Paul Ryan's Convention Speech - Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire

I didn't watch or listen to Paul Ryan's speech last night - I generally try to avoid self-inflicted pain. Fortunately, some people get paid to watch these exercises in absurdity, and the consensus on Ryan's speech (including on op-ed from Fox News, the GOP's media outlet) is that he somehow managed to tell more lies per minute of airtime than any other convention speech ever. Now that is impressive.

Many of these lies are so blatantly false - it makes me wonder to what extent Ryan believes these statements. Is there deep self-deception occurring, is he so blinded by ideology that he is unaware of the lies, or his he simply a dishonest and ethically-deficient person?

These are questions we should be asking about all politicians, left, right, or center.

Sally Kohn of Fox News, who in that extreme right-wing world might be considered left-leaning, wrote:

[T]o 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.

Fact: Though Paul Ryan accused President Obama of taking $716 billion out of Medicare, the fact is that that amount was savings in Medicare reimbursement rates (which, incidentally, save Medicare recipients out-of-pocket costs, too) and Ryan himself embraced these savings in his budget plan.

Sometimes we learn a lot about someone from the things they DON'T talk about - maybe these are lies by omission, or simply positions that are indefensible on a national stage. Again, from Sally Kohn:

And then there’s what Ryan didn’t talk about.

Ryan didn’t mention his extremist stance on banning all abortions with no exception for rape or incest, a stance that is out of touch with 75% of American voters. 

Ryan didn’t mention his previous plan to hand over Social Security to Wall Street. 

Ryan didn’t mention his numerous votes to raise spending and balloon the deficit when George W. Bush was president. 

Ryan didn’t mention how his budget would eviscerate programs that help the poor and raise taxes on 95% of Americans in order to cut taxes for millionaires and billionaires even further and increase — yes, increase —the deficit.

Here are some links to other coverage of Ryan's speech, courtesy of The New Civil Rights Movement.

• David Weigel at Slate writes that Ryan’s speech was “one of the more impressive strings of whoppers we’ve seen at this level.”
• Joan Walsh at Salon, in “Paul Ryan’s brazen lies,” says Ryan’s “speech was stunning for its dishonesty,” and adds that Ryan, “blamed Obama for a deficit mostly created by programs he himself voted for – from two wars, tax cuts, new Medicare benefits and TARP.”
• Jonathan Cohn at The New Republic: “The Most Dishonest Convention Speech … Ever?”
• Ruth Conniff at The Progressive: “Paul Ryan’s Brilliant, Scary, Lying Speech”
• Ryan Grim at The Huffington Post: “Paul Ryan Address: Convention Speech Built On Demonstrably Misleading Assertions”

Barack Obama's Speech in Tucson Last Night

Full text here -and here is the video for those (like me) who did not/could not see it last night. It was certainly one of his best speeches - as one commenter below noted, he matched and easily transcended the speeches given by Reagan (the Challenger disaster) and Clinton (Oklahoma City bombing).

Andrew Sullivan's Daily Dish collected responses to Obama's speech, which is far as I can tell have been largely favorable, even from conservatives - here is what he posted earlier this morning.

Adam Serwer tweets:

This speech reminds me that the criticism I find most incomprehensible is the idea that the president does not love his country.

Fallows:

The standard comparisons of the past four days have been to Ronald Reagan after the Challenger disaster and Bill Clinton after Oklahoma City. [Yesterday's] speech matched those as a demonstration of "head of state" presence, and far exceeded them as oratory -- while being completely different in tone and nature. They, in retrospect, were mainly -- and effectively -- designed to note tragic loss. Obama turned this into a celebration -- of the people who were killed, of the values they lived by, and of the way their example could bring out the better in all of us and in our country.

First Read:

While Obama tried to uplift, Palin tried to settle scores. While the president called for more civility, the former Alaska governor talked about duels and 'blood libel.' And while Obama's message was, well, presidential, Palin's was not. We'll say this: If Palin has ambitions for the White House -- and we're still not sure she does -- then her tone, message, and timing from her eight-minute video was a serious miscalculation.

Amy Davidson:

We do need civility, and one hopes we get more of that, and less scorn. We also need politics. And true civility can be disruptive—it is not civil, for example, to abandon the unpopular or unfairly treated. There are times when smiling blandly is far more cynical than raising one’s voice would be—when politeness is uncivil—just as there are times when cheering at a memorial is a profound act of mourning.

Allahpundit:

Note the rhetorical move at the end: Civil rhetoric may be a virtue but that doesn’t mean it’s a lesson of the shooting. He’s obviously aiming this at the left, although naturally they’ll conclude that that can’t possibly be the case. Ace heard a different speech than I did, I guess, but for what it’s worth, this is playing remarkably well thus far among righties on Twitter: Rich Lowry, Jonah Goldberg, Jim Geraghty, Andy Levy, S.E. Cupp, Philip Klein, and Ace’s own co-bloggers Drew and Gabe all thought it was rock solid.

Jonathan Bernstein:

It's an easy speech because everyone watching wants the president to succeed. It's an easy speech because that's how representation works, at its best. He's not only Barack Obama speaking; he's speaking on behalf of the American people.

Noam Scheiber:

I found myself reacting well to the speech emotionally even if it didn’t always hang together for me intellectually. Still, by nodding at the ways the Tucson tragedy might nudge us toward self-improvement, then not following through, Obama’s otherwise eloquent speech left me a bit unsatisfied.

Josh Green:

My own impression is that he provided what had so far been missing from this tragedy: a response that dignified the memories of the victims and properly placed them at the forefront of public attention.

Ed Morrissey:

Some of my friends may criticize Obama for not defending Palin specifically, or for waiting until the memorial to have rebuked those attempting to exploit the deaths for political gain. On the first point, though, this was a memorial service and it wouldn’t have been appropriate to name other names than the dead, the wounded, and the heros who helped save lives. The second point may be germane criticism of the previous couple of days, but even if it came late, Obama stepped up and led last night.

Tags: speeches, mourning, grief, America, presidents, Tucson, Arizona, memorial, Barack Obama, Gabriel Giffords, shooting, violence, rhetoric, civility, politics