Is Sauce for the Goose Still Sauce for the Gander?

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

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.

Vote in comments!

GREAT JOURNALISM, SLOW FUNDRAISING

Our team has been on fire lately—publishing sweeping, one-of-a-kind investigations, ambitious, groundbreaking projects, and even releasing “the holy shit documentary of the year.” And that’s on top of protecting free and fair elections and standing up to bullies and BS when others in the media don’t.

Yet, we just came up pretty short on our first big fundraising campaign since Mother Jones and the Center for Investigative Reporting joined forces.

So, two things:

1) If you value the journalism we do but haven’t pitched in over the last few months, please consider doing so now—we urgently need a lot of help to make up for lost ground.

2) If you’re not ready to donate but you’re interested enough in our work to be reading this, please consider signing up for our free Mother Jones Daily newsletter to get to know us and our reporting better. Maybe once you do, you’ll see it’s something worth supporting.

payment methods

GREAT JOURNALISM, SLOW FUNDRAISING

Our team has been on fire lately—publishing sweeping, one-of-a-kind investigations, ambitious, groundbreaking projects, and even releasing “the holy shit documentary of the year.” And that’s on top of protecting free and fair elections and standing up to bullies and BS when others in the media don’t.

Yet, we just came up pretty short on our first big fundraising campaign since Mother Jones and the Center for Investigative Reporting joined forces.

So, two things:

1) If you value the journalism we do but haven’t pitched in over the last few months, please consider doing so now—we urgently need a lot of help to make up for lost ground.

2) If you’re not ready to donate but you’re interested enough in our work to be reading this, please consider signing up for our free Mother Jones Daily newsletter to get to know us and our reporting better. Maybe once you do, you’ll see it’s something worth supporting.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate