Tuesday, August 07, 2012

mittens got punked

a few days ago, the ghost of andy breitbart reported that the obama administration was suing to restrict members of the military from voting in ohio. the charge, like just about everything reported on that site, turned out to be horseshit. in fact, ohio had previously permitted in-person voting for all citizens on the weekend before election day, but then it changed the law to eliminate in-person early voting for everyone except members of the military. the obama administration sued to restore the rights of everyone else to vote early. in other words, they are not trying to take away the special early voting rights of members of the military, they are trying to extend those rights to everyone else under the theory that all u.s. citizens should have the same voting rights. (you can read the obama's administration's complaint here).

on saturday, just after breitbart published the story, the romney campaign jumped on the bandwagon and echoed the charges of the false breitbart story. since then, however, the campaign has been completely unable to defend its charge, so they've simply stopped talking about it.

i'm not sure what else they can do. if you read the court documents, there really isn't much wiggle room. what they said about the obama campaign is blatantly false, and this campaign is not willing to say "oops" for fear that it will draw more attention to the initial lie. i suspect that just read the breitbart piece and went with it, without bothering to look into whether the claim was right or wrong. and now they're stuck. the best they have is the hopes that this will just go away. i wonder how long before the mitt's facebook post disappears.