Mitt Romney’s shameless distance from the truth

When I was a kid, I knew a boy named Denver. He was an inveterate liar. He would say things like: “See my grandpa’s pickup over there? In the back it’s filled with cases of Coke and Pepsi.”

And you’d go over and look in the bed of the pickup and it was perfectly empty.

Denver didn’t care. He would just go on, blithely, with his next tall tale. He was oblivious to the idea that he’d become a sad joke.

If I didn’t know better, I’d swear Denver grew up to be Willard Mitt Romney, the presumptive Republican nominee for president.

Out for a spin: Willard Mitt Romney

Yesterday on NBC, Romney—rejecting calls for stronger gun laws in the wake of the Aurora, Colorado theater shooting—said of suspect James Holmes: “This person shouldn’t have had any kind of weapons and bombs and other devices and it was illegal for him to have many of those things already. But he had them. And so we can sometimes hope that just changing the law will make all bad things go away. It won’t.”

According to Kasie Hunt of the Associated Press, it may have been illegal for Holmes to have built the explosives with which he booby-trapped his apartment. But it’s not known whether he obtained the component parts/ingredients of these devices illegally. More important: All of the firearms that Homes purchased for the cinema shooting that killed 12 people and wounded dozens more were obtained legally.

Romney conveniently ignored that key point altogether.

To call Romney “disingenuous” would be kind. He may not have lied outright here, but he evades the whole truth. He commits a lie by omission. And he does it in the face of common knowledge. Anyone who has at all followed the Aurora story knows that Holmes obtained his deadly firearms legally. (We don’t even have to walk over to see whether there’s any soda pop in the back of the pickup.)

The new episode is reminiscent of the Romney campaign’s obvious distortion of Barack Obama’s “didn’t build that” statement. Romney doesn’t seem to fret that he exaggerates or slants the truth in egregious fashion. It almost seems as though he’s unaware he’s doing it. To put it crudely, at times he just seems to make shit up as he goes along. He knows that his hard-core constituency will nod at what he says (and repeat it) without question. And he seems to figure the media will just give him a pass and not press him or call him out on it. Which is often, it seems, the case.

By the way, as for Romney’s contention that changing laws won’t “make all bad things go away”: In 2007, Romney called for laws that would put filters on all computers in order to strain out pornographic content. He seemed to think then that it was OK to legislate in order to try to curb “bad” things.

Why is it OK to use governmental regulation to ban pictures of human genitalia but not OK to let the government try harder to curb super-phallic assault weapons that can leave a movie theater roiling with human blood?

Riddle me that, Denver.