Returning to the subject of pictures, early in 2006 my wife retired from her university job, and we celebrated her retirement with a nearly-13,000 mile trip for ten weeks across North America. She is an avid photographer, and those thousands of ephotos of the trip are on our computer, where we enjoy seeing them as an endless slide show. Recently, one of those ephotos popped up, from a night in Montgomery, Nevada, where I stopped to gas up our trusty Toyota Corolla at a place called Terrible's -- such an unusual name that we memorialized it in an ephoto, showing gas prices of $2.45 for regular and $2.55 for premium. So, early in 2006, two years before President Obama took over, gasoline already cost considerably more than Mitt Romney's mythical "two dollars a gallon" in Nevada, a state with relatively-low gas prices!
No matter how many times Mitt Romney and his running mate, Paul Ryan, claim that President Obama is responsible for the so-called "doubling of gasoline prices during his term," the assertion is not only untrue, it is easily disprovable. Of course, the great increase in gasoline demand from such nations and China and India, and the ongoing supply restrictions due to the OPEC oil cartel and strife in the Middle East, have much more to do with gasoline prices than Barack Obama does. But sound economics is not a strong point with the Romney-Ryan team: none of their numbers add up, not their tax cut numbers, not their deficit reduction numbers, not their government spending numbers, and none of the other figures in their
vague plans and proposals.
It is understandable that Mitt Romney does not have the facts about gasoline prices, as he has ignored facts which are not to his advantage for decades. What is neither understandable nor forgivable, however, is that the news media let him get away with such disprovable lies, misstatements, distortions, misrepresentations, and myths. Records on gas prices go back for decades, and ever since the Arab Oil Embargo beginning in 1973, those numbers are available in great detail, almost on a daily basis. If Mitt Romney is willing to make up numbers for gasoline price increases, how could we trust him to not make up all the rest of his numbers in his vague plans and unsound proposals -- in all the Myths of Mitt.