"The Rachel Maddow Show" really shouldn't air weeknights on MSNBC. It is much better suited for Saturday mornings, you know, along with the other cartoons.
Maddow is so deep in the tank for the Obama administration at this point that she no longer cares how ludicrous she appears in her melodramatic inveighing against the staggering mendacity of one Willard Mitt Romney, a man who clearly haunts her fitful dreams and restless nights. (video after page break)
Here was Maddow on her show Friday night uncorking what she described as yet another lie from Romney --
MADDOW: Mr. Romney spoke yesterday in the town of Defiance, Ohio. Part of why Ohio's economy has begun to bounce back is that we did not just let Detroit go bankrupt, as it were, right? The Obama administration bailed out the automotive industry, saved the industry and it has roared back to life and the Big Three are hiring again. Well yesterday in Defiance, Ohio, Mitt Romney gave that Obama administration success story a little Mitt Romneyesque tickle.
ROMNEY: I saw a story today that one of the great manufacturers in this state, Jeep, now owned by the Italians, is thinking of moving all production to China.MADDOW (with look of mock surprise): Wow, Mr. Romney saying hey, don't get too comfy there, Ohio, with the Obama rescue of the automotive industry, I know it's been better, he saved everything here and that's why you have jobs and everything, but don't get too comfy there, Ohio, I read that they're moving all the jobs working for Jeep, they're moving all the Jeep jobs to China. He said that in Ohio on the campaign trail 12 days before the election. And it is not true at all.
Gotta love when Maddow paraphrases Romney's remarks and has him saying of Obama that "he saved everything here and that's why you have jobs and everything." What makes this amusing is that no such sentiment has ever been stated by Romney, nor will he ever say anything remotely like this. Instead, these are entirely Maddow's sentiments and the sort of gushing you'd expect in a Tiger Beat profile of Justin Bieber.
More from Maddow in her feeble attempt at indicting Romney --
The real Jeep news that day was actually that Chrysler announced it was adding 1,100 new jobs in the US! Here! Making Jeeps in Detroit, Jeep Grand Cherokees. And Chrysler says it could hire almost as many people for work at another plant in Warren, Mich. In Ohio, Chrysler is investing half a billion dollars in its Toledo plant and hiring 1,100 workers. But Mitt Romney got up that day, got up yesterday in Defiance, Ohio, and says, you know, he read somewhere that Jeep is moving all of its production jobs to China, all of 'em. That's ridiculous, what is he talking about? It's embarrassing for Mr. Romney, right? I mean, why on God's great campaign trail would Mitt Romney get up in front of 12,000 people in Ohio and tell them the auto bailout actually hasn't helped you at all, your jobs making Jeeps are going to China, I read it somewhere.
Once again, Maddow shows how her professed "obsessive" devotion to accuracy is nothing more than a pathological need to bolster her self-esteem. Here is what Romney said -- "Jeep, now owned by the Italians, is thinking of moving all production to China." Maddow's translation: Romney claims "Jeep is moving all its production jobs to China"; Romney says "your jobs making Jeeps are going to China."
Here's where Maddow embarrasses herself, citing what she claims is Romney's source --
MADDOW: Where is this story he says he read somewhere? We found it -- here it is. He was apparently trolling the nether regions of the right-wing press, he found it on a Washington Examiner blog post which reported, "Jeep, an Obama favorite, looks to shift production to China," (Maddow citing headline for story here), "a move that would crash the economy in towns like Toledo." (Maddow quoting from story). Is this true? This is not true. This is a conservative blogger's misreading of a Bloomberg report that actually was reporting good news for Jeep. The Bloomberg report was that global demand for Jeeps has risen to the point where the company can sell more of them in China and it wants to build Jeeps for China -- in China. This is good news for an American company, not bad news. They're not shipping any American jobs overseas. This doesn't mean less work for Americans. This means they're just adding! They're expanding overseas! Thanks to the auto bailout that Mitt Romney opposed, Chrysler stuck around long enough to win again. Yah! Or as Mitt Romney put it --
ROMNEY, SPEAKING IN DEFIANCE, OHIO: Jeep, now owned by the Italians, is thinking of moving all production to China.
MADDOW: Look, I cover campaigns for a living, right? I understand that politicians inflate and conflate and duck and dodge ane weave and even dissemble sometimes. That is not what Mitt Romney is up to here. Mitt Romney is just flat-out lying to the voters of Ohio and by extension to voters all across America on the basis of something he happened to read in the right-wing blogosphere.
Or quite possibly Romney read the story from the same second source cited by Maddow, the story from Bloomberg. And you'll see from the video clip embedded here that while Maddow was citing the Bloomberg story, the story itself was shown with its headline, "Fiat Says Jeep Output May Return to China as Demand Rises."
And the lede of that Bloomberg story, shown to Maddow viewers as she repeatedly claimed that Romney lied, stated this --
Fiat SpA (F), majority owner of Chrysler Group LLC, plans to return Jeep output to China and may eventually make all of its models in that country, according to the head of both automakers' operations in the region.
Still unclear to me where Romney lied about this. Chrysler is majority-owned by Fiat and hence it is within Fiat's power to move Jeep production wherever it wants. Since the company "may eventually" make all its Jeeps in China, as Bloomberg reported, citing a company executive as its source, one can only conclude that Romney's lying about this, as far as Maddow is concerned, stems from him not actually reading a story about it as he claimed, but getting his information elsewhere.
If only he waited, Romney could have gotten that info from the Maddow show.
