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Thursday, August 30, 2012

Fox News on Paul Ryan's speech: 'Dazzling, Deceiving and Distracting'


. . . 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

Editor's note: Today is the last day, mercifully, of the Republican National Convention in Tampa, Florida. Two take-away predictions: The convention will cause a slight dip, not a bump, in the polls for the GOP ticket. Future physicists who dabble in quantum mechanics will look back upon this event as proof of the existence of an alternate universe.
From the DallasMorningNews | By Todd J. Gillman Washington Bureau |Ryan promises tough choices, sweeping changes from Obama | Wed Aug 29, 2012 TAMPA, Fla. — Rep. Paul Ryan, the cheerful architect of a plan to reshape tax and entitlement policy, urged voters Wednesday to accept some bitter medicine to help nurse the nation back to fiscal health.

From Associated Press | By Jack Gillum | FACT CHECK: Convention Speakers Stray from Reality | Thursday Aug 30, 2012 WASHINGTON – RYAN: "And the biggest, coldest power play of all in Obamacare came at the expense of the elderly. ... So they just took it all away from Medicare. Seven hundred and sixteen billion dollars, funneled out of Medicare by President Obama." ...... THE FACTS: Ryan's own plan to remake Medicare would squeeze the program's spending even more than the changes Obama made, shifting future retirees into a system in which they would get a fixed payment to shop for coverage among private insurance plans. Critics charge that would expose the elderly to more out-of-pocket costs.
GOP VP nominee Paul Ryan
NYDailyNews Photo

From FoxNews.com
By Sally Kohn
Aug. 30, 2012
Read the complete story

To anyone watching Ryan’s speech who hasn’t been paying much attention to the ins and outs and accusations of the campaign, I suspect Ryan came across as a smart, passionate and all-around nice guy — the sort of guy you can imagine having a friendly chat with while watching your kids play soccer together. And for a lot of voters, what matters isn’t what candidates have done or what they promise to do — it’s personality. On this measure, Mitt Romney has been catastrophically struggling and with his speech, Ryan humanized himself and presumably by extension, the top of the ticket.

On the other hand, 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. On this measure, while it was Romney who ran the Olympics, Ryan earned the gold.
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.
Fact: While Ryan tried to pin the downgrade of the United States’ credit rating on spending under President Obama, the credit rating was actually downgraded because Republicans threatened not to raise the debt ceiling.
Fact: While Ryan blamed President Obama for the shut down of a GM plant in Janesville, Wisconsin, the plant was actually closed under President George W. Bush. Ryan actually asked for federal spending to save the plant, while Romney has criticized the auto industry bailout that President Obama ultimately enacted to prevent other plants from closing.
Fact: Though Ryan insisted that President Obama wants to give all the credit for private sector success to government, that isn't what the president said. Period.
Sally Kohn is a writer and Fox News contributor. You can find her online at http://sallykohn.com or on Twitter@sallykohn.
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Source: US Treasury Department 2011
(From left: Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, President Obama)

12 comments:

The Lone Ranger and Tonto said...

Quote from Robert Reich, Labor Sec. under President Clinton (even some Republicans are seeing the danger):

"Democracy cannot thrive in such a place. To the contrary, history teaches that this is where demagogues take root.

The Romney campaign has decided it won’t be dictated by fact-checkers. But a society without trusted arbiters of what is true and what is false is vulnerable to every lie imaginable."

BlogRot said...

TAMPA (The Borowitz Report):

In his speech to the Republican National Convention last night, Vice-Presidential nominee Paul Ryan test-drove what the Romney-Ryan campaign says will be a major theme for the 2012 Republican campaign: “lying about everything.”

“The question was, how many whoppers could you pack into one speech?” the campaign adviser Tracy Klugian said. “All I can say is, when Fox News accuses a Republican of lying, you know you’ve witnessed something historic.”

Mr. Ryan pronounced himself pleased with his performance, noting that he only strayed into the truth when he recited the names of his wife and children.

“That won’t happen again,” he laughed. “Call it opening-night jitters.”

As for Presidential nominee Mitt Romney, he said he was working “around the clock” to add additional lies to his speech tonight: “I’m no Paul Ryan, but, darn it, I’m going to do my best.”

Reality Check said...

Smart people can either immediately identify right wing lies or are willing to at least check with "FactCheck" for lies.

Most Republicans seem to like being lied to because it fits their hate vision, or are simply so hateful of Obama they don't care if Romney or Ryan are blatantly lying.

Independents are probably closer to the latter or they wouldn't be independents.

The exceptional independents will vote for Obama but is very much become disillusioned with Obama's main weaknesses:

1) Eric Holder's cowardice to go after the Bush/Wall Street criminals,

2) Obama’s drone bombings that have killed innocent women and children, and

3) Obama's continuation of some of the worst remnants of the Bush ere fascist Homeland Security policies.

