“I can tell you Mitt Romney was not handed success. He built it.”
— Ann Romney, Aug. 28, 2012
Can an entire convention be built around a grammatical error?
We wondered about that as we watched the first night of the Republican Convention. From House Speaker John A. Boehner to RNC Chairman Reince Priebus to Ann Romney, speaker after speaker made reference to Obama’s statement that “If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.”When Ann Romney declared that her husband “was not handed success — he built it,” the delegates even began chanting “We built it” — which in fact was the official theme for the convention on Tuesday. As our former colleague Peter Baker tweeted, “If Obama had a nickel for every time a Republican quoted his “didn’t build it” line, that would take care of the whole national debt problem.We originally gave Romney’s use of the phrase Three Pinocchios, a ruling that did not seem to please anyone, with Democrats complaining that Obama’s words were clearly taken out of context and Republicans arguing that even in context, his words exposed a philosophy that was deeply suspicious of — even hostile to — the private sector.
beating dead things is a right wing pastime. remember Palin and the fish? overkill.
However, in light of the GOP’s repeated misuse of this Obama quote in speech after speech, we feel compelled to increase the Pinocchio rating to Four. (Warning to Democrats: You will get the same scrutiny of out-of-context Romney quotes next week. It’s really a silly thing on which to base a campaign.)
well desereved he didn't build those on his own either the entire party helped to build that house of lies.
There has been no dispute among fact checkers on this question, with PolitiFact awarding the claim "Pants on Fire" and FactCheck.org also saying it was incorrect. Interestingly, Romney pollster Neal Newhouse dismissed the complaints of fact-checking organizations after a Romney ad executive said that an ad based on this assertion was "our most effective ad."
"Fact checkers come to this with their own sets of thoughts and beliefs, and we're not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact checkers," he told BuzzFeed.
die hard in the fantasy. 
