Current TV's Jennifer Granholm went after Mitt Romney with a bit of fact checking after he had the audacity to claim that he "deserved credit" for saving the auto industry. Granholm was in the middle of this disaster as governor of her state, so the indignation here is all to real and her disdain for Romney is deserved, because if it was up to him, he'd have allowed Michigan, along with every industry and state that relies on the auto industry and their workers, to just crash and burn. Consequences to what that would have done to the nation's economy be damned.
Dear Mitt: You Did Nothing to Save Detroit:
Dear Mitt Romney:
There are politics, there are lies, and then there's you. You take it to a whole 'nother level.
OK, I admit that I have a particular animus toward you, as a guy that knifed us in the back when Michigan was on its knees, but you simply cannot be our president. It cannot happen.
As you know, Mitt, I was governor of Michigan during that horrible time, when the financial industry was melting down and the auto industry was in free fall. And you were running for president. You saw the polls about the unpopularity of bailouts and you lumped the auto industry in with the bank industry -- the auto industry, where your father and so many of your family members had worked.
You raised your finger into the air, saw which way the wind was blowing, and followed it. Way to lead, Mitt.
You weren't looking into the eyes of autoworkers getting laid off as factory after factory closed.
In the six month period surrounding the president's inauguration, more than 1,018 Michigan companies had announced mass layoffs in response to the crash.
Our unemployment office was receiving more than 800,000 calls per day from people desperate for help. The auto industry was heading over the cliff, we were begging for help, and you were coolly standing behind us giving your home state a shove over the ledge. And now you have the nerve to claim credit for the auto industry's rebound? It's a joke, right?
Steve Rattner, who headed the president's auto task force said it succinctly today when he said, "Mitt Romney is nuts." If only that's all it was.
So Mitt, here's my request: Just stop it. Stop denying that you were pandering to a national audience when you wrote that Detroit should "go bankrupt" and then stop taking credit for the success of the Obama administration's intervention to save the auto industry and more than a million jobs that went with it.
The Obama team wasn't taking advice from you. So just. Stop. Talking. Just stop.
You can read the rest of Granholm's well deserved rant of Romney's dishonesty at the link above. It's a shame we don't have more in our corporate media calling him out for his lies as sternly as Granholm did here. Sadly he's not going to quit lying until they do, which I'm not holding my breath in anticipation of.
They're actually debating on a daily basis in the rest of our cable "news" what "conversation" his campaign wants to be having in what state, as though people in different states don't have access to and can't just watch what he said on the campaign trail in another state. Forget all about the existence of You Tube, the nightly news or the national media and what's on line, as though voters never take a look at any of those things and just follow their local media alone. And they're debating about whether his time as a "businessman" a.k.a. vulture fund manager who loved to bust unions, gut pension funds and make a lot of money for his investors while they ran companies into debt is going to be his "strong point" during the election or not, because Romney wants to keep the conversation about the economy.
Just shoot me now. I thought I lived through some surreal times during the Bush years. Romney is giving me a bad case of flashbacks in too many ways than one.