But since these ugly failures are also loved by the Republicans, I see no reason whatsoever to vote for the proposed neoRepublican elitist financial junta called Romney/Ryan.

True Patriot said...

How can the Republican voters be so gullible when Ryan just blatantly lies to them - a very disrespectful thing to do to their own constituency?

The Republican Party is clearly getting their last breath, before they next morph in to an elite white fascist party.

Still, the French Resistance ultimately prevailed, with help from a liberal US president.

Anonymous said...

I voted for Obama and I am disappointed in his first four year performance:

1) He should have focused on jobs before health care.

2) He has continued most of the Bush foreign policies except for Iraq.

3) He has not prosecuted any Wall Street criminals or any Bush war criminals

4) He chose Eric Holder and Tim Geitner and Larry Summers to be advisors.

But am I disappointed enough (or crazy enough) to vote for dipshit Romney? No way.

It took Clinton eight years to create a budget surplus and it took Bush eight years to piss away the surplus and destroy the US economy.

Obama, now that he has more experince, deserves another four years.

See, I can admit the truth. The Republicans should try it.

Now Damaged said...

I fell asleep last night watching the RNC and had a terrible nightmare.

In my nightmare I saw Clint Eastwood talking to an empty chair on a big stage with a lot of white people laughing at him.

It was as if Dirty Harry was senile, rambling on about someone wanting him to give himself a happy ending.

When I woke up I saw some pudgy Cuban kid talking about how his father missed those great cigars.

It was scary.

Dirty Harry said...

NEW YORK (The Borowitz Report):

In a development that the Republican campaign is sure to find troubling, a new poll of likely voters showed nominee Mitt Romney trailing badly behind the empty chair Clint Eastwood talked to onstage at the Republican National Convention in Tampa.

When asked the question, “Who cares more about people like me?” thirty-seven per cent of voters responded, “Mitt Romney,” while fifty-two per cent said, “Chair.”

The poll numbers for the chair represent the largest post-convention bounce for an inanimate object since the nomination of Michael Dukakis, in 1988.

Jasper, come in here right now! said...

To "Now Damaged":

I had the same, horrible nightmare.

Wake me up.

Predator View said...

No one has mentioned the debt chart put up in this article.

It is accurate. The Republicans always increase the national debt because their job is to pilfer tax dollars away from government programs into corporate coffers - so then the government must sell bonds (debt) to replace the redirected (stolen) money.

The big debt increase you see during the Bush regime was the financing of two wars, the Medicare drug program that had no inflationary controls, and the massive unfunded Bush tax cuts.

Romney is the expert at taking profits (revenues) from a business and replacing it with crippling debt. Bain keeps those profits and then lets the business fend for themselves - often ending in bankruptcy.

This is what Republicans do when managing government. And it never recovers.

Montana said...

So Willard Mitt Romney tells us that he is a success, its easy when you start with Dad’s money and dad’s contacts (kinda like Trump) and did not do it on your own, but ok, success.

Willard Milton Romney tells us that Bain was his first success, a company without a product (unlike Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Henry Ford, Thomas Edison among others who created jobs by the success of their products). What’s even funnier is Bain owns “Clear Channel” who has under contract both “Rush Limbaugh” and “Glen Beck”, how do you think they will do after the election. Bain preyed on weak companies and even when Bain took these companies into bankruptcy Bain made money (Willard still gets a check from Bain) not to mention the jobs that were outsourced or their dealings with RED CHINA, but ok maybe Willard did not know that Bain was in to that, sure, why not, right?

Willard Milton Romney then tells us that his second success is 2002 Winter Olympics. All 2002 Winter Olympics financials have been destroyed, but ok lets take his word, success.

This is Willard Milton Romney calling card that what our country needs now is someone like him a supposed successful business man. This “Business Success” and how that will translate into “Public Sector” success has already been tested.

So given all of Willard Milton Romney, supposed success, don’t you expect to see an extraordinary success in his position as governor of Massachusetts, his one and only public sector job? If you look at the majority of his statements as to why he should be governor of Massachusetts, they almost mirror his current ones, mainly “I am a successful business man”. But when we look at Massachusetts, it was an ordinary mediocrity, to the point that he could only survive one term, that how good this guy was, but ok according to him he was a success.

Now he wants the top public sector job, hmmm, no not on my watch!

Anonymous said...

@Montana

You couldn't at least try and change your post from blog to blog? When you copy and past the exact same thing on every internet story related to Mitt Romney, it shows how unintelligent and uninformed you are.

Faux News said...

Fox News is now reporting that at the last interview with Paul Ryan, the Rep VP candidate is now saying that he killed Osama bin Laden, not President Obama or the Navy Seals.

Republican voters are sceptical, but says it must be true if the party elders say it is so.