Do Republicans care about integrity, or is it a nuisance?

[Asher]

Honest question, if they support Paul Ryan's nomination.

A pretty impressive debut on the ticket from what I've seen so far.

[regexcellent]

I can't tell if you're expressing a positive attitude toward the man or a negative one.

I mean, he is from Wisconsin, so he's practically a canuck...

[-Jrabbit]

Pretty sure he's referring to fact-check results from Ryan's acceptance speech.

[Hauldren Collider]

Those fact-check sites are mostly full of ****. Turns out (SURPRISE!) they're not any better than your average political reporter, they just get away with calling themselves nonpartisan.

[MrFun]

HC is talking out of his ass again.

[SlowwHand]

Why? Because he doesn't offer a blanket agreement with you?

[Alexander's Horse]

*snicker*

[Tupac Shakur]

HC is right. Ryan's speech wasn't dishonest, but rather heavily spun like any other political speech.

http://reason.com/archives/2012/09/03/obama-democrats-and-the-media-you-cant-h

[Tupac Shakur]

Pants-On-Fire Politics

The Democrats' attack on Republican honesty is a campaign ploy, not an argument. An unusually honest election on both sides. ...

The Democrats are hoping to do to Paul Ryan what Republicans so successfully did to Al Gore: To conflate stray real personal exaggerations; rhetorical simplifications; and actual policy differences into an unfair character attack. Ryan (and now Romney) is in fact far more honest than any Republican national figure in memory in his explicit plan to turn Medicare into a less-expensive voucher system and to cut health care spending for poor people deeply. That had been Democrats first, and obvious, point of attack, and is an utterly valid one. Also: Romney and Ryan want to repeal a vast program of expanded health coverage. Obama wants to implement it.

But the attack on his honesty was an Obama Campaign tactic last week, one reporters should be wary of echoing. Let's look at some of the examples. Among the facts being checked are actual policy disagreements, like the welfare ad. That spot may play on voter resentment; it may not appeal to better angels; and it may overhype an actual policy move with the verb "gutted"; but as a Chicago Tribune columnist noted, there is an actual policy disagreement (of long standing) here over the work requirement in welfare, and an actual White House policy move to offer exceptions to it. The Romney ad contains heated rhetoric of the genre of Democratic allegations that Ryan would "end" Medicare — but what's wrong with heated rhetoric? Do the fact checkers now also carry thermometers?

The other "fact" I heard about endlessly on MSNBC Wednesday was the timing of the closure of a Janesville auto plant, which Obama had pledged on the campaign trail to keep open, but which began to close before he was elected. Michael Cooper's summary of this is appropriately nuanced; Ryan was being tendentious, but again, it's hard to see the outrageous lie in this complicated story. And indeed, an aggressive fact checker might also raise an eyebrow at Obama's original comment that appropriate government help could keep the plant open another century.

Other Ryan comments are self-serving in a way that I have never heard a politician avoid: He criticizes Obama for rejecting the debt commission without mention his own (not exactly secret) role in its failure and he talks about deficits without (always) apologizing for his Bush-era votes. Is this required? Obama did not, during 2008, highlight his votes to approve spending for the Iraq war, for instance.

http://www.buzzfeed.com/bensmith/pants-on-fire-politics

[Asher]

Pretty sure he's referring to fact-check results from Ryan's acceptance speech.

Not just that, but the fact that I have only heard of the man for a week now and he can't seem to stop lying.

Apparently he's even lying about running a marathon in the "high 2s".

I know politicians are bad at telling the truth, but most of the time they at least play with half-truths and spin tactics. Paul Ryan seems to just be a liar.

So it begs the question, is Paul Ryan so stupid he thinks no one will figure out he's a liar? Or is he counting on GOP voters being too stupid to care?

[regexcellent]

As if voters care about his marathon time.

[snoopy369]

I doubt he cares about GOP voters. He cares about independent voters, primarily, as they in every election are what determine the winner.

[Asher]

As if voters care about his marathon time.

Exactly, right? So why lie about it?

I don't give a **** about his marathon time, I give a **** that the man is dumb enough to lie about it in public. And not just lie about it, by lie about it specifically...with ample detail.

He's either stupid or a man with zero integrity.

[kentonio]

I know politicians are bad at telling the truth, but most of the time they at least play with half-truths and spin tactics. Paul Ryan seems to just be a liar.

So it begs the question, is Paul Ryan so stupid he thinks no one will figure out he's a liar? Or is he counting on GOP voters being too stupid to care?

Given that Romney has been telling outrageous, verifiably wrong barefaced lies for months without it seemingly hurting his campaign, why wouldn't Ryan follow along?

[Hauldren Collider]

I more or less expect kentonio to lap up anything the press says that's bad about Paul Ryan. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised when Asher does too, but I had hoped for better.

At any rate the politics of the liar smears are pretty obvious. Usually Republicans, in the eyes of Democrats and the media, get to be one of two things: Stupid or evil. Paul Ryan is obviously neither, so they've decided to go with the hilariously hypocritical epithet of "liar".