Saturday, September 1, 2012

Ryan's Marathon Lies

I was amused by the ambiguity in the Huffington Post link depicted at right.  At first I was thinking that Ryan had admitted that his address at the convention was some kind of lie-a-thon.  But actually the point is that he told a lie about how fast he ran a marathon, as the text underneath makes clear.

I've been kind of wondering why Ryan gave the speech he did, with the obvious factual errors it had. The point of picking Ryan, as I saw it, was not just to fire up the conservative base, but to also draw in wealthy centrists who think you're brave and serious if you make a lot of virtuous noise about balanced budgets.  Since Ryan hasn't really talked that much about social issues, his furiously right-wing voting record there might not influence their perception of him as an earnest honest policy wonk. But that reputation gets destroyed if you tell big whoppers that get roundly mocked in the media. I really didn't know why he and his people made the lies so obvious. If the idea was to raise money for some worthy charity that was holding a lie-a-thon, that would at least be something.

Anyway, the best joke I've seen about the actual story is that if Ryan really ran a marathon in under three hours, we should really be asking about his birth certificate, because people who can do that tend to be born in Kenya.

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