Convention update: Media and Democrats redefining “lie” to attack Ryan

The attacks on Paul Ryan’s acceptance speech began last night, as I noted in my column earlier this morning, and they have continued unabated for most of today.  Right now, #lyinryan is trending nationally on Twitter, and I’ve gotten a handful of emails from the Obama campaign and others accusing Paul Ryan of lying in his speech last night.

As a southerner, I get my hackles up when I see someone accused of lying.  When I was growing up, calling someone a liar – especially if it wasn’t based on a smoking gun – was a recipe for a fist fight.  I have rarely, if ever, called someone a liar unless it was clear they were being intentionally misleading, trying to deceive. 

It’s too bad the media and the Democrats are jumping so quickly to attack Paul Ryan for his speech last night.  There are a handful of things they’re incensed about, but when you look at them in the text of the speech, there’s not a lie in sight.

Bottom line is simple: Ryan didn’t lie.  Everything he said was factually accurate, regardless of what Politifact or the other fact checkers might claim.  Here’s my review of the statements that have spun most people up.

1.) The Janesville GM Plant Closing –  The media flipped out last night about the GM plant closing issue.  Ryan was a liar, they claimed, because that plant closed in December 2008,  after the election but before President Obama took office.  But that’s not the point, and Ryan never accused Obama of shuttering the plant or somehow being responsible for it closing.  Here’s what Ryan actually said:

President Barack Obama came to office during an economic crisis, as he has reminded us a time or two. Those were very tough days, and any fair measure of his record has to take that into account. My home state voted for President Obama. When he talked about change, many people liked the sound of it, especially in Janesville, where we were about to lose a major factory.

A lot of guys I went to high school with worked at that GM plant. Right there at that plant, candidate Obama said: “I believe that if our government is there to support you … this plant will be here for another hundred years.” That’s what he said in 2008.

Well, as it turned out, that plant didn’t last another year. It is locked up and empty to this day. And that’s how it is in so many towns today, where the recovery that was promised is nowhere in sight.”

Where’s the lie?  Obama did go to Janesville, twice, in February and October 2008.  Both times Obama made statements about keeping the plant open.  The plant stopped producing GM SUVs in December 2008, and it stopped producing trucks in 2009.  Today, the plant isn’t producing anything.  What Ryan said was accurate – Obama went to Janesville, said the plant should remain open, and today it isn’t.  It’s indicative of the President’s inability to turn the economy around.  He never blamed the plant closing on Obama.  He simply said what Obama said and the fact that plant is now not producing.  That’s reality.

2.) The Medicare argument – This one has been going around for a while.  The Affordable Care Act funnelled $716 billion from Medicare Advantage to cover the enormous cost of Obamacare.   The Romney campaign has been attacking the President for this incessantly since Paul Ryan joined the campaign.  Democrats have attacked Ryan for a variety of reasons on this claim – namely, that Medicare Advantage isn’t really Medicare, and – the most damning in their eyes – Ryan’s budget kept the Medicare Advantage cuts Obamacare made. 

Ryan’s speech last night said the following: “You see, even with all the hidden taxes to pay for the health care takeover, even with new taxes on nearly a million small businesses, the planners in Washington still didn’t have enough money. They needed more. They needed hundreds of billions more. So, they just took it all away from Medicare. Seven hundred and sixteen billion dollars, funneled out of Medicare by President Obama. An obligation we have to our parents and grandparents is being sacrificed, all to pay for a new entitlement we didn’t even ask for. The greatest threat to Medicare is Obamacare, and we’re going to stop it.”

Is that true? Yes. $716 billion was cut from Medicare Advantage.  It doesn’t matter why it was cut, because Ryan and Romney have never gotten into the details of why Obama made those cuts other than to say they were to help fund Obamacare, which is true.  The cuts were a pay-for for the AFA.  The goal of those cuts, Obamacare supporters claim, is to cut waste from the program and reducing overall health care costs, effectively saving money over the long term. Whether or not those cuts will actually save money has yet to be seen.  But the fact remains – $716 billion was cut from a Medicare program to fund Obamacare.

That leads to the fact that Ryan’s budget left the cuts in.  Some in the media love to trot this talking point out like it invalidates the entire claim.  But here’s the difference that no one in the media – especially Rachel Maddow and the MSNBC crew – seems to understand:  Ryan’s budget never became law.  The Affordable Care Act did.  Ryan may have proposed the cuts remain, but his budget never got enacted.  It died, like most House passed legislation, in the Senate.  Ryan may have proposed to keep those cuts – he kept any cuts he could to get spending down – but Obama himself got those cuts enacted.  Another “Ryan lie” claim that doesn’t hold water.

3.) Simpson-Bowles Debt commission –  Paul Ryan noted last night that the President effectively ignored the Simpson-Bowles debt commission recommendations.  The media immediately screamed that Ryan was on the Simpson-Bowles commission and voted against the recommendations. 

That is true.  So what?  It doesn’t make what Ryan said a lie.  Here’s what Ryan actually said: “He created a bipartisan debt commission. They came back with an urgent report. He thanked them, sent them on their way and then did exactly nothing.”

That statement is, on the whole, accruate.  The commission itself never made official recommendations to Congress becasuse they couldn’t muster the 14 of 18 votes needed to make their recommednations official.  The proposals failed on an 11-7 vote. None of the Simpson-Bowles recommendations have become law.  The President never truly fought for them, and they all died without ever being enacted.  That’s the legislative equivalent of doing nothing – it was effectively accomplishing nothing. 

In all of these situations, Ryan made a statement that was factually accurate, but didn’t get down into the weeds to talk about specifics.  This gave the media the chance to glom on and scream “Liar!” and their enablers in the professional “fact-checking” crowd like Politifact have jumped up and agreed, despite needing to massage the facts in order to justify their false ratings. 

That’s one of the reasons why fact-checking doesn’t always work.  In politics, we’re rarely dealing with just plain facts.  We’re dealing with facts, conclusions drawn from them, opinions about them, and language that is carefully crafted to tell the message the speaker wants told.  That’s what Ryan’s speech did last night, and from my perspective he said nothing that rises to the level of being a “lie.” 

Shame on the media for being so quick to throw around that word. 

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