If you’re a GOP candidate with your back to the wall, it’s probably not a good idea to say, “read my lips.” Brings back bad memories.
The GOP candidate in question here is not George H.W. Bush — it’s Senator Mike DeWine, who’s fallen far behind Dem challenger Sherrod Brown. Today a dozen Ohio TV stations yanked a GOP ad attacking Brown, mainly because the ad was demonstrably false. The NRCC sank over $700,000 into the ad. It said Brown “didn’t pay his unemployment taxes for 13 years.” Even though the Brown campaign produced proof that the claim was false, the NRCC hung in there and claimed they weren’t fudging the facts. Still, the networks disagreed and killed the ad.
But the story doesn’t end there. At tonight’s debate between Brown and DeWine, the ad came up again. And DeWine — never one to give up when the going gets tough — hung on to the claim that the ad was true. And he compounded the absurdity of the whole story by saying: “The ad, Sherrod, is true. Read my lips. The ad is true.”
Read his lips.
