Quote of the Week (Paul Ryan edition)

Alright, time to jump into things post-Labor Day. I hope you're all enjoying your fall, even though it won't "officially" start for a couple more weeks. It's football season, so it's fall, simple as that.

Of course, it's also an election year, which means that fall is going to be... just mind-numbingly annoying. I'm going to try my best to ignore the majority of the political noise over the next couple of months, because so much of it is specifically designed to inflame and distract and do anything but talk about the actual issues which are plaguing our country—issues which our politicians refuse to address, and for which voters refuse to hold our politicians accountable—but I digress. Wait, where was I?

So at any rate, while I'm going to try to ignore most of the political noise, this week's Quote will indeed be somewhat political in nature. No, I'm not going to quote Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert, even though it would've been incredibly easy to do so (a perfect example from Stewart: "Do you know how hard it is to get money down in Tampa that doesn't have body glitter on it?"... you see, it's funny because Tampa is loaded with strip clubs). Instead, I'm going to let Paul Ryan do what apparently comes naturally to him: tell a lie. Without further ado...

This week's QUOTE OF THE WEEK

"I hurt a disc in my back, so I don't run marathons anymore... I had a two hour and fifty-something [personal best]... I was fast when I was younger."
                                     - Republican Vice Presidential nominee Paul Ryan

Wow. That is fast. That's a sub-7 minute mile pace, sustained for a whole marathon. I'm impressed. That's not easy.

You see, when Romney chose Ryan to be his running mate, it seemed to be a solid, safe choice. Ryan had built a reputation on being/pretending to be tough on budgetary issues, and that's an issue that's seeming to resonate with voters this year (which I consider a positive, even if I think neither candidate is prepared to honestly do anything about it). Perhaps more importantly, Romney seemed to be avoiding the Sarah Palin landmine that exploded on John McCain four years ago—Ryan wasn't the type to say anything stupid, or get his name in the headlines, or anything like that. Hell, I'd even (sorta) praised the guy here on my blog once, and that's not easy for me to do. And hey, he's young and athletic, too!

But... um... whoops. You see, Paul Ryan never broke 3 hours in a marathon. He never even broke 4 hours. His best time was a 4:01 (not bad, just not overwhelmingly impressive), which just so happens to be about two minutes slower than Sarah Palin's personal best. That hour difference amounts to more than two minutes per mile, which is an obviously significant amount.

Could Ryan have just randomly screwed up here? Sure, it's possible, if not particularly probable for anyone who's spent more than a minute of their lives training for a marathon (believe me, I'd remember if I'd broken 3 hours up in Boston a couple of years ago).

But as I remarked on Twitter over the weekend, when you lie for a living, sometimes it's hard to know where the truth ends and fiction begins. And for Paul Ryan, it seems like lying is just quite simply what this guy does. To wit, after his incredibly misleading convention speech, none other than FOX FREAKING NEWS remarked that Ryan's speech "was an apparent attempt to set the world record for the greatest number of blatant lies and misrepresentations slipped into a single political speech." Um... yikes.

So, congratulations Mitt Romney. Your "uncontroversial" pick for running mate has already managed to put his foot in his mouth on repeated occasions, lying in a manner that has made even Fox News blush. That's not easy.

Hey, Ron Paul, you doing anything this November?

Paul Ryan gets it?

I've had my disagreements with Paul Ryan's decisions in the past (namely, voting for TARP and voting for Medicare Part D), but today he issued some incredibly sensible analysis in his questioning of Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke.



The highlight, as I see it: "The Federal Reserve, whose primary goal is to manage our money, is involving itself in fiscal policy--is sort of bailing out fiscal policy, because the branch of government in charge of fiscal policy, this branch, is not doing its job. I mean, a budget hasn't passed Congress in two years."

That is correct. I vehemently disagree with Bernanke and his inflationary policies, as I've made clear here on several occasions. But as I pointed out in my post earlier this week, Bernanke is merely raising taxes (effectively, at least) where Congress has refused to do so. His constant purchases of U.S. debt have kept the federal government solvent where it otherwise would not be (by artificially depressing borrowing costs), and it is therefore disingenuous at best to see elected officials hurling barbs at Bernanke without also acknowledging their own shortcomings.

With his analysis today, Rep. Ryan showed that he at least seems to understand the dynamics at play--Bernanke may be the devil, but he's a devil of Congress' own creation. One cannot exist without the other.


(h/t The Mess That Greenspan Made)