A not-very-truthful speech in a not-very-truthful campaign
Posted by Ezra Klein on August 30, 2012 at 11:19 am
... The original pitch was for the five biggest lies in Paul Ryans speech. I said no. Its not that the speech didnt include some lies. Its that I wanted us to bend over backward to be fair, to see it from Ryans perspective, to highlight its best arguments as well as its worst. So I suggested an alternative: The true, the false, and the misleading in Ryans speech. (Note here that were talking about political claims, not personal ones. Ryans biography isnt what were examining here though, for the record, I found his story deeply moving.)
An hour later, the draft came in Dylan Matthews is a very fast writer. There was one item in the true section.
So at about 1 a.m. Thursday, having read Ryans speech in an advance text and having watched it on television, I sat down to read it again, this time with the explicit purpose of finding claims we could add to the true category. And I did find one. He was right to say that the Obama administration has been unable to correct the housing crisis, though the force of that criticism is somewhat blunted by the fact that neither Ryan nor Mitt Romney have proposed an alternative housing policy. But I also came up with two more false claims. So I read the speech again. And I simply couldnt find any other major claims or criticisms that were true ...
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/wp/2012/08/30/a-not-very-truthful-speech-in-a-not-very-truthful-campaign/