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GOP convention flooded with lies



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The Republican party should have had a fighting chance of winning the 2012 Presidential election on the issues. Four years is more than enough time for voters to forget who created the current economic mess (hint: them).

Instead the 'We Built It!' convention is themed as a rebuttal to a statement that was never made. Here is what the President actually said:

If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you've got a business -- you didn't build that. Somebody else made that happen. The Internet didn't get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet.

The point is, is that when we succeed, we succeed because of our individual initiative, but also because we do things together. There are some things, just like fighting fires, we don't do on our own. I mean, imagine if everybody had their own fire service. That would be a hard way to organize fighting fires.
It is one thing to win a media cycle or two with an out-of-context quotation, but using a malicious mis-quotation as the whole convention theme is completely unprecedented. Fox News thinks it is 'ironic' that the Conference is 'using the President's 'own words' against him, but what is genuinely ironic here is the fact that as Issac headed towards the GOP convention, Republican governors across the South were calling for precisely the type of assistance that Obama was talking about in his speech.

The idea behind this lie is that it is meant to demonstrate the President's 'hostility to small businesses'. And so the Republicans have a parade of small business owners to tell the convention how they built their businesses on their own without any government help apart from grants, loans, tax breaks and government infrastructure. In other words no government help apart from all the types of help that governments provide, and the very help the President was talking about.

Which gets me to the fundamentally stupid part of this whole 'We built it' charade: If businesses have no need of any form of government help whatsoever, then a Romney administration can't be any better for business than an Obama administration.  And we can forget about all those pesky tax cuts too.


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