Paul Ryan’s speech in 3 words

[frigidmagi]

Fox News

1. Dazzling

At least a quarter of Americans still don’t know who Paul Ryan is, and only about half who know and have an opinion of him view him favorably.

So, Ryan’s primary job tonight was to introduce himself and make himself seem likeable, and he did that well. The personal parts of the speech were very personally delivered, especially the touching parts where Ryan talked about his father and mother and their roles in his life. And at the end of the speech, when Ryan cheered the crowd to its feet, he showed an energy and enthusiasm that’s what voters want in leaders and what Republicans have been desperately lacking in this campaign.

To anyone watching Ryan’s speech who hasn’t been paying much attention to the ins and outs and accusations of the campaign, I suspect Ryan came across as a smart, passionate and all-around nice guy — the sort of guy you can imagine having a friendly chat with while watching your kids play soccer together. And for a lot of voters, what matters isn’t what candidates have done or what they promise to do —it’s personality. On this measure, Mitt Romney has been catastrophically struggling and with his speech, Ryan humanized himself and presumably by extension, the top of the ticket.

2. Deceiving

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. 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.

3. Distracting

And then there’s what Ryan didn’t talk about.

Ryan didn’t mention his extremist stance on banning all abortions with no exception for rape or incest, a stance that is out of touch with 75% of American voters.

Ryan didn’t mention his previous plan to hand over Social Security to Wall Street.

Ryan didn’t mention his numerous votes to raise spending and balloon the deficit when George W. Bush was president.

Ryan didn’t mention how his budget would eviscerate programs that help the poor and raise taxes on 95% of Americans in order to cut taxes for millionaires and billionaires even further and increase — yes, increase —the deficit.

These aspects of Ryan’s resume and ideology are sticky to say the least. He would have been wise to tackle them head on and try and explain them away in his first real introduction to voters. But instead of Ryan airing his own dirty laundry, Democrats will get the chance.

At the end of his speech, Ryan quoted his dad, who used to say to him, “"Son. You have a choice: You can be part of the problem, or you can be part of the solution."

Ryan may have helped solve some of the likeability problems facing Romney, but ultimately by trying to deceive voters about basic facts and trying to distract voters from his own record, Ryan’s speech caused a much larger problem for himself and his running mate.

So huh... My reaction to an article of this quality coming from Fox News.

[youtube][/youtube]

[Dark Silver]

wait...wait...

this is from FOX NEWS?!

Sure, it's a opinion piece..but gods..I can't believe they let THAT slip through the carefully crafted web.

Hell, we had O'Rielly saying during the RNC in interviews that the Romney/Ryan campaign will run a clean campaign upon purely the facts even as they've been playing dirty.

[General Havoc]

You know, I'm no fan of FOX news, but most people who bash it for being nothing but an arch-conservative mouthpiece with no deviation from the party line have never once even looked at it in their lives.

FOX is a republican media machine, but there's a lot of different types of republican out there, inconvenient as that may be.

[LadyTevar]

Sometimes they do point out the gorilla in the room.

[frigidmagi]

Havoc I watched O Reilly's No Spin zone for something like two years before finally giving up in disgust.

[SirNitram]

O'Reilly is a fat peice of shit. It is unbecoming to even put him in the same subject matter as Sally Kohn, who appears to be a dedicated journalist, even if she works for one of Murdoch's 'Right Wing Corporatist Paradise' mouthpeices.

This article is very interesting also for it's effect on the interwebs. When I last checked, it had 33k shares on Facebook. This put it on top of the 'Trending' list from Fox News' site. The next rung down was 60 shared.

And later it was in second place. Ahead of it, an article with no shares or similar, which are, supposedly, the indicators of trending.

[SirNitram]

Bonus double extra super update, from Miss Kohn herself:

Link

It appears that my article “Paul Ryan’s Speech in 3 Words” which I wrote for the Fox News website went viral. I’m still trying to keep up with it all, but here are some of the places where it’s been cited, shared, etc. All I can say is: Wow. And thanks.

