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(2,627 posts) Mon Sep 3, 2012, 05:42 PM Sep 2012

Romney and Ryan's Post-Truthiness

September 3, 2012 by Common Dreams - by Bruce Hay

If dissembling were a competitive sport, the speakers last week’s Republican National Convention would all be wearing medals. Maureen Dowd called the whole thing a “masquerade.” The Washington Post called it “breathtakingly dishonest.” Even Fox News was surprised at the "dazzling, deceiving, and distracting" mendacity of Paul Ryan's speech.

Welcome to what Grist’s David Robert has dubbed “post-truth politics.”

Lying in politics is, of course, nothing new. What is new about the GOP campaign of dissiumulation, though, is the idea that it’s fine, it’s nothing to be embarrassed about, covered up or retracted. All politicians exaggerate or sometimes even just flat out make stuff up, but there used to be a code of ethics, so to speak, about how to handle the exposure of a lie. There was a need to at least keep your statements informed by at least a bit of “truthiness,” as Stephen Colbert named that old brand of political misinformation. Even if you continued to deny the truth, you stopped repeating the falsehood.

But that etiquette has apparently gone the way of candidate tax-form disclosure. Within minutes of Ryan’s bit about the closed GM plant in Janesville, fact checkers were telling the true story, that the plant closed before Obama took office. Yet when Wolf Blitzer questioned him about the issue the next day, Ryan didn’t backpedal; incredibly, he doubled down. He said he didn’t want to revise anything, that the plant is “still idle,” and that “the point is, this is the story of the Obama economy,” alleging that the now thoroughly debunked story was representative of the entire presidency. Ryan seemed to have missed the irony that the story was in fact now emblematic of his own proclivity for truth bending.

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/09/03-2