By Eric W. Dolan/Raw Story
On his show Wednesday night, Jon Stewart wondered if conservatives could be any more manipulative in their misrepresentation of words spoken by President Barack Obama.
“Mr. Romney, hanging your attack on a person’s slight grammatical misstep is what people do in an argument when they’re completely fucked and they know they have no argument,” he said.
During a recent speech, the President said: “Let me tell you something: If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.”
Romney and other conservatives have asserted that Obama was referring to businesses when he said “you didn’t build that.” However, the President’s full speech makes it clear that he was referring to American infrastructure — roads and bridges. Obama continued, saying “the point is that when we succeed, we succeed because of our individual initiative, but also because we do things together.”
“Here’s a tip: when someone says, ‘the point is,’ the next thing they say usually nine times out of 10 is the point.But I see what happened here. By using the phrase ‘you didn’t build that,’ you create confusion by using the demonstrative single pronoun instead of the plural ‘those,’ which of course was referring to the antecedent roads and bridges,” Stewart explained, before his own underpants gave him a wedgie.
Stewart said the difference between Obama and Romney was a matter of degrees, not a matter of “fundamental diametrically opposed world views.” He illustrated the point by showing a mash up of two speeches by Obama and Romney, in which they said essentially the exact same thing about businesses relying on public and private investments for their success.
