Thursday, August 30, 2012

Ryan the master of the simple lie...and there were so many of them.

I'll have more on Paul Ryan's highly praised speech and his grotesque almost comical overacting soon. In the meantime, Salon's Joan Walsh pretty much covered all the specifics here:
His most brazen lie accused President Obama of “raiding” Medicare by taking the exact same $716 billion that Ryan and the House GOP notoriously voted to slash. It was stunning.

But that’s not all. He attacked Obama for failing to keep open a Janesville GM plant that closed under Bush in 2008. He hit him for a credit-rating downgrade that S&P essentially blamed on GOP intransigence. He claimed that all taxpayers got from the 2009 stimulus was “more debt,” when most got a tax cut (and the stimulus is known to have saved between 1.4 and 3.3 million jobs). He derided the president for walking away from the Simpson Bowles commission deficit-cutting recommendations when Ryan himself, a commission member, voted against those recommendations.

He blamed Obama for a deficit mostly created by programs he himself voted for – from two wars, tax cuts, new Medicare benefits and TARP.

And of course, he riffed on the tired central lie of the GOP convention: that the president said “government gets the credit” for small businesses, not the business owners themselves.

Other than that, it was a great speech.
At Rock Netroots, who's coverage of Ryan is as good as it gets, wrote this bit of history.
After Ryan's speech at the RNC last night, the right-wing loons were out heavy trying to re-write history about the date the GM Plant in Janesville officially ended production. The most important date to remember is October 13, 2008. That was the day 1,280 workers will never forget when General Motors made the official announcement to Janesville workers that GM will stop production on Dec. 23, 2008. Only about 40 workers remained employed into May, 2009 to fulfill contract obligations in a partnership between GM and Isuzu … when President Obama's White House Counsel came into Janesville AND Kenosha in June of 2010 to share in local economic recovery plans, Paul Ryan was nowhere in sight. Instead, he was out galavanting around the country plugging his hyper-partisan GOP "Young Guns" recruitment book.

1 comment:

  1. I managed to only watch one second of Ryan's speech but it was enough to practically give me the bends. Much thanks to the person who invented the remote control.

    I did watch about ten seconds of Rand Paul just because lunatics are truly fascinating.

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