There’s sort of this unwritten rule in politics. On the campaign trail anything goes. You can throw the kitchen sink at your opponent. If you want you can call him a Russian spy if you think that might get you some votes. In one of the nastiest campaigns ever between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, the Jefferson campaign accused Adams of “being a hermaphrodite” while the Adams campaign accused Jefferson of “being the son of a half-breed Indian squaw and a mulatto father.”
The campaigns of 1828 and 1876 were filled with accusations
of murder, prostitution, and stealing.
Perhaps the most contentious and bitterly fought campaign was the one
that pitted Howard Taft against his old friend Teddy Roosevelt. Roosevelt was so incensed at what he
perceived as Taft’s betrayal of his principles that he ran as an independent,
thereby resulting in the election of Democrat Woodrow Wilson to the presidency.
But while campaigns can be extremely nasty, conventions are supposed
to be altogether different. It’s not
that they’re squeaky clean, mind you; it’s just that the attendees who speak at
these events tend to opt for a more general, higher road tone. And while you are allowed to say your
opponent is wrong, maybe even articulate somewhat on how and why, you’re not
supposed to deliberately make false accusations that can be easily fact-checked
by anyone with an iPad in attendance.
Apparently Paul Ryan was absent when they went over that
rule because in his vice-presidential acceptance speech he committed no fewer
than five flagrant lies that were so obvious that even Fox News called him out
on it.
The second worst of these involved the $716 billion that
President Obama supposedly “stole” from Medicare to pay for his healthcare
law. This is blatantly false. The $716 billion represents savings in
reimbursement rates that will add almost ten years to the solvency of the
entitlement program. In fact, Ryan’s own
budget proposes to save the same exact amount.
The only difference is where the savings goes: to healthcare for millions
who can’t afford it or to the richest income earners in the form of tax cuts.
But the sleaziest, most disgusting lie was when Ryan made it
sound – without actually saying it outright – as if Obama was responsible for a
GM plant that shutdown in December of 2008, a full month before he was even sworn
in as president. It was sleazy because
Ryan knew that Obama had nothing to do with the closing; yet he floated it out
there to provoke a reaction among the crowd and to drum up animosity among
frustrated workers who are still unemployed, especially in Wisconsin which is
now considered a toss-up state. Sleazy
and cheap.
Well it appears, at least for now, as though Ryan’s stunt
has backfired. The press has turned his
speech inside out and thoroughly trashed it as misleading and filled with
falsehoods. My favorite critique came
from the supposedly fair and balanced quarter.
Sally Kohn, a Fox News’ contributor, summed up Ryan’s speech in three
words: dazzling, deceiving and distracting.
The deceiving part was what caught my eye.
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.
Ouch!
Now to be fair
(pun intended) Kohn is hardly a conservative.
She’s actually one of those “balanced” talking heads that Fox trots out now
and then to support the line they’ve been peddling for years: that they’re fair
and balanced. So Fox News itself wasn’t actually
ripping the Ryan speech; merely one of its liberal elitist employees.
Still, even if
you discount Kohn, which I certainly don’t, there were plenty of other
journalists who took their turn blasting the speech.
Dan Amira from New York magazine called it “appallingly
disingenuous and shamelessly hypocritical.”
Ryan Lizza from The New Yorker said, “Ryan started this
race with a reputation for honesty. He’s on his way to losing it.”
But the best came
from blog favorite Paul Krugman, who wrote “If you’re going to be deceptive,
you should at least put in the effort to avoid offering targets that even the
most diffident, balance-loving reporters will have a hard time hittingmissing.”
And that’s the real crux of the matter here. The idea that politicians should use the
platforms accorded them at conventions to become statesmen is certainly a
novel, if somewhat naïve, concept. If
there was such a thing as an objective truth it died a slow and painful death
sometime around the last ice age. Everyone knows political conventions are little more than infomercials.
But Ryan, in appropriating so many obvious lies in a speech
that could’ve been the catalyst for his Party to build some badly needed
momentum over the last two months of the campaign, didn’t just cross a
line; he leapfrogged it.
He didn’t need to lie to make his point. Whether you agree with Paul Ryan’s vision for America or not, it is worth having a discussion over. By engaging in such reprehensible behavior, Ryan undercut his whole argument, not to mention his own credibility, and came across as someone with something to hide. What does it say about your platform when you have to lie about your opponent to sell it? It’s one thing to throw mud at the opposition; it’s quite another to fire a pistol.
And now, thanks to Ryan’s poor judgment, the Obama
Administration will have plenty of ammo with which to return fire.
Links: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/30/paul-ryan-fact-checking-media_n_1844085.html
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-3460_162-57496060/nasty-campaign-ads-an-american-tradition/
http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2012/08/30/paul-ryans-speech-in-three-words/
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/30/discipline-and-indiscipline/
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2012/08/the-paul-ryan-speech-five-fibs.html
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