Lyin' Paul Ryan
Paul Ryan’s speech at the Republican National Convention has earned many negative reviews—mostly for its dishonesty.
Check out Talking Points Memo Turning Point? Media Backlash Continues Against Paul Ryan’s Misleading Speech.
Ryan's remarks have been described by various sources as fibs, lies, whoppers, dishonest, false, or misleading.
In her Journal Sentinel post Paul “Pinocchio” Ryan’s speech: A roundup of media fact checks, Barbara Miner writes:
"The articles exposing the distortions, misleading statements and outright lies in Paul Ryan’s Wednesday night speech are racing through the Internet so fast that it’s hard to keep track of them all."
She provides links to a bunch of the articles, which have headlines like Top 5 Fibs in Paul Ryan’s Convention Speech, The Most Dishonest Convention Speech—Ever?, Paul Ryan’s Breathtakingly Dishonest Speech, ---as well as a link to a video outlining the deceptions in Ryan's speech.
Fox News contributor Sally Kohn said, “To anyone paying the slightest bit of attention to facts, Ryan’s speech was an apparent attempt to set the world record for the greatest number of blatant lies and misrepresentations slipped into a single political speech.”
Kohn also wrote, “The good news is that the Romney-Ryan campaign has likely created dozens of new jobs among the legions of additional fact checkers that media outlets are rushing to hire to sift through the mountain of cow dung that flowed from Ryan’s mouth. Said fact checkers have already condemned certain arguments that Ryan still irresponsibly repeated."
And on Thursday, Fox News anchor Chris Wallace said, “There are some things that I think were factually questionable.” adding himself to the list of unexpected journalists to question the accuracy of the would-be vice president’s arguments. ( See TPM)
Ms. Miner observes, “Take the claim that President Obama broke a promise to keep open the GM plant in Ryan’s hometown,PolitiFact rated the claim “False” and noted that the Janesville plant closed before Obama even took office"—a fact Ryan must have known.
Ryan’s statement that Obama funneled $716 billion out of Medicare at the expense of the elderly was rated “Mostly false” by PolitiFact.
Oh, and Ryan’s statement in April 2012 that President Barack Obama has “ doubled the size of government since he took office” earned a “Pants on Fire” rating from PolitiFact, which also remarked, “As the House's budget leader and a key spokesman for his party’s budgetary proposals, Ryan should have known better. We rate his statement Pants on Fire.”
Per Huffington Post: Mitt Romney's campaign said on Tuesday that its ads attacking President Obama’s waiver policy on welfare have been its most effective to date. And while the spots have been roundly criticized as lacking any factual basis, the campaign said it didn't really care.
"We're not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact-checkers," Romney pollster Neil Newhouse said at a panel organized by ABC News.
*** Update 8/31/12 The headline of today's Journal Sentinel newspaper's SORTING OUT THE TRUTH IN POLITICS/PolitiFact Wisconsin article is Some of Ryan's points bent the facts.
It says that fact checks of the speech at the GOP convention showed that the vice presidential nominee from Wisconsin, Paul Ryan took signficant liberties with the facts or misled through omission on Medicare, the GM plant closing in Janesville and other topics.
It quotes Darrell West, director of government studies at the Brookings Institution saying, "He is smart and articulate. But he opened himself up to criticism by saying things that are not true." Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center contended that Ryan tangled his message of being a responsible truth-teller on the budget by overreaching on some facts.
Hmm. "bent the facts", "misled through omission", "said things that are not true", "overreached on some facts". Simply put, they are talking about Ryan's deceit. What it boils down to is that on a national stage, the Congressman from Janesville, Wisconsin/ Republican VP nominee Paul Ryan lied and lied.
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And by the way---
The Minneapolis Star Tribune's online post Ryan's speech was short on facts maintains that Ryan's speech "peppered with statements that were incorrect, incomplete or incompatible with his own record -- seemed to signal the arrival of a new kind of campaign, one in which concerns about fact-checking have been largely set aside."
Salon has an op-ed by Joan Walsh titled Paul Ryan's brazen lies
Democurmudgeon, which blogs about conservative deception, posted several entries about Ryan's convention speech, including these two: Even Fox News Couldn't Take The Paul Ryan Lies ; Ryan, the Master of the Simple Lie...And There Were So Many Of Them
