GOP Convention Day 3: Paul Ryan’s Many Lies

Posted on Aug 29, 2012

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Republican vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan’s convention speech was good, according to CNN’s Wolf Blitzer. Even if it was, you know, filled with factual errors and all. Blitzer guessed seven or eight. It’s too bad he doesn’t work for a huge news organization with lots of resources available or anything like that to help him fact check those seven or eight points he was unsure about.

Luckily for Blitz, Salon did the fact checking for him.

Salon:

His most brazen lie accused President Obama of “raiding” Medicare by taking the exact same $716 billion that Ryan and the House GOP notoriously voted to slash. It was stunning.

But that’s not all. He attacked Obama for failing to keep open a Janesville GM plant that closed under Bush in 2008. He hit him for a credit-rating downgrade that S&P essentially blamed on GOP intransigence. He claimed that all taxpayers got from the 2009 stimulus was “more debt,” when most got a tax cut (and the stimulus is known to have saved between 1.4 and 3.3 million jobs.) He derided the president for walking away from the Simpson Bowles commission deficit-cutting recommendations when Ryan himself, a commission member, voted against those recommendations.

He blamed Obama for a deficit mostly created by programs he himself voted for – from two wars, tax cuts, new Medicare benefits and TARP.

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As for Ryan, it’s scary that he could lie so brazenly to the millions of people around the country who tuned in to watch the Republican National Convention. But what’s scarier? That quite a few of those millions will have hung on to and believed every word he said.

—Posted by Tracy Bloom.

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