Steve Benen, who once upon a time was a contributor here at C&L before being hired by the Washington Monthly is no longer a regular guest on Rachel Maddow's show, probably because because he's working for her now, both as a producer and writing for her blog. And you can definitely see his influence when she does segments like this one, because he's been writing about Mitt Romney and his constant lying on the campaign trail for some time now.
He's been keeping a running list and doing weekly installments documenting Romney's lies in a series that comes out on Fridays, the latest of which from last week you can read here: Chronicling Mitt's Mendacity, Vol. XIX. I'm sure Romney's latest which Maddow reported on in the clip above will make this Friday's post as well.
As Rachel noted, on a crazy news day when most of the media was reporting on George W. Bush at the White House having his portrait unveiled, Romney openly admitting to sending hecklers out to scream over Obama adviser David Axelrod and the trial of John Edwards finally coming to an end, Mitt Romney appeared for a campaign stop at the failed energy company Solyndra, and besides the crazy conspiracy theories the Romney campaign was throwing out there that Dave wrote about this Thursday and the fact that Romney has a Solyndra type problem of his own from his time as Governor in Massachusetts, there's also the problem that Mitt Romney just straight up lied about the Obama administration supposedly steering contracts to "friends and family."
Here's more on that from the Time article she quoted in the segment: Mitt Romney’s Ads: Still Wrong on the Stimulus:
I’ve been on leave writing a book about the stimulus, so I’ve let others judge the Pants-on-Fire ads and Four-Pinocchio attacks and Solyndra-related nonsense that Republicans have been peddling about the stimulus. It’s certainly created jobs for fact-checkers. But now that I’m back, I suppose it’s my duty to weigh in on Mitt Romney’s new stimulus-bashing ad–apparently part of a new stimulus-bashing campaign–because it’s not just a rehash of the same old bogus charges. It’s added a brand new bogus charge that perfectly captures the up-is-down stimulus debate. [...]
It was a line near the end of Romney’s ad that caught my attention: “The Inspector General said contracts were steered to ‘friends and family.’” That sounded like news. I’ve spent two years in stimulus-world, and I had no idea an inspector general had said that. I asked the Romney campaign for documentation, and it produced a Newsweek article asserting that Energy Department inspector general Gregory Friedman “has testified that contracts have been steered to ‘friends and family.’”
Except that Newsweek article was an excerpt from the book “Throw Them All Out,” written by Peter Schweizer, a right-winger who has served as an adviser to Sarah Palin’s PAC, edited one of Andrew Breitbart’s websites, and written a slew of books portraying liberals as pond scum. Not exactly a disinterested source. And it turns out that the inspector general never testified that stimulus contracts were steered to friends and family. He said his office was investigating whether stimulus contracts were steered to friends and family. So far, it hasn’t confirmed that any were.
The talking heads on cable news keep repeating ad nauseum that "if we're talking about the economy, Mitt Romney is winning" the debate and that any focus on the economy is always great for Mitt Romney. It's great for Mitt Romney if they continue to allow him to lie unchecked.
As Rachel pointed out, since he's running for President, letting the public know he's lying constantly might be kind of important.
