A heartening note from a fact-checker

By Dan Brooks in lying 1 Comment
Ted Cruz makes his truth-telling face.

Ted Cruz makes his truth-telling face.

Over at the New York Times, Angie Drobnic Holan has written an interesting guest editorial about her work as a political fact-checker. Holan works for PolitiFact, the Pulitzer-Prize winning project of the Tampa Bay Times to determine the accuracy of public statements. When you think about it, every news organization in America should do that—especially since Holan notes that fact-check stories get a lot of internet traffic after debates and other news events. Now is a good time for fact-checking. “I see accurate information becoming more available and easier for voters to find,” she writes. “By that measure, things are pretty good.”

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Comedian admits he lied about 9/11 experience

By Dan Brooks in lying 0 Comment
Comedian Steve Rannazzisi at an unknown event. Where could he be?

Comedian Steve Rannazzisi at an unknown event. Where could he be?

Buffalo Wild Wings pitchman and star of FXX’s The League Steve Rannazzisi has admitted he lied about escaping the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. The good news is he’s even more famous now. The bad news is he’s famous for saying he was working at Merrill Lynch in the south tower when a plane hit the north, when in fact Merrill Lynch had no office in either tower, and Rannazzisi was working in midtown for somebody else. Previously, he was best known for the following joke:

Rannazzisi: Knock knock!

Audience: Who’s there?

Rannazzisi: Steve Rannazzisi—I’ve just escaped from a horrible tragedy. You’ve got to let me in to your living room on Wednesdays at 10pm!

Audience: We don’t have FXX.

But now he’s a liar, and we hate him. Or we love him because he told the truth about lying? Consideration after the jump.

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Paul Ryan: Rage Against the Machine was never my favorite band

By Dan Brooks in lying 3 Comments
A possibly Photoshopped image of Rep. Paul Ryan

A possibly Photoshopped image of Rep. Paul Ryan

We all remember the highlight of the 2012 presidential election, when then-Republican nominee for vice president Paul Ryan told the New York Times that Rage Against the Machine was one of his favorite bands. It wasn’t quite irony, exactly. It was more like the twist in Terminator Salvation: with a rush of existential horror, we realized this guy thought he was a real person. But don’t you worry—he’s corrected that misapprehension in a new interview with the Times. Quote:

They were never my favorite band. I hate the lyrics, but I like the sound. Led Zeppelin has always been my favorite band. Again, these urban legends get going.

By “urban legends,” Ryan means things he told the most respected and carefully fact-checked newspaper in America. But he was never directly quoted, so he has some wiggle room. Uncomfortable writhing after the jump.

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Paul Ryan invites us to save money by embracing false dichotomy

By Dan Brooks in lying 0 Comment
Paul Ryan, who has not held a job since 1999

Paul Ryan, who has worked in politics since graduating college in 1992.

After over-composing to make deadline yesterday, I am enjoying my first semi-day off in weeks. While I propagate a culture of laziness and entitlement, how about we check in with a guy who knows all about that stuff from the perspective of righteous election? I refer of course to Paul Ryan, who recently complained that poverty is largely due to people in the inner cities “not even thinking about working or learning the value and the culture of work.” In case this blog post falls into a time machine set for 1954, “inner cities” is futurespeak for “people who are not white.” We need to stop spending money to help them, or this poverty thing might spread to another demographic.

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History takes one on the chin

By Dan Brooks in lying, Uncategorized 2 Comments

They're going to remember us as heroes, dog.

We here at Combat! blog are big fans of Paul Begala, in large part because he once made Meghan McCain feel sad on TV. Like a lot of political strategists, Begala has an incisive mind. Unlike a lot of political strategists—especially certain childlike, doughy political strategists we could name—some portion of that mind seems devoted to discernment of the truth, as opposed to truth’s active obfuscation. I’m sure he’s only tricked me into believing this, but Paul Begala seems to be the anti-Karl Rove. When he responded to Me-Mac’s bitchy assertion that she wouldn’t know about the Carter-Reagan transition because she hadn’t been born yet by saying, “I wasn’t born during the French Revolution, but I know about it,” I felt like I was watching a man who succeeded in politics by attacking the flaws in arguments, not by exploiting them. He’s the debate team to Rove’s student council, and that makes him a great choice to review Karl Rove’s new memoir. Spoiler alert: he did not like it. Under the headline, “Karl Rove’s Book of Lies,” Begala describes the former Bush advisor’s memoir as “a brief and compelling personal narrative, followed by 500 pages of dishonesty and deception.” But on the plus side, it contains a great recipe for bean dip.

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