Is Sauce for the Goose Still Sauce for the Gander?

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Here is today’s Rorschach test. Or a something test, anyway. Earlier this morning, Mitt Romney said:

I like being able to fire people.

Hah! Ain’t that just like a plutocrat who’s spent most of his career buying companies and then making millions by mounting brutal mass layoffs of their workers? Of course, this is wildly out of context. What Romney really said was that he likes being able to buy, say, health insurance from whoever he wants, so that he can switch companies if he gets bad service. It’s really completely unobjectionable. So what about that out-of-context snippet? Do you think:

  1. It’s fair game. After all, Romney himself, after airing a plainly deceptive quote about Barack Obama, was the guy who proposed the “what’s sauce for the goose is now sauce for the gander” standard for quote doctoring. And pretty much everyone on the right backed him up.
  2. It’s ridiculous. We lefties should have more integrity than to stoop to stuff like this.

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BEFORE YOU CLICK AWAY!

Mother Jones was founded to do journalism differently. We stand for justice and democracy. We reject false equivalence. We go after stories others don’t. We’re a nonprofit newsroom, because the kind of truth-telling investigations we do doesn’t happen under corporate ownership.

And the essential ingredient that makes all this possible? Readers like you.

It’s reader support that enables Mother Jones to devote the time and resources to report the facts that are too difficult, expensive, or inconvenient for other news outlets to uncover. Please help with a donation today if you can—even a few bucks will make a real difference. A monthly gift would be incredible.

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