Thursday’s letter writer has had more than a week to discover the actual comments from which President Obama’s “You didn’t build it” line were lifted.
Along the way, he might have found precisely the same sentiments expressed on different occasions by Mitt Romney — that you didn’t build the roads that helped your business succeed, you didn’t create the schools and other community resources that helped you become successful, and so on. Of course, if his only source has been Fox News, probably the only news organization in the country that has not aired the full text of the president’s comments, then it’s no wonder he’s outraged.
Fox and Rush and now the Romney campaign itself have, in fact, built business models of their own based on slicing and dicing the truth in the service of eliciting anger, whether it’s by passing off unflattering comments by John McCain as the president’s, or this latest distortion by all three entities, the result of deleting one or two crucial sentences.
We might all wonder if this approach is the best the Romney campaign has to offer the American people as a way forward. Given its penchant for saying one thing during one election and saying the opposite during another, and expecting people not to notice, we already know its opinion of us isn’t too high.