And second, for the record, no I do not get paid for my writing for Fox News. So if you’re inclined and want to help keep me off the stripper poles in Tampa, feel free to make a tax-deductible donation via my fiscal sponsor the Grassroots Policy Project in order to support my work. I’d be grateful.

Here’s the clip from the Colbert Report:

The Atlantic Wire’s Serena Dai named by article one of the five best columns of the day, alongside the great Maureen Dowd and Bill Keller of the New York Times.

Reuter’s columnist and social media editor Anthony De Rosa tweeted:


Anthony De Rosa

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@AntDeRosa

The best thing you'll read about @PaulRyanVP's speech comes from @FoxNews by @sallykohn fxn.ws/Txn1UY
30 Aug 12

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A Huffington Post story about my piece by Bonnie Kavoussi has so far been shared over 21,000 times and received over 10,000 comments. And there are a bunch of other stories just about my essay — in the Houston Chronicle, PolitiScoop, Daily Kos, Truthdig. Syndicated columnist Pat Cunningham wrote a blog post about my article that was posted on more city and small-town newspaper websites than I can count. And Michael Musto wrote about my column at the Village Voice.

Henry Blodget quoted me in his post about Ryan’s speech on Business Insider. So did Gabrielle Levy in a UPI story, Dylan Byers in Politico, Aviva Shen at ThinkProgress, Alex Hern in the New Statesman, Kevin Spak in Newser, Michael Arceneaux for NewsOne, John Aravos on AmericaBlog, Raf Sanchez in the UK’s Telegraph, Laura Matthews in the International Business Times, Latifah Muhammad on Hip Hop Wired, Sarah Wolfe for Global Post, Rekha Basu in the Des Moines Register, Tod Robberson in the Dallas Morning News, and the magazine The Week.

I hope all these folks have their Google Alerts set and know I appreciate being included in their stories.

And my piece was included in the post-speech rounds ups of The Atlantic’s James Fallows, David Pinar’s list in the Tucson Citizen and this list by Grist’s Philip Bump.

I’m sure I’m missing some but that’s a good start.

Then, for fun, there the tweets from famous folks. Here are a few:

Sally Kohn @sallykohn 30 Aug 12

@octaviaspencer thank you so much for tweeting my piece about Ryan's speech on Fox News. Honored! I'm a big fan!!

octavia spencer

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@octaviaspencer

@sallykohn Thanks for being unbiased in your news coverage. The american public needs the TRUTH to be reported going into this election!
30 Aug 12

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rob delaney

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@robdelaney

Here's a FOX News article for your dad: foxnews.com/opinion/2012/0…
30 Aug 12

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Dulé Hill

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@DuleHill

Interesting read @sallykohn "Paul Ryan’s speech in 3 words | Fox News" fxn.ws/OzkZ8f via @fxnopinion
30 Aug 12

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Harvey Fierstein

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@HarveyFierstein

Paul Ryan’s speech in 3 words | Fox News fxn.ws/OzkZ8f via @fxnopinion Ryan couldn't even get FOX NEWS to believe him.
30 Aug 12

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Suze Orman

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@SuzeOrmanShow

For an unbiased review of Ryan's speech take a look at what this Fox Reporter says fxn.ws/OzkZ8f I couldnt agree with him more
30 Aug 12

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Then a correction:

Suze Orman

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@SuzeOrmanShow

Oh my it was written by a womanhttp://twitter.com/sallykohn So sorry Sally. Kudos to you for having the guts to tell the truth.
30 Aug 12

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Sally Kohn @sallykohn 30 Aug 12

@morgfair thanks for tweeting my fox piece on ryan's speech. appreciate it!

Morgan Fairchild

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@morgfair

@sallykohn Very good piece!! Thank YOU!
30 Aug 12

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Anyway, keep sharing the original article here. And for those looking for somewhere to post a comment, feel free to do so on this post — including if you want to point out any links or mentions that I’ve missed. And thanks.