How much are you willing to ignore and how much are you willing to accept — all to ensure your chosen party’s victory this November?
Are you willing to allow your party to “jump the shark”?
Forgive the dated cliché, but it was used by presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s pollster Neil Newhouse to describe critics of Paul Ryan’s Republican National Convention speech last week.
“Fact-checkers come to this with their own sets of thoughts and beliefs,” Newhouse said. “And we’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact-checkers.”
Apparently, the Washington Post’s fact-checkers made an error by checking the statements made in vice-president-candidate Ryan’s speech against actual facts.
If you are unfamiliar with the speech, Ryan told a story last Thursday night about how then-Sen. Barack Obama came to his home state of Wisconsin. Ryan skewed Obama’s remarks that were made to workers at a GM factory, which was already slated to be closed, by misquoting him as saying the factory would be open another hundred years.
“When (Obama) talked about change, a lot of people liked it,” Ryan said. “But, as it turns out, that plant didn’t last another year.”
The other problem with that statement is that the GM plant closed while President George Bush was in office — yet Ryan made it look like “another failed promise” of Obama’s administration.
Democrats are no less deceptive in their own campaign advertisements. A few weeks ago, mirroring Ryan’s statement to the point of parody, a mudslinging TV advertisement representing Obama ran stating that a steel mill was closed by Romney while managing Bain Capital.
The plant was closed, but not while Romney was managing the company. Also, the factory workers all lost their jobs and their family health-care benefits.
However, the ad implied that one of the steel worker’s wife died “shortly” after this closing due to the loss of health care, implying it was Romney’s fault. It also implied he could not have cared less about this husband’s tragic loss.
The fact is that GST Steel went bankrupt in 2001 and the passing of the man’s wife occurred in 2006 when his wife was diagnosed with cancer and then died “shortly” after her diagnosis of a very aggressive cancer.
The Washington Post’s fact-checkers called this a “gray area” rather than a dishonest attack — they’re leaning so far to the left I’m surprised they can walk down a hallway.
I’m not going to delude myself into thinking most people watched the RNC speeches or have been following the Democratic National Convention this week. I’m sure most are pretty sick at this point of the presidential race because it’s been shoved in their faces, talked about in the office or maybe argued about over pancakes.
Both the speech made by Ryan and the TV ad are free online to watch, and normally I would write, “Go watch them for yourself.”
Instead, I’m going to just say they’re both outright, manipulative lies from people who think we’re so stupid that they must retort to these age-old smear campaigns that have existed before George Washington took office.
So, instead of focusing on this race, we should turn our focus on our local politicians and make sure they don’t even consider an attempt at this kind of insult to our intelligence.
There are a lot of important seats and one major decision in Nicholasville’s government coming up — not to forget seven candidates for six seats on the Wilmore City Council.
We may not have as loud of a voice in the presidential race, but we have a government-changing, wall-toppling, future-molding voice in this community — let’s keep our politicians here honest.
On a side note, the only comment I’ll make about Clint Eastwood’s RNC speech and his enduring one-on-one conversation with the empty chair is — I’ve never laughed harder in my life — God bless him.
