Oh boy, here we go ...
Apparently Paul Ryan had his people check into it and yes, it turns out Paul Ryan did indeed write letters explicitly asking for (and getting) stimulus funds
in spite of his own certainty that he never would have done such a horrible thing. Well, oops. But he can explain!
You see, he just didn't know those millions of dollars of projects were related to the stimulus. If he had known that those projects were being funded by the stimulus, he would have told those constituents to go right to hell:
“After having these letters called to my attention I checked into them, and they were treated as constituent service requests in the same way matters involving Social Security or Veterans Affairs are handled. This is why I didn’t recall the letters earlier,” he continued. “But they should have been handled differently, and I take responsibility for that. Regardless, it’s clear that the Obama stimulus did nothing to stimulate the economy, and now the President is asking to do it all over again.”
I'm not sure if I can even parse that—Ryan seems to share Mitt's gift for stringing words together in ways that sound like English, but which convey precious little actual information—but he seems to be saying that his office considered those requests to be simple, run-of-the-mill things that Paul Ryan happened to very strongly disagree with, and therefore, um, did anyway without even thinking much about it.
Is Ryan saying his office regularly rubber-stamped constituent requests for money even when he disagreed with them, or that they just never paid much attention, or what? It sounds like he's saying he and his office would normally write requests like that as a routine matter, but really ought to have treated those specific requests differently only because he now realizes they were going to be paid for via the stimulus, which made them bad.
"Oh, you want us to help you fix your town's most important bridge? No problem. Wait, you want to do it as part of the stimulus? Oh, well fuck you, then."
That doesn't even make sense on the level of lame excuse. I guess Paul Ryan is saying that he never would have helped his own constituents get things done if he thought doing so would improve the economy, which he is positive it did not because, um, he says so. Or something—like I said, I can't even parse it. But implicit in all of it is that it was his staff's fault, not his, and that he's truly sorry that his staff prepared these various requests for stimulus money on his letterhead with his own name signed prominently at the bottom of each one.
What a wreck of a campaign. Between Romney and Ryan, it's just one car crash after another.
