For weeks, political pundits and journalists — a lot not known for niceties — have treated Paul Ryan’s comments like they were delicate little finger sandwiches.
Dan Amira wrote an excellent article for New York Magazine saying that Ryan’s campaign strategy is to ignore the facts and just attack. He’s relying on the public’s ignorance, Amira says.
Maybe no one wants to use the L-word out of civility, but where does that leave the nation? Maybe it’s time to clarify the truth, even if it means calling the Republican VP candidate a liar, starting with his attack on President Obama during last night’s Republican National Convention. Ryan blurred fact with more fiction than a supermarket tabloid.
The line about a GM plant in Wisconsin closing after Obama said he would try to keep it open was an incredible distortion. Obama made the statement while he was campaigning in 2008, but the plant had already closed by the time he was in the Oval Office.
Much of Ryan’s tale-telling last night was not new.
Contrary to Ryan’s assertion, the stimulus bill did create jobs. And Ryan’s Wisconsin constituents were some of the bill’s beneficiaries.
And if Ryan thought Obama should have acted on the bipartisan Simpson-Bowles debt-commission’s report, why did he vote against its recommendations? Ryan didn’t even say he was on the commission.
And then there’s his claim that Obama is raiding Medicare to pay for Obamacare, which is nonsense. That’s especially hypocritical, since Ryan made the same recommendation in his budget plan.
NPR interviewed some young college women yesterday. They giggled about Ryan’s looks like sixth-grade bobbysoxers. But they knew nothing about his views on women’s health, rape, and abortion.
But they had heard Ryan say that he’ll help them get rid of their student debt, and that’s all they think they need to know. I wonder whether they know that he’s been talking about cutting support to students: cutting Pell Grants and reducing access to to low-interest loans.
This article appears in Aug 29 – Sep 4, 2012.
The disinformation in this post already has been widely and thoroughly debunked. Whether the author is in on the joke or merely a dupe we can’t say. What we can say is that in the wake of Rep. Ryan’s smashing success, the Obama regime unleashed an unusually well-orchestrated disinformation campaign through its Journ-O-Matic network of compliant moonbat scribblers, who within minutes of each other dutifully and mindlessly parroted the same factually-deficient talking points in the same order using the same verbiage.
At least in the immediately preceding campaign (known as Operation Racist Bogeyman), the Journ-O-Matics were given a certain degree of latitude in order to make the coordination just a tiny bit less blatant. But by this point Axelrod just no longer can conceal his panic and desperation.
Nice try. No dice.
Ryan explicitly said that the plant was already closing when then-candidate Obama came to Janesville in 2008: “We were about to lose a major factory,” In June 2008, Obama said that, if elected president, he would “lead an effort to retool plants like the GM facility in Janesville,” promising to find a way to keep the plant open after he became president. Did he deliver? No. So Ryan’s point stands.
And which is it about reducing Medicare, hypocritical nor nonsense? Neither. The cuts in Obamacareinvolve reduction in payments to Medicare Advantage plans. According to the Medicare trustees, that cut will force 4 million seniors out of their Medicare Advantage plans. And the chief actuary for the Medicare program has projected that, by the end of this decade, 15 percent of facilities will have to stop taking Medicare patients because of Obamacare’s cuts. So not nonsense. How about hypocritical? the Ryan budget repeals Obamacare’s spending, it doesn’t specify the kinds of Medicare cuts Obamacare does. It calls for the same level of savings but doesn’t spend the money elsewhere and leaves room for Congress to pursue those savings in ways that don’t rely on price controls and the elimination of benefits.
Please stop repeating the faux-fact-checkers talking points without actually checking the facts.