Paul Ryan’s Wonky, Dishonest Assault on President Obama at the Republican Convention

The vice presidential nominee used a folksy style, policy chops and outright untruths to make the case against the incumbent. Some Folks think  his speech was effective.  It seems that some Folks are not interested in the truth.  Judge for yourself.

At the Republican national convention, VP nominee Paul Ryan made a generational pitch for fresh leadership on Wednesday, August 29,  slamming the Obama administration with these words: “Fear and division is all they’ve got left.”

Stepping into the national spotlight at the Republican convention, the vice presidential nominee wasted no time praising Mitt Romney’s “character and decency.” Nor did he wait long to introduce his cute children in the audience, or describe himself as the son of a small-town lawyer also named Paul.  It is difficult to understand the relevance of his father’s name.

It could not be described as an electrifying speech—Ryan , pictured on the right, isn’t the barn-burner type—but his plain-spoken, Midwestern style played well in the Tampa arena.  Of course, the arena was filled with Republicans.  True to his reputation as one of the GOP’s leading intellectuals, it was something of a wonky speech sprinkled with folksy references.  That having been said, please be reminded that there is poetic license, there is stretching the truth, and then there is outright lying.  His convention speech qualifies as outright lying, considering that it contained multiple statements that were out and out falsehoods, ranging from Medicare to the U.S. credit rating, to the debt commission.   His speech has been labeled as “appallingly disingenuous and shamelessly hypocritical”.  I certainly cannot find any reason to disagree with that statement.   (Somewhat off the point, one is compelled to wonder just what constitutes a “Republican intellectual”.)

But perhaps the most brazen lie of all was an emotionally stirring story about the closing of a GM plant in his hometown of Janesville,, Wisc., where “a lot of guys I went to high school with” worked at a GM plant that shut down.   It is a story he has told repeatedly throughout the campaign, and one he has used to lash out at President Obama.  Ryan claimed that President Obama’s economic policies failed to save that GM plant.  This claim is mystifying, at best, since the auto plant actually closed in 2008; the closing having been  orchestrated by then President George W. Bush.  Should Mr. Ryan assert that he simply had no detailed knowledge about the closing, and thus misspoke, he should be reminded that at the time of the closing he released a statement about the closing.  He also requested federal assistance to keep the plant open.

Ryan charged that the President ignored the Bowles-Simpson debt commission report; falsely accusing Obama of walking away from debt reduction.  However, the debt commission actually failed to create a report.  It was unable to reach an agreement on a set of recommendations.  Incredibly, this was, in large part, due to aggressive opposition from Paul Ryan himself.  He was extremely critical of the commission’s proposals and voted against the commission’s recommendations.

Ryan stated that President Obama’s policies were responsible for the downgrading of the USA’s Triple-A credit rating.  In stark contrast to this allegation, Standard and Poor made it exceptionally clear that the downgrade was a result of the House Republican’s refusing to raise the debt limit unless the President’s proposals were tabled and the Republican’s agenda was initiated.  The credit rating service stated, “The political brinksmanship of recent months highlights what we see as America’s governance and policymaking becoming less stable, less effective, and less predictable than we previously believed.  The statutory debt ceiling and the threat of default have become political bargaining chips in the debate over fiscal policy.”

Ryan lied about the debt, saying Obama “has added more debt than any other president before him.”  The truth is it was “The W”,  George W. Bush  who added over $5 trillion to the debt thanks in large part to congressional votes cast by none other than Paul Ryan.  Ryan also affirmed that, at $831 billion, the President’s economic stimulus was the biggest expenditure in government history.  Clearly, Ryan is at odds with the Congressional Research Service, which estimates that World War II was the biggest one-time expenditure in the history of the federal government.  That cost was $4.1 trillion (adjusted for inflation).  4.1 trillion is a bigger number than 831 billion…what else is there to say?  Ryan further lied about the Recovery Act, calling the stimulus “a case of political patronage, corporate welfare, and cronyism at their worst,” when reality shows the exact opposite. .

Ryan delivered the most sustained attack on Obama that was heard in Tampa.  Ryan accused Obama of trying to “dodge and demagogue”  the debt problem that Ryan helped  create.  And he took the obligatory shot at the Affordable Health Care Act as a law that “has no place in a free country.”  As the author of a plan to turn Medicare into a voucher program, he repeated a cynically selective attack by assailing the President for cutting $716 billion from Medicare—without acknowledging that his own budget assumes the same savings.  Ryan lied about small businesses, accusing Obama of raising their taxes when he actually cut their taxes.  Legions of fact-checkers have not persuaded Ryan to drop the line.

This was a crucial moment for Romney’s running mate, a congressman who has never run outside his Wisconsin district and who is far better known to Tea Party activists and journalists than to the general public.  In the end, Ryan portrayed himself and Romney as two earnest men from the heartland who just happen to have different songs on their iPods.  His folksy style and his ability to ignore the truth has made him a hero to the Republicans – especially to the ultra-conservative right-wingers.  He is viewed as a truth-teller who would slash the size of government, although his deficit-fighting fervor lags when it comes to tax cuts and trimming defense spending.

At a fundamental level, what is most disturbing about politicians who lie, especially from a national stage, is that the deceptions are insulting. A candidate who knows the truth, but makes a deliberate decision to deceive, is working from the assumption that Americans are suckers.  And at the Republican convention, Paul Ryan made painfully clear that he thinks we’re all profound idiots who’ll believe an endless string of lies, so long as they’re packaged well and presented with conviction.  It has been suggested that Ryan’s address to the convention may have been the “most dishonest convention speech” ever delivered.  It was a truly breathtaking display of brazen dishonesty. Paul Ryan looked America in the eye and without a hint a shame, lied to our face.

Paul Ryan, the man the Republicans celebrate as a bold truth-teller, told one lie after another; demonstrating a near-pathological disdain for honesty. His speech presented no substantive ideas, no policy solutions, and no bold positions on any key issue. Instead, it included enough falsehoods to choke a fact-checker — all because he assumes you’re a fool and journalists are too incompetent to separate fact from fiction.  Most of the people who watched the speech on television do not read fact-checks or obsessively consume news 15 hours a day, and will never know how much Ryan’s case against Obama relied on lies and deception.

Let that sentence roll around in your brain for a moment, and ponder what it means for our country.  Ryan lied uncontrollably.   But that’s not as important as the fact that his brazen, unashamed departures from the truth highlights his values; and those values only serve to undermine our democracy and the basic norms of the American political system.  Ryan thinks we’re idiots, but his cynicism matters less than the electoral implications.

The United States is better than Paul Ryan’s dishonesty. It has to be. Our future depends on it.