Lying Weasel

Jeff Greenfield's analysis of Paul Ryan's acceptance speech on Yahoo! Finance was particularly disappointing. Greenfield pointed out several errors/lies/misrepresentations in the speech and then went on to explain that the Republican/Conservative faithful can dismiss the particulars because they'll attribute the charge to a tainted source, their traditional whipping boy, "liberal media".

That this is now accepted, that demonstrable facts can be dismissed because one doesn't like the source of the information bodes ill for this country.  (Is it ironic that Sally Kohn's article on Fox News, Paul Ryan’s speech in 3 words boiled it down to this: Dazzling, Deceiving, and Distracting.)

Alluding to Nazis is now a marker of the point where a debate/discussion goes off the rails.  However in this case, my immediate thought was "The Big Lie", perfected by Paul Goebbels, Reich Minister of Propaganda under Hitler.  I'm not drawing a parallel between Ryan and Goebbels, but the phenomenon of repeating a falsehood loudly and persistently that others will repeat the statement as given truth.

As for the particulars in Ryan's speech:

The claims that Obamacare cuts $716 billion of benefits from Medicare when in fact the cuts are to payments to hospitals, not benefits.

He pinned S&P's downgrade of U.S. debt on Obama, when S&P itself explained its downgrade resulted from Congressional Republicans refusal to pass measures to increase revenues.

Ryan accused Obama of promising to keep a GM plant open for "hundreds of years" after he was elected, only to have it closed in the first year. In fact, GM closed the plant before Obama even took office.

Sigh.