Various people and outlets on the left have thoroughly debunked Ryan's laundry list of right wing distortions and outright lies that made up his convention speech last night. Included in the many fine diaries here was this piece, which featured this archival video debunking of Ryan's lie that is so devastating that I can't resist the urge to poach it and repost it here:
What's interesting is that even the corporate media has been willing to call out Ryan's lies. It's not clear if this signals a new sense of journalistic pride in their work or if Ryan's lies were just so egregious that they couldn't be left to stand. I'll leave it to you to come to your own conclusions on that matter.
What is just as interesting, and very telling, is the reaction of the right to the general reaction to Ryan's lies. Get into your RWNJ reinforced hazmat suits, make sure you have your good towel, and, of course, don't panic. Let's go...
The redstaters are striving mightily to convince themselves that 2008 was actually 2009. Of course, adding another delusion to their bag of untrue facts is not the hard part.
Their true challenge is to convince those not consumed by hatred for Obama and all things to the left of Dick Cheney, and that's not so easy. As the clear, irrefutable evidence in the video above documents, the decision to close the plant was made in the summer of 2008 and the last night of full production was in December of 2008.
The right wingers are latching on to the fact that the plant didn't finally run out it's inventory and lock it's doors to even the skeleton shifts until April of 2009. This is dishonesty on par with the claims that when Obama quoted McCain's campaign, it was okay to ascribe the quote to Obama himself because 'those words came out of Obama's mouth.'
The problem is, while right wingers are quite happy to suspend all critical thinking skills in the service of confirming their roiling hatred and fear of all Obama represents in their minds, other Americans, including the still undecided, don't share the right wing vitriol for the president and his ostensibly center-left policies.
What they see is the supposedly truth talking wonk of a GOP VP pick making a declarative statement about a verifiable sequence of events. They then see that the GOP VP pick blatantly lied to them. Next, they see the GOP campaign and right wingers mocking and demonizing those who are calling VP pick Ryan on his lies and attempting to spin a preposterous web that is so insulting to their intelligence as to cause one two major reactions: resentment and dismissal.
Ryan has gleefully tossed his quite undeserved reputation as a supposed truth teller to the wind. What he, and the campaign and right wingers in general, are already beginning to sow reap in this hyper accelerated mediascape is disbelief and budding resentment. Will this bloom into full scorn and derision or simply fester as a low grade but persistent undergrowth of suspicion and distrust, lingering in the back of voters' minds whenever Ryan or Romney speak?
We'll have to wait and see. But the squealing and panic on the right about this issue tells us what they fear is coming.