Paul Ryan’s Theme Song: Lying Eyes

Posted on by

Some of the reviews of Paul Ryan’s speech last night —

Joan Walsh, “Paul Ryan’s Brazen Lies”

Steve Kornacki, “How Paul Ryan Gets Away With BS”

Brian Beutler, “Top 5 Fibs In Paul Ryan’s Convention Speech”

James Downie, “Paul Ryan’s breathtakingly dishonest speech”

Adele Stan, “Paul Ryan Obscures His Koch-Backed Agenda With a Pack of Lies in Convention Speech”

John Nichols, “They Love the Lies Paul Ryan Tells”

Greg Sargent, “Paul Ryan Fails — the Truth”

Robert Schlesinger, “Paul Ryan Repeats Auto Bailout, Medicare Lies”

Marty Kaplan, “Romney/Ryan and the Lullaby of Lying”

Jonathan Chait, “Paul Ryan’s Large Lies and One Big Truth”

Juan Cole, “Top Ten Repeated Paul Ryan Lies”

Jonathan Cohn, “The Most Dishonest Convention Speech … Ever?”

I detect a theme here —

That’s not even all the headlines I found that declared Paul Ryan a liar. And we haven’t heard from Charles Pierce yet. I could go on and on, but I’ve got other things to do today.

On the other hand, this is how the speech was covered on CNN:

Blitzer: So there he is, the republican vice presidential nominee and his beautiful family there. His mom is up there. This is exactly what this crowd of republicans here certainly republicans all across the country were hoping for. He delivered a powerful speech. Erin, a powerful speech. Although I marked at least seven or eight points I’m sure the fact checkers will have some opportunities to dispute if they want to go forward, I’m sure they will. As far as mitt romney’s campaign is concerned, paul ryan on this night delivered.

Burnett: That’s right. Certainly so. We were jotting down points. There will be issues with some of the facts. But it motivated people. He’s a man who says I care deeply about every single word. I want to do a good job. And he delivered on that. Precise, clear, and passionate.

Issues with some of the facts, yes. Many issues. But isn’t he pretty?

Here’s another potential theme song —

19 thoughts on “Paul Ryan’s Theme Song: Lying Eyes”

  2. I hope the lying thing starts to stick, or else it’ll be “Blue-eyes, Bringin’ In The Reign.”

    And as for Blitzer, well, Wolf ain’t a 4-letter word for nothin’!

    To call him an insipid toady, is an insult to the people who have no choice but to do that for a hell of a lot less money.
    Ah, but he must have been something to see when he was covering Romme’ls charge across Africa and the Middle East!

  3. The AP couldn’t bring itself to use the word “lies”, so their headline is about “factual shortcuts.”

    You remember the famous George Washington line, don’t you? “I cannot take any factual shortcuts?”

    After the night based around the “We Built It” theme, which was completely based on a distortion and willful misreading, last night made it clear that they are all-in on the idea of a ‘post-truth’ campaign. All the lying campaign ads and stump speeches aren’t an oversight or an accident – they are willing to lie their way into power.

    And there may be enough people who’d rather hear a racist lie and a bogus promise to get them there.

    It will be interesting to see how the media handles it. (Even AP has to be close to its limit -that ‘factual shortcut’ dodge only lasts so long.)

  4. Sign of the Apocalypse?

    According to Fox News columnist Sally Kohn, vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan’s speech at the Republican National Convention on Wednesday “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,” Kohn wrote.

    In a surprising move, Fox News joined CNN, The Huffington Post, the Washington Post’s Wonkblog, and ThinkProgress in publishing a fact-check of the Republican vice presidential nominee’s speech, finding that the speech was full of lies and misleading assertions.

    Here’s the link to the whole article:

    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/30/fox-news-sally-kohn-paul-ryan_n_1842580.html

    Of course it mentions that most of Faux Noise’s robots ignored all the lying, because, hey, it’s the air that they breathe. (Theme song runner-up?)

  5. Don’t forget the Sex Pistols! They did a song called “Liar” too.

    At any rate, I wish I knew the complete history of US presidential election campaigns, because I’d like to know if any previous campaign has been based entirely and exclusively on lies. Politicians have always lied, of course, but the lies are usually incidental, not the centerpiece of the campaign. Right now, the only candidate I know of who was as totally lacking in character or integrity as Romney and Ryan was Aaron Burr.

