Romney's Bullshit Talking Point

For the last few days, whenever I've caught Mitt Romney on the television machine he's inevitably saying this:

“Barack Obama has failed America. He didn’t create the recession, but he made it worse and longer. And now we have more chronic long-term employment than this country has ever seen before.”

Really, Mitt? More chronic than the Great Depression? Please show me the bread lines.

Now any legitimate economist, or normal adult for that matter, will explain to you that Mitt Romney is full of shit.

Moody's economist Mark Zandi says the stimulus helped:

If government had not reacted as aggressively or as quickly as it did, the financial system would still be unsettled, the economy would still be shrinking, and the cost to U.S. taxpayers would be vastly higher. In sum, the government’s unprecedented response stabilized the financial system and ended the recession...

...Setting the record straight on the stimulus question is important because it will shape the current debate about how government should manage the still-fragile economic recovery. Last month (July, 2010), partly because of the misconception that the stimulus didn’t work, Congress was barely able to muster enough votes to pass another extension of emergency unemployment benefits. Not doing so would have been a serious error, putting the recovery in jeopardy.

Calvin Woodward and Jim Kuhnhenn of AP also fact checked Romney's recession claims:

THE FACTS: The gross domestic product, the prime measure of economic strength, shrank by a severe 6.8 percent annual rate before Obama became president. The declines eased after he took office and economic growth, however modest, resumed. The recession officially ended six months into his presidency. Unemployment, however, has worsened under Obama, going from 7.8 percent in January 2009 to 9.1 percent last month. It hit 10.1 percent in October 2009.

A case can be made for and against the idea that Obama's policies made the economy worse than it needed to be and that the recession lasted longer than it might have under another president. Such arguments are at the core of political debate. But Obama did not, as Romney alleged, make the economy worse than it was when he took office.

Now call me crazy, but isn't the mainstream media supposed to know these facts? And yet, I didn't hear CNN moderator John King questioning Romney on his debunked talking points in the GOP debate last night. He was too busy playing "Obamneycare Gotcha" with Tim Pawlenty.