This fucking guy

By Dan Brooks in Republican Candidates 4 Comments

Paul Ryan says whatever to some votes at the Iowa State Fair.

Paul Ryan has been directly involved in the 2012 general election only a short time, but he seems bent on racking up as many fact-check stories as he can by November. Speaking to an audience at East Carolina University, Ryan claimed that 1.4 million businesses filed for bankruptcy in 2011, and that the economy under Obama has been worse than under Carter. Quote:

The president can say a lot of things and he will. But he can’t tell you that you’re better off. Simply put, the Jimmy Carter years look like the good old days compared to where we are right now.

“Simply put” is a verbal signal Ryan uses to warn his family to stop listening when he is about to lie, like when Sarah Palin says “gee” or “the.” It turns out that around 48,000 businesses filed for bankruptcy last year, not 1.4 million. It also turns out that fact checkers will jump all over a claim re: quantitative data that can be found on the internet within 30 seconds, and they did.

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Against which machine, exactly?

By Dan Brooks in Republican Candidates 3 Comments

Rage Against the Machine and guitarist Tom Morello’s extremely bad t-shirt idea

Charming Charlie sent me this nuanced—and equally ranty, so buckle up—assessment of what it means that Paul Ryan likes Rage Against the Machine. I know that tidbit came out a few weeks ago, but you know it was the most important reveal of the 2012 election. Either Barack Obama or Mitt Romney will be our next president; such details pale in comparison to the knowledge that the man who wants to end Medicare rocks out to “Killing in the Name.” The Last Psychologist, if that is his real name, believes that the whole thing is a setup—the question that brought this information to light, the co-opting of little- and big-r Rage by MTV, the faux media outrage, everything. I think he is exactly half right.

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Are Romney’s welfare ads racist?

By Dan Brooks in Republican Candidates 3 Comments

A little bit softer now…

God damn, Mitt Romney knows how to wear a suit. It’s because he’s rich; put him in jeans and he looks like he lost his luggage. Back before we knew about his Olympic horse and 13% tax rate, he tried to downplay the fact that he made enough money in 2010 to buy 100 houses. Now he’s going with it. The Republican candidate for president is one Thurston Howell micky-ficky, and you should vote for him because you have money, too. Even if you don’t, you would rather act like you did. That’s why the Romney campaign released this commercial:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0F4LtTlktm0

Almost nothing in that ad is true, by the way. PolitiFact called it “a drastic distortion” of actual HHS policy—an accusation that prompted one Romney operative to declare that “we won’t let this campaign be dictated by fact-checkers.” Thank god. I think we can all agree that fact-checkers have too much power in contemporary politics. To this home truth Thomas Edsall adds the claim that the Romney campaign is fundamentally racial.

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That was fast

By Dan Brooks in Republican Candidates 5 Comments

Missouri congressman and Republican senatorial candidate Todd Akin, with novel-tie

On Sunday, Todd Akin (R-MO) opined that if you really hadn’t wanted that man to penetrate you, you wouldn’t have gotten pregnant. By yesterday afternoon, multiple Republican groups had withdrawn their support and asked him to leave the senate race. It turns out you can’t say absolutely anything you want into a microphone in the United States of America, despite the occasional impression to the contrary. Now, approximately 48 hours after he tried to explain why he believes women who have been forcibly impregnated by strangers should have to bear their children, Representative Akin has produced an apology. Forgiveness video after the jump.

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Is this the handsomest GOP ticket ever?

By Dan Brooks in Republican Candidates 3 Comments

Paul Ryan addresses a journalist who was mean to Mitt Romney last week.

Paul Ryan was a high school prom king. Also his dad died when he was young, which is sad and uncool, and now he wants your dad to die too. Mitt Romney picked this guy to be his running mate Saturday morning, in a clever bid to capture a bloc of voters who might otherwise have gone to Obama: Tea Party members. Actually Ryan is a respected representative whose traction among the conservative wing of his party would help President Romney corral a potentially rebellious Congress. Or Candidate Romney decided he was going to lose in November unless he did something crazy. It depends whom you ask.

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