, Momadu Kebbeh, 36, said Wednesday, as his devoutly Muslim family mourned and prayed at their WashingtonPark home. “What’s the point of staying here?”
Muhammed, 19, was sitting with his girlfriend when he was shot dead by masked gunmen in a drive-by shooting in the 8100 block of South Ingleside shortly after 11:30 p.m. Tuesday. Relatives say they had been especially worried about him ever since his 23-year-old brother Omar Kebbeh became Chicago’s 68th murder victim of 2012 back in February.
Muhammed moved out of the family apartment in the 5800 block of South Indiana — just a few blocks from the spot where Omar Kebbeh was killed as he walked home from work — soon after to stay with friends and wouldn’t come back, despite repeated entreaties, his brother Hajie said. …