Ryan Lizza, The New Yorker: The Paul Ryan Speech: Five Hypocrisies

[highplainsdem]

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2012/08/the-paul-ryan-speech-five-fibs.html

My quick take on Paul Ryan’s speech at the Republican National Convention Wednesday night is that it is awfully difficult to criticize President Obama when you’ve spent the last fourteen years in Washington dealing with many of the same issues. In five significant cases, Ryan’s attacks on the President were breathtakingly hypocritical.

-snip-

5. Finally, Ryan attacked Obama for ignoring the recommendations of the Simpson-Bowles debt commission:

-snip-

Guess who the leading Republican budget wonk on that commission was? Yes, Paul Ryan. When “the urgent report” came up for a vote, Ryan voted against it.

Ryan started this race with a reputation for honesty. He’s on his way to losing it.

Emphasis added.

This list of five hypocrisies in Ryan's speech has four that are familiar from other articles tonight, but one I don't recall anyone else mentioning.

Lizza notes that Ryan criticized Obama for saying it was his message and not his policy that failed. But that was essentially the same argument Ryan made to Lizza when Lizza, researching a long article on Ryan published a few weeks ago, asked him why his Social Security reform plan failed in 2005. Ryan blamed the Bush administration for doing a bad job of selling it, and he added that "You’ve got to prepare the country for these things."

Paul Ryan will probably shrug off a lot of the criticism of his speech, but he might find it harder to ignore criticism from Lizza, after what Lizza wrote about him earlier.

[Cha]

1. K&R!

[Sherman A1]

2. K&R

[longship]

3. Woof, woof! Good read! nt

R&