Thursday, August 30, 2012

Paul Ryan: The First Truly Orwellian Convention Speech?

Our advisers tell us we can get away with this. So, all in!
 
Orwellian, or is this more of a Big Lie propaganda effort? Let's look at the reports:


Fox News:
Paul Ryan's speech in three words
2. Deceiving
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.

Talking Points Memo:
Top 5 Fibs In Paul Ryan's Convention Speech
Vice Presidential nominee Paul Ryan’s headlining speech at the GOP convention in Tampa Wednesday night touched on many of the election’s defining issues. But it was also filled with prevarications — not just recitations of the conventions “you didn’t build that” theme, but on the very policy matters that have endeared him to the political establishment in Washington.


Huffington Post:
Paul Ryan Address: Convention Speech Built On Demonstrably Misleading Assertions
Ryan then noted that Obama, while campaigning for president, promised that a GM plant in Wisconsin would not shut down. "That plant didn’t last another year. It is locked up and empty to this day. And that’s how it is in so many towns today, where the recovery that was promised is nowhere in sight," Ryan said.
Except Obama didn't promise that. And the plant closed in December 2008 -- while George W. Bush was president.
It was just one of several striking and demonstrably misleading elements of Ryan's much-anticipated acceptance speech. And it comes just days after Romney pollster Neil Newhouse warned, defending the campaign's demonstrably false ads claiming Obama removed work requirements from welfare, "We're not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact-checkers."

New York Times:
The Vacuum Behind the Slogans
Mr. Ryan, who rose to prominence on the Republican barricades with a plan to turn Medicare into a voucher system, never uttered the word “voucher” to the convention. He said Medicare was there for his grandmother and mother, but neglected to say that he considers it too generous to be there in the same form for future grandmothers (while firmly opposing the higher taxes on the rich that could keep it strong). He never mentioned his plan to abandon Medicaid on the doorstep of the states, or that his budget wouldn’t come close to a balance for 28 years.
The reasons for that are clear: Details are a turn-off, at a boisterous convention or apparently in a full campaign.

Bloomberg News:
Paul Ryan’s Hypocritical Attack on Barack Obama
Ryan criticized Obama for ignoring his own debt commission. “They came back with an urgent report. He thanked them, sent them on their way, and then did exactly nothing.” That urgent report? Technically, it wasn’t a report from the debt commission. Too many of its members dissented from the report for it to be adopted as the commission’s official report. One of those dissenters was Paul Ryan.

Associated Press:
FACT CHECK: Convention speakers stray from reality
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 claim ignores the fact that Ryan himself incorporated the same cuts into budgets he steered through the House in the past two years as chairman of its Budget Committee, using the money for deficit reduction. And the cuts do not affect Medicare recipients directly, but rather reduce payments to hospitals, health insurance plans and other service providers.
In addition, 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.

David Weigel, Slate:
Entry 13: Here’s a list of some of the whoppers that Paul Ryan served up Wednesday night.
So I was in the cheap seats, not on carpet, when Ryan plowed through one of the more impressive strings of whoppers we've seen at this level. Ryan's been doling out chunks of this speech for weeks, which made the fibs sound even stranger.

So, there we have it, the media response to Paul Ryan, from Fox News to the Associated Press, and the central reaction was that Paul Ryan is lying about the principal points of of his critique of Barack Obama, and this critique is the entirety of the Romney/Ryan campaign. Just wow. Read all the linked articles, and then visit this final web page from Daily Kos, called Abbreviated Pundit Round-up. In today's report, almost all linked articles speak to the general falsity of the Romney campaign. Where do we go from here? I'm afraid to contemplate.

The media know we're lying. We're betting the people won't figure it out.
Update. The Washington Post editorial board doesn't mince words:

Paul Ryan's misleading speech

Read it.

Update 2. A media storm is developing, discussing if the media will actually start to call out the Romney/Ryan campaign on its lies:

Calling out the lies in your headlines 

Will the media finally do its job? We'll see.

Update 3. Yahoo!'s Jeff Greenfield says yes, but it'll reinforce the public's perception that the "liberal media" is in the tank for Obama:

Paul Ryan’s Speech Was Filled With Economic Inaccuracies

Good grief.

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