We Just Stopped Giving A Damn, Ma'am

Steve Benen points out that the Romney camp no longer cares about the truth, and dares the media to do something about it.

[On Tuesday], Team Romney abandoned the pretense of caring about honesty altogether.

Mitt Romney's aides explained with unusual political bluntness today why they are spending heavily -- and ignoring media criticism -- to air an add accusing President Barack Obama of "gutting" the work requirement for welfare, a marginal political issue since the mid-1990s that Romney pushed back to center stage.

"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 claims are "new," of course, because the Romney campaign made them up. Sure, it's "new information," in the same way it would be "new information" if Obama said Mitt Romney sold heroin to children -- when one invents a lie, its "newness" is self-evident.

Romney pollster Neil Newhouse added, "[W]e're not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact checkers."

So guess what, Village media?  When you rolled over for Palin in 2008 and the Tea Party in 2010, you inherited Mittens and his crew saying now that truth is meaningless in this election, and that there's nothing you can do about it.  The threat is implicit:  if you point out Mitt is lying, you're biased and the campaign will bury you, and the Republican party will remove your access.

Mitt's campaign is daring the Village to even try to call them out.  With only a few exceptions, it won't happen.  Why?  The Village destroyed its own credibility with the Both Sides Do It!/View From Nowhere.  Not pissing GOP politicos off became more important than telling the truth about them (and to a lesser extent, some Democrats).

Now we're at the point where the Romney campaign is daring the media to report the truth, and no doubt already threatening vengeance.  They have FOX and Rush and Hannity and Huckabee and whatever media outlets they've bought.  They don't need the broadcast networks and the newspapers anymore.

Paul Ryan's GOP convention speech Wednesday night exemplified this new dynamic as he told outright lies about Medicare, the debt ceiling battle that cost the US a credit rating notch, the Bowles-Simpson commission, and a Wisconsin auto plant closing that Ryan blamed on Obama...when the plant closed in 2008 before Obama took office.

Ryan criticized Obama for — yes — not using government funds to prop up an auto plant in his district.

“A lot of guys I went to high school with worked at that GM plant. Right there at that plant, candidate Obama said: ‘I believe that if our government is there to support you … this plant will be here for another hundred years,’” Ryan recalled. “That’s what he said in 2008. Well, as it turned out, that plant didn’t last another year. It is locked up and empty to this day.”

Ignoring the inconsistency of a Republican chastising Obama for not bailing out more auto manufacturers, the plant in question closed before Obama’s inauguration in 2009.

They don't care anymore.  They're just making stuff up in order to win.

And all sides know it.