http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/...ed-to-know_n_1841658.html?utm_hp_ref=business A night after Chris Christie promised America that his party would tell hard truths about the economy, his party's vice-presidential nominee hit the stage and told truths so damn hard you couldn't even find them. Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) had his Sarah Palin moment last night, in a good way, lighting up the Republican National Convention with startling charisma and energy, and a love of classic rock, cementing his position as the right's new superstar maybe forever. Ryan used his superhuman charisma powers as a force for truth, telling Americans stuff they didn't want to hear, like how President Obama closed a GM plant in Wisconsin, how Obama wants to sneak into old people's houses at night and take their Medicare, how Obama got the U.S. credit rating downgraded, how Obama strangled the Bowles-Simpson debt-reduction plan in the bathtub, how Obama's stimulus plan did nothing for the country. Nobody wants to hear that stuff, but Paul Ryan is not afraid to say it. Except, as The Huffington Post's Ryan Grim -- and pretty much every other political commentator in America, including one employed by Fox News -- points out, these claims stretch the truth, or in some cases drive the truth out to the pine barrens and shoot it in the head. Ryan voted against the Bowles-Simpson debt-reduction plan. The U.S. credit rating got downgraded because of the debt-ceiling crisis deliberately caused by House Republicans, led by Paul Ryan. Paul Ryan's famous budget plan only "works," to the extent it actually works, if you cut the same amount of money from Medicare that Obama took -- from providers, not from benefits, notes Brian Beutler of TalkingPointsMemo. Paul Ryan requested some of those same worthless stimulus funds, points out New York magazine's Dan Amira. And the biggest whopper of all is that story about the GM plant. Turns out it closed in 2008, before Obama was even in office. Why does Obama have a time machine that allows him to retroactively destroy America? For his next trick, one can only assume that he will next go back and slap George Washington in the mouth with his Kenyan birth certificate. All this comes at a convention obsessively focused on two other falsehoods, the "We Built It" meme and the idea that Obama has gutted welfare reform. Look, sure, fact-checkers are for wimps. But maybe we should start to get concerned that a political party could very soon take control of the U.S. economy, not as a result of offering any concrete plan for fixing it, but after being as misleading as it possibly can about it.
CNN fact check: true, but incomplete statement "So, though Ryan might have been incorrect in the August 16 telling, he cleaned it up for Wednesday's convention. Obama said what Ryan said he said." http://www.cnn.com/2012/08/30/politics/pol-fact-check-ryan-gm/index.html