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Saturday, September 1, 2012

Paul Ryan's Lies starting a National Discussion; is there any "Penalty for Falsehoods?"

This NY Times article is sounding the alarm over Paul Ryan's blatantly deceptive speech:
Every four years there are lies in campaigns, and at times a blurry line between acceptable political argument and outright sophistry. But recent events — from the misleading statements in convention speeches to television advertisements repeating widely debunked claims — have raised new questions about whether the political culture still holds any penalty for falsehood.
Since the whole Romney/Ryan campaign has been based solely on fictions and lies, we can confidently answer; there are no penalties...especially from Republican voters. 

But do both sides do it? The example given as proof, basically accepted the outrageous GOP spin that a fired worker blamed Romney for the death of his wife. He never suggested any such thing, and yet, it appears even the reporter here believes it.
An outside group supporting Mr. Obama ran an advertisement giving the unfair impression that Mr. Romney was responsible for the death of the wife of a steelworker who lost his job and his health insurance when Mr. Romney’s old company, Bain Capital, closed down the plant where he worked.
I’ve criticize fact check organizations for never considering known and long standing political agendas. But agendas are squishy things, and not really “facts.” So even though Paul Ryan’s voucherized Medicare plan was meant to fulfill the GOP’s long standing quest to eventually kill the program, the changes don’t wipe it out, so Ryan’s given a pass.
Brendan Nyhan, an assistant professor of government at Dartmouth College, said “The term ‘fact check’ can easily be devalued, as people throw it onto any sort of an opinion that they have.”
Ryan's speech though was so over the top, even the national media is starting to squirm. 
When Paul Ryan made a number of questionable or misleading claims in his speech, even before he stopped speaking, some of his claims were being questioned on Twitter. Soon fact-checkers were highlighting some of the misleading statements
Here's where right wing politics flexes it's propagandist muscle:
More partisan sites rushed to Mr. Ryan’s defense with posts finding fault with the first round of fact checks.
For a laugh, you have to read the comment at the Brookfield Patch by Brian Divelbess, who picks a few truthiness like details out of Ryan's lies and turns reality on its head (see picture). If these guys ever took complete control of government, real mistakes and bad policy will become a thing of the past with what they think is justified "down the rabbit hole" logic. 

Here's "Paul's Ryan's Lies" by David Mills, with my collection of Ryan graphics created by me and so many others:


But I found the following factoid unsettling: 
In a recent paper, called “When Corrections Fail: The Persistence of Political Misperceptions,” he and Jason Reifler, an assistant professor of political science at Georgia State University, found that corrective information in standard news articles — compared with separate fact-check pieces — was often ineffective at changing the minds of people predisposed to believe a misperception, and sometimes made the problem worse with what they termed a “backfire effect.” 
Or what is normally refered to as "liberal bias."

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