“Let me tell you something. F— off, Internet,” President Barack Obama said on July 15 in a speech in Roanoke, Va.
He said that. Those are his exact words.
Well, those are his exact letters, anyway. And they’re in the exact order in which he spoke them.
If you want to be a stickler for context, what President Obama actually said was:
There are a lot of wealthy, successful Americans who agree with me — because they want to give something back. They know they didn’t — look, if you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own. You didn’t get there on your own. I’m always struck by people who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart. There are a lot of smart people out there. It must be because I worked harder than everybody else. Let me tell you something — there are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there.
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.
But if we just take that “Let me you something” from the final sentence of that first paragraph, then take the F from “If,” the UC from “successful,” the K from “make,” and then take “off” and “Internet” from “could make money off the Internet,” then we can say that President Obama said, “F— off, Internet.” Those are all his own words and/or his own letters.
I’m obviously being facetious here. It would be silly to rearrange Obama’s statement into the crude remark I’ve cut-and-pasted together from his words. It’s ridiculous even as a joke, and it would be hideously dishonest if it were suggested in earnest.
Did someone say hideously dishonest? Mitt Romney is up to the task.
Romney snipped two lines from the speech above, separating a pronoun from it’s antecedent. Removing that pronoun from the context of its antecedent allowed Romney to then pretend that it referred back to something else. He was thus able to pretend that Obama said something he never said — all about as plausibly as in my ludicrous example in the title of this post.
There’s a word for what Romney is doing by twisting Obama’s statement in this way. It’s called lying. Yet again, Mitt Romney is lying — straight-up, bald-faced, no-shame lying. Guy does a lot of that.
Romney lies so often he seems almost bored with a run-of-the-mill one-level lie. So he also likes to mix things up a bit by tossing in the occasional double-lie. Lie No. 1: Change what Obama said to something else. Lie No. 2: Pretend to be appalled, horrified and saddened by such a statement.
The double-lie is a rare and remarkable feat. You don’t see a lot of people who can pull off the double-lie, since doing so requires one to have a conscience less than half the normal size.
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