Paul Ryan's Republican Convention speech was truly scary.
He comes off like a Midwest choir boy who grew up busing tables and just wants to help unemployed 20-year-olds get jobs and move out of their parents' house. This 'aw shucks' act may play well among heartland voters who could swing the election.
But Ryan lies like a hooker telling her john that she loves him. And given a media that tends to cover the horse race rather than the substance, there's a good chance he could lie his way all the way to the vice presidency.
A sampling of the lies in Ryan's speech:
•Ryan claimed that President Obama threatens Medicare because the Affordable Care Act reduces the cost of Medicare costs by $716 billion over 10 years. The truth is that those savings come primarily from slowing the rate of growth in payments hospitals and doctors and do not take away any benefits from seniors, unlike Ryan's plan to end Medicare by turning it into a voucher program in which seniors rather than the government will bear increasing health care costs. Moreover, Ryan's own Medicare plan contains the same $700 billion in costs savings. It just goes to show that a good defense is a good offense with the man who wants to end Medicare as we know it claiming it's President Obama who wants to cut Medicare.
•Ryan accused President Obama of "adding more debt than any other President before him." The truth is that the biggest driver of the debt have been the Bush tax cuts, the unfunded wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the Republican-backed Medicare drug program which wasn't paid for, all of which Paul Ryan voted for.
•Ryan blamed Obama for the shutting down of a GM plant in Ryan's home district in Janesville, Wisconsin. The fact is that the plant shuttered in 2008 while George Bush was still President. President Obama's program to keep GM alive saved hundreds of thousands of jobs.
•Ryan gave moving homilies to the responsibility of the strong to protect the weak. The truth is that the Medicaid cuts in Ryan's budget would deny health care to millions of the poor and prevent millions more middle class families from affording nursing homes.
•Ryan appealed to young people without jobs living in their parent's homes. Cuts to student loans in Ryan's budget would deny millions of them the chance to go to college and obtain the skills to get high-paying jobs.
•Ryan blamed President Obama for last summer's downgrade of the U.S. credit rating by Standard and Poor's. But S&P itself stated that the downgrade was caused primarily because Congressional Republicans, like Ryan, refuse to consider raising revenues.
Ryan is a master practitioner of The Big Lie, the propaganda technique in which if you lie big and often enough, people will believe the lie.
The question is whether the American media will let him get away with it.