Romney tops 850 lies

During the town-hall debate on Long Island Tuesday, New York, Igor Volsky of ThinkProgress.org counted 31 "myths" told by Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney but Steve Benen of MaddowBlog identified 41 instances of Mitt's Mendacity, out of 49 misstatements of the truth told during the entire week.

Since Benen has been chronicling Mitt's Mendacity for 39 weeks, starting when the presidential campaign heated up in January, we consider Benen's as the official count, and Romney's 49 stretchers bring him to 857 told so far this year. If there is a bigger liar in American politics, we're at a loss to identify him. (We exclude active Fox News hosts and commentators.)

We expect Romney to breeze past 900 lies in this coming week -- we invite you to guess how many lies he will tell in Monday's foreign-policy debate -- but it will still challenge his creativity to reach the plateau of 1,000 lies in the two weeks remaining in the campaign.

As Benen wrote:

President Obama and his campaign team have been increasingly assertive of late in accusing Mitt Romney of dishonesty, but the president is still cautious in how he makes the charge. 

In this week's debate, for example, Obama was willing to go so far as to say, "Not true, governor," when the president heard something obviously false. The problem, of course, is that the Republican challenger strayed from the truth with unfortunate frequency -- leading Obama to repeat the words "not true" a half-dozen times. 

I suspect the president was probably annoyed, both with Romney's dishonesty and with the challenge of coming up with alternative ways to let the audience know the Republican was repeating falsehoods. I know the feeling ...

See previous editions of "Chronicling Mitt's Mendacity": Vol. I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX, X, XI, XII,XIII, XIV, XV, XVI, XVII, XVIII, XIX, XX, XXI, XXII, XXIII, XXIV, XXV, XXVI, XXVII, XXVIII, XXIX, XXX, XXXI, XXXII, XXXIII, XXXIV, XXXV, XXXVI, XXXVII, XXXVIII