CSotD: “We’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact checkers.”
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The Big Lie Theory of Government is alive and well.
Matt Davies does a nice job of wedding the embarrassing Clint Eastwood appearance with what should be an even more embarrassing speech by VP Candidate Paul Ryan, a presentation so full of non-operative statements that even a Fox News analyst called him out on it:
(T)o 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.
When it's this obvious even to the Ailes and Murdoch crew, you can bet it's not going to slip past your opponents or the neutral commentators.
Chris Britt had a fairly blunt reaction:
Kevin Siers took a more whimsical approach, which also tied in the underlying conceptual falsehood upon which the Republicans based their convention theme: An out-of-context phrase that, honestly parsed, simply acknowledges that a lot of public money — in general, not specific to the current administration — is spent on measures that benefit business owners.
But even Steve Kelley, whose politics skew well to the right, wasn't letting Ryan off the hook, though his choice of words suggests that maybe Paul just kinda made a few mistakes.
Jon Stewart, as would be expected, went delightfully ballistic on the speech and on the Republican disregard for facts generally, and that's fun. It might even spur some people to stop being too hip to differentiate between imperfect choices and recognize that some choices are more imperfect than others.
But what will be more critical in the upcoming campaign is the extent to which Daniel Patrick Moynihan's famous dictum "You're entitled to your own opinions, but you're not entitled to your own facts" is even operative anymore.
The True Believers will continue to insist on having their own set of facts, and will be readily persuaded to believe, as a Romney strategist said, that the campaign should not be dictated to by fact-checkers, because the fact-checkers have their own political agenda.
The question before the nation is, are those people a lunatic fringe or a growing majority?
That's a pretty important question.
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