The Obama campaign is lashing out at Paul Ryan, claiming that his fantastic convention speech last night was packed with falsehoods and lies. Here's their hysterical response video:
To the surprise of no one, the ad's "rebuttals" are misleading and wrong themselves. Point by point:
(1) They begin with video of CNN reporters discussing accusations of Ryan's "lies." This is proof that the Obama campaign sent out a lot of angry emails, and nothing else.
(2) Medicare - Sorry, guys, but it is 100 percent true that Obamacare raided $716 Billion from Medicare to pay for itself. It does cut benefits to current seniors. And Paul Ryan's plan took the president's Medicare "savings," and re-routed them back into Medicare to shore up the program. Mitt Romney's plan would undo those cuts altogether. Obama took those cuts and used them to pay for Obamacare. He has admitted this on camera:
(3) The GM Plant - Part of the factory Ryan mentioned was shut down under Bush, despite the initial GM bailout (which Senator Obama supported). The plant finally fully closed in April of 2009, during Obama's presidency, as this report clearly states. Obama's problem is that he showed up and made empty promises to pander for votes. Ryan never said Obama was personally responsible for the plant's closure, but he accurately stated that it closed down within a year of candidate Obama's hope-filled speech and remains closed today. Obama goes on and on about "saving" the auto industry and his economic recovery. That boarded-up Janesville plant tells a different story.
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(4) The Stimulus - Pointing out that Paul Ryan asked that his district receive a slice of a giant, wasteful pie after it was passed -- and despite his opposition -- is at worst an instance of hypocrisy. It does not disprove anything that Ryan said in his speech, and it does not change the empirical fact that Barack Obama's borrowed stimulus has utterly failed based on the metrics for success Obama himself set out for it.
(5) The debt commission - What Ryan said is absolutely correct. The Obama ad quotes Chris Wallace, who notes that Ryan was on that commission and voted against it. True. He refused to abide the section maintaining Obamacare, and voted no on its final findings. Still, he was intimately involved in the group's deliberations and proposed solutions. Not fully happy with the final outcome, he went on to craft two budgets of his own, with numerous elements based on the Simpson-Bowles framework. The commission's Democratic co-chairman (Bowles of Simpson-Bowles) has praised Ryan's proposals to the hilt. Barack Obama, who convened the commission in the first place after deriding commissions on the campaign trail, completely ignored its recommendations and proceeded to propose to wildly reckless, debt-busting budgets that received a total of zero votes in either house of Congress. Correctly asserting that Ryan opposed the final Simpson-Bowles recommendations is no way absolves Obama for his demonstrable abdication of leadership on these issues. It's more smoke and mirrors -- and more petty Obama blame, another central theme of Ryan's address.
(6) Chris Matthews called the speech "nasty." Stop the presses!
If this is all they've got, it's no wonder they're freaking out. Paul Ryan told the truth about Barack Obama, and the president's campaign can't handle it.
UPDATE - More smoking-gun video, this time on the GM plant. This aired in April 2009:
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