  6. Biggest lie of all is R-money’s stellar business career. You should the 9/13 Rolling Stone article by Matt Tiabbi! I just finished, and it is a barn-burner.

    Only the peopleblinded by their faith can ignore the proven dishonesty of the Romney-Ryan ticket.

    I can’t wait to see Stewart and Colbert tonight!

  7. Burnett: “He’s a man who says I care deeply about every single word.”

    Yeah, I once knew a sociopath who could radiate sincerity and lie convincingly, too. They’re not as rare as Burnett seems to think.

  8. Btw – the Democrats need to ask if they can get The Eagles permission to use their great song, and just change the lyrics a bit, to match the new title:
    “Your Ryan Eyes.”

    ‘You can’t hide your Ryan eyes
    And your smile is a thin disguise
    I thought by, people would realize
    That there ain’t nothing there
    Except your lyin Ryan eyes…’

  10. Way OT, but the truth goes marching on….I believe Anita Hill… and I will continue in that belief until my dying day.

    I thank the Lord God of all creation for giving me the discernment in establishing that truth.

    “From an abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks”. Betraying wicked motives and the deceits that shield them…”Are you a women scorned?”

  11. Biggerbox… Good catch on the factual shortcuts nonsense.

    The Bible says:….Satan is the father of fatual shortcuts.

    Babelfish translation, English to Spanish: Factual shortcut =Diluyente de mentira

  12. Alternate translation, English to Book o’ Mormon: “And so it came to pass, that Nephi’s younger brother Torquemada came before the populace, and told them many things that were greatly removed from veracity.”

    i.e., “We’re lying and we know it…. Look! It’s Dirty Harry!”

  14. I read the Matt Taibai/Rolling Stone article on Romney (linked to in the prior thread), and can’t recommend it highly enough. He really is Gordon Gekko with a smile. His wealth wouldn’t be possible without a lot of help from the very government he publicly decries. But Taibbai’s last few paragraphs, which don’t go into detail about all the financial chicanery (it’s explained earlier in the article), are the most perceptive and the perhaps the most chilling:

    Listen to Mitt Romney speak, and see if you can notice what’s missing. This is a man who grew up in Michigan, went to college in California, walked door to door through the streets of southern France as a missionary and was a governor of Massachusetts, the home of perhaps the most instantly recognizable, heavily accented English this side of Edinburgh. Yet not a trace of any of these places is detectable in Romney’s diction. None of the people in any of those places bled in and left a mark on the man.

    Romney is a man from nowhere. In his post-regional attitude, he shares something with his campaign opponent, Barack Obama, whose background is a similarly jumbled pastiche of regionally nonspecific non-identity. But in the way he bounced around the world as a half-orphaned child, Obama was more like an involuntary passenger in the demographic revolution reshaping the planet than one of its leaders.

    Romney, on the other hand, is a perfect representative of one side of the ominous cultural divide that will define the next generation, not just here in America but all over the world. Forget about the Southern strategy, blue versus red, swing states and swing voters – all of those political clichés are quaint relics of a less threatening era that is now part of our past, or soon will be. The next conflict defining us all is much more unnerving.

    That conflict will be between people who live somewhere, and people who live nowhere. It will be between people who consider themselves citizens of actual countries, to which they have patriotic allegiance, and people to whom nations are meaningless, who live in a stateless global archipelago of privilege – a collection of private schools, tax havens and gated residential communities with little or no connection to the outside world.

    Mitt Romney isn’t blue or red. He’s an archipelago man. That’s a big reason that voters have been slow to warm up to him. From LBJ to Bill Clinton to George W. Bush to Sarah Palin, Americans like their politicians to sound like they’re from somewhere, to be human symbols of our love affair with small towns, the girl next door, the little pink houses of Mellencamp myth. Most of those mythical American towns grew up around factories – think chocolate bars from Hershey, baseball bats from Louisville, cereals from Battle Creek. Deep down, what scares voters in both parties the most is the thought that these unique and vital places are vanishing or eroding – overrun by immigrants or the forces of globalism or both, with giant Walmarts descending like spaceships to replace the corner grocer, the family barber and the local hardware store, and 1,000 cable channels replacing the school dance and the gossip at the local diner.

