Okay for me but not for thee

During political campaigns I’ve often heard one side imply that his or her opponent’s spin is an out-and-out lie, but when his own side does it it’s just a different way of looking at things. It’s a silly argument, but nobody really believes it anyway, so there’s not much harm done.

This is something completely different.

As Buzzfeed reports this morning, top Romney advisers say their most effective ads are the ones attacking Obama over welfare, and that they will not allow their widespread denunciation by fact checkers as false slow down their campaign one little bit:

“Our most effective ad is our welfare ad,” a top television advertising strategist for Romney, Ashley O’Connor, said at a forum Tuesday hosted by ABCNews and Yahoo! News. “It’s new information.”…

The Washington Post’s “Fact Checker” awarded Romney’s ad “four Pinocchios,” a measure Romney pollster Neil Newhouse dismissed.

“Fact checkers come to this with their own sets of thoughts and beliefs, and we’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact checkers,” he said.

Needless to say, he [Romney] has a different standard for the Obama campaign:

“You know, in the past, when people pointed out that something was inaccurate, why, campaigns pulled the ad,” Romney said on the radio. “They were embarrassed. Today, they just blast ahead. You know, the various fact checkers look at some of these charges in the Obama ads and they say that they’re wrong, and inaccurate, and yet he just keeps on running them.”

So, it’s perfectly legitimate to lie in your own ads, but your opponent mustn’t do it.

It would be nice if more members of the media would call this man on his lies and make a fuss about it. I’m beginning to think in his business career he would have been guilty of what old-fashoned businesspeople would call “sharp practice.”