Jack Kelly...Friday?

On Friday, our trusty conservative columnist at the P-G posted a column that began thusly:

Team Obama has rushed out an unintentionally hilarious ad attacking Mitt Romney for quoting the president verbatim. It is revealing in multiple ways:

The ad charges, falsely, that Mr. Romney distorted what President Barack Obama said in Roanoke, Va., last Friday: "If you've got a business -- you didn't build that. Somebody else made that happen."

There's nothing new about the mendacity. Since May, Team Obama has spent about $100 million on ads attacking Mr. Romney for jobs cut at firms acquired by Bain Capital. The jobs were cut after Mr. Romney left to head up the Olympic Games in Salt Lake City. Jonathan Lavine, the Bain executive who made the cuts the ads decry, is a major Obama fundraiser.

But this new ad is so poorly edited it is self-refuting. Included in it is footage that shows Mr. Obama saying exactly the words Mr. Romney said he said.

And in doing so, he joined a distinguished crowd of conservatives who are content with disregarding the truth  in order to try to make some political points.  They'll snip away context and in doing so make one thing sound like another.

It's another form of a lie of omission.  Let me explain.  Again.

Here's the ad that Jack misreads:


You will notice the deception that Jack is foisting upon you.  The part where the ad says "exactly the words Mr. Romney said he said" are the words that come directly from the deceptive Romney campaign ad.  The point of the "tampered" ad is to show, well, that the Romney camp tampered with what Obama actually said.

Jack's hoping his audience doesn't check his work.  Luckily for his audience, I will.

(Didn't I already do this?  That's right - for Selena Zito.  I guess this is yet another right wing zombie lie.)

What, exactly was tampered with?  This is the speech from which the snipped sentence was taken:

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. (Applause.)

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.

The point is, is that when we succeed, we succeed because of our individual initiative, but also because we do things together. There are some things, just like fighting fires, we don’t do on our own. I mean, imagine if everybody had their own fire service. That would be a hard way to organize fighting fires. [emphasis added.]

Take a look at the paragraph the Romney folks snipped (I bolded the snipped sentences to make them easier to find).  It's about infrastructure.

Factcheck.org agrees with me, Jack.  As do the fact checkers at the Washington Post:

The biggest problem with Romney’s ad is that it leaves out just enough chunks of Obama’s words — such as a reference to “roads and bridges”— so that it sounds like Obama is attacking individual initiative.

It's taken out of context. It's deceptive.  It's a lie.

Jack Kelly is lying to you, folks.