Have the executives running MSNBC informed their employees that it's completely acceptable to lie on the air if it helps President Obama win reelection this November?
On Thursday, Martin Bashir flat out lied to make the case to his audience that Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney is going to hell for supposedly lying when he says the current White House resident promised unemployment would not rise above eight percent if his stimulus package was enacted (video follows with transcript and commentary):
MARTIN BASHIR: But his third lie yesterday appears to be his all-time favorite. This is his utterly false claim that the president promised to keep unemployment below a certain level.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
MITT ROMNEY: He said if we let him borrow $787 billion, he would hold unemployment below 8 percent.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
BASHIR: Now Mitt the mendacious knows full well that the president never, ever said such a thing. In fact, that figure of 8 percent was a speculative projection written by two analysts with limited access to data and well before the president was even inaugerated. But much more to the point, it is something that the president has never written nor said. But that doesn't, so it doesn't matter how many times he hears the truth. Mitt Romney prefers to tell lies.
And from the book of Mormon to Nephi chapter two verse 34 we find this: “Wo unto the liar for he shall be thrust down to hell.”
Given what the book of Mormon is clearly saying, Mr. Romney has but two choices: he can either keep lying and potentially win the White House but bring eternal damnation upon himself, or; he can start telling the truth. The question for him, I guess, is which is more important?
Let's take this one step at a time.
"That figure of 8 percent was a speculative projection written by two analysts with limited access to data and well before the president was even inaugerated."
Actually, no. On January 9, 2009, just eleven days before Obama was inaugurated, future administration officials Christina Romer and Jared Bernstein published a fourteen page report entitled "The Job Impact of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan." On page five they offered the following chart:
This chart - created by the woman that shortly after would be named to chair Obama's Council of Economic Advisers and the man that currently serves as Vice President Joe Biden's Chief Economist and Economic Policy Adviser - specifically informed readers that if the new president's stimulus plan was enacted, unemployment would not rise above eight percent.
This was the official document from the incoming administration about its economic plan and what it would accomplish.
When your top economic advisers issue a projection about what a piece of legislation you're proposing will accomplish, it is coming directly from you and your office.
You can't claim after the fact that you had nothing to do with it and neither should members of the media regardless of how in the tank they are for you.
For Bashir to claim "that figure of 8 percent was a speculative projection written by two analysts with limited access to data and well before the president was even inaugerated. But much more to the point, it is something that the president has never written nor said" is a total falsehood.
As the perilously liberal New York Times columnist Paul Krugman wrote at the time, "Christina Romer and Jared Bernstein have put out the official (?) Obama estimates of what the American Association of Retired Persons American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan would accomplish."
Maybe Bashir should do a segment about Krugman going to hell. Conservatives would quite like that.
This would be easy for Bashir who has a tendency to predict such a destination for people he doesn't agree with. The MSNBC anchor made such a despicable claim about Herman Cain in December.
As for this attack on Romney, even the liberal website Mediaite was disgusted by Bashir's lies Thursday:
[T]he 8 percent unemployment figure was part of the sales pitch by the Obama administration to persuade a friendly Congress to borrow billions from lenders at home and abroad in order to throw Keynesian pump-priming funds into the economy. When it failed, there is now a concerted effort to pretend that figure was something a kooky surrogate made up – the president himself had nothing to do with it.
Indeed. And shills like Bashir are only too happy to advance this lie.
Exactly how is MSNBC allowed to broadcast such falsehoods with total impunity while calling itself a news network?