    Obama ran on “change” in 2008, but Mitt Romney represents a far more real and seismic shift in the American landscape. Romney is the frontman and apostle of an economic revolution, in which transactions are manufactured instead of products, wealth is generated without accompanying prosperity, and Cayman Islands partnerships are lovingly erected and nurtured while American communities fall apart. The entire purpose of the business model that Romney helped pioneer is to move money into the archipelago from the places outside it, using massive amounts of taxpayer-subsidized debt to enrich a handful of billionaires. It’s a vision of society that’s crazy, vicious and almost unbelievably selfish, yet it’s running for president, and it has a chance of winning.

    A key event in Romney’s life, is when he graduated from Harvard Business School, and could’ve really done anything in the whole world, given his famous and wealthy father, and the fancy education and pedigree. What does he do? He goes into the then non-glamorous field of corporate takeovers. He becomes skilled at saddling companies with huge debts, most of it from money Romney borrowed, and then extracting management fees and stock dividends, while the companies themselves have to gut themselves – laying off workers – to pay off these debts, just to survive, if they do survive. In mafia terms, this is called a “bust-out” or a “blow-out”. Lying and conning your way into this kind of arrangment is just part of doing business.

    And so you have candidate Romney with the biggest leveraged buyout candidate of them all, standing before you – the United States of America. This is why he is completely unfazed by lying – it’s just how he has done business in the past.

    I have thought a lot about how the whole GOP program since Ronald Reagan basically is about asset-stripping: tearing down what generations of Americans have built up in this country: the social safety net, various federal agencies and so on. Romney simply represents to the GOP the best man for sucking out any remaining wealth in this country and forwarding it on to the 1%. He has tons of experience in doing this at Bain.

  15. It was a bright, hot day in August, and the clocks were striking 13…..
    These guys are somewhere between a crime family and a Marilyn Manson video; Sweet dreams (are made of these).

  16. Ann Romney said women tell her: “It’s time for the grown-up to come, the man that’s going to take this very seriously and the future of our children very, very seriously,”

    Not only can’t you hide lying eyes.. You can’t hide your venom sac. It’s resplendent.

    In the spirit of FDR’s Norway speech…”Again I say, Look to character”

  17. Yeah, Swami,
    I saw the “grown-up” line, too.

    I hope she repeats that line at every speech, and TV and radio appearance.

    Remember the result of the last clammoring by the Republicans for adults to be in charge?

    After Clinton/Gore, the country gave the keys (or rather, the SCOTUS – but it was close enough for 5 old thieves to steal them) to Bush/Cheney, and many of these same Republicans who are with Romney/Ryan, who took the car that had just been repaired after 12 years of Reagan/Bush neglect and abuse, and promptly started driving it around for 8 years, drunk and high on power, smashing into trees and people’s homes, until finally they drove it off a cliff.
    Obama got the car out of the cliff, and on the road again.
    And now the Republicans clammor for the keys, AGAIN?

  18. So Willard Mitt Romney tells us that he is a success, its easy when you start with Dad’s money and dad’s contacts (kinda like Trump) and did not do it on your own, but ok, success.

    Willard Milton Romney tells us that Bain was his first success, a company without a product (unlike Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Henry Ford, Thomas Edison among others who created jobs by the success of their products). What’s even funnier is Bain owns “Clear Channel” who has under contract both “Rush Limbaugh” and “Glen Beck”, how do you think they will do after the election. Bain preyed on weak companies and even when Bain took these companies into bankruptcy Bain made money (Willard still gets a check from Bain) not to mention the jobs that were outsourced or their dealings with RED CHINA, but ok maybe Willard did not know that Bain was in to that, sure, why not, right?

    Willard Milton Romney then tells us that his second success is 2002 Winter Olympics. All 2002 Winter Olympics financials have been destroyed, but ok lets take his word, success.

    This is Willard Milton Romney calling card that what our country needs now is someone like him a supposed successful business man. This “Business Success” and how that will translate into “Public Sector” success has already been tested.

    So given all of Willard Milton Romney, supposed success, don’t you expect to see an extraordinary success in his position as governor of Massachusetts, his one and only public sector job? If you look at the majority of his statements as to why he should be governor of Massachusetts, they almost mirror his current ones, mainly “I am a successful business man”. But when we look at Massachusetts, it was an ordinary mediocrity, to the point that he could only survive one term, that how good this guy was, but ok according to him he was a success.

    Now he wants the top public sector job, hmmm, no not on my watch!

Comments are closed.