By GREGORY N. HEIRES
Even conservative-tilted Fox News blasted Republican vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan for his deceitful GOP convention address.
Fox’s Sally Kohn called the speech “an apparent attempt to set the world record for the greatest number of blatant lies and misrepresentations in a single political speech.” The speech gave fact checkers the mammoth task of sifting through the “mountain of cow dung that flowed from Ryan’s mouth,” she wrote.
Ryan’s lies were so brazen that many members of the mainstream media couldn’t credibly cover the speech in the he said, she said method typical of so-called reporters who lack the guts to call a lie a lie.
The Associated Press headlined its article, “Ryan Takes Shortcuts in Speech,” and the online Huffington Post said, “Paul Ryan: Lying Liar,” while Washington Post blogger Jonathan Bernstein proclaimed, “Paul Ryan fails — the truth.”
The 42-year-old Congressional leader and darling of the Republican Party’s anti-government Tea Party wing, — some call him the party’s intellectual guiding light — proved his deep dishonesty with the Big Lie of charging that Obama had harmed seniors by cutting $716 billion from Medicare.
Ryan’s own budget proposals included the same cuts, which involved reducing the costs of insurance companies, doctors and hospitals, not cutting services for seniors. And he claimed he would preserve Medicare without explaining that his own plan — endorsed by running mate Mitt Romney — would destroy Medicare as we know it, replacing comprehensive coverage with vouchers that would pay part of the cost of private insurance and raise retirees’ out-of-pocket costs by over $6,000 a year.
Anyone who reads the whole speech will find more lies and hypocrisy:
• Ryan charged that Obama failed to save a Wisconsin General Motors plant — but the factory closed before Obama became president.
• Ryan claimed Obama’s economic stimulus program represented “political patronage, corporate welfare and cronyism at their worst.”
In fact, a new book by Time magazine’s Michael Grunwald, “The New New Deal,” concludes that only 0.0001 percent of the stimulus involved fraud. Many economists credit the stimulus with preventing a second Great Depression.
• Ryan said the Obama administration had damaged the nation’s credit rating. Yet when it downgraded the rating in 2011, the Standard & Poor’s rating agency blamed Republican intransigence on the debt ceiling increase.
• Ryan charged Obama with adding more to the national debt than any other president, but in fact most of the debt has resulted from the Bush tax cuts and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
This article appears in the October edition of Public Employee Press, the official publication of DC 37, AFSCME, which represents 120,000 municipal employees in New York City.
