Paul Ryan Escalates Romney Campaign's War on Facts — And Even Fox News Takes Notice

Ever wondered how much calculated Republican disregard for reality it would take to make Fox News finally stand up and say ‘dafuq’?

Well, we now have an answer, thanks to Paul Ryan’s factually-deficient RNC speech:

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. Said fact checkers have already condemned certain arguments that Ryan still irresponsibly repeated.

Fact: While Ryan tried to pin the downgrade of the United States’ credit rating on spending under President Obama, the credit rating was actually downgraded because Republicans threatened not to raise the debt ceiling.

Fact: While Ryan blamed President Obama for the shut down of a GM plant in Janesville, Wisconsin, the plant was actually closed under President George W. Bush. Ryan actually asked for federal spending to save the plant, while Romney has criticized the auto industry bailout that President Obama ultimately enacted to prevent other plants from closing.

Fact: Though Ryan insisted that President Obama wants to give all the credit for private sector success to government, that isn’t what the president said. Period.

Fact: Though Paul Ryan accused President Obama of taking $716 billion out of Medicare, the fact is that that amount was savings in Medicare reimbursement rates (which, incidentally, save Medicare recipients out-of-pocket costs, too) and Ryan himself embraced these savings in his budget plan.

Elections should be about competing based on your record in the past and your vision for the future, not competing to see who can get away with the most lies and distortions without voters noticing or bother to care. Both parties should hold themselves to that standard. Republicans should be ashamed that there was even one misrepresentation in Ryan’s speech but sadly, there were many.

Now, to be fair, the op-ed is by Sally Kohn, not someone you’d normally call a mouth-breathing wingnut ideologue (quite the opposite). But the fact that Fox allowed a progressive to sneak an unqualified affirmation of reality into Fox’s previously secure faith-based wingnut bubble (eventheliberals are supposed to reinforce right-wing bullshit, not call it out) speaks volumes IMO. Thanks, Rep. Ryan, for affording us a handsome (if “breathtakingly dishonest”) breaking point.