Just look at the round-up of Sunday talk show quotes from the disastrous Vice Presidential candidate, Paul Ryan:
Regarding his marathon lie:
O'Donnell asked him about another fact that has been problematic for Ryan: his marathon time. Ryan, a fitness nut, originally said he ran a marathon in under three hours. It turned out that he had run it in more than four.http://www.latimes.com/..."It was an honest mistake, Ryan said. I was 20 years old. I hurt my back when I was about 23 or 24 and I had to quit running; I herniated a disk in my back. So I've just lost perspective on what normal times are. I ran an ordinary race, and I thought the answer I gave was an ordinary time. Obviously it wasn't.
Most people use a stopwatch as a timepiece. Ryan apparently uses his back to keep time.
This innovative use of his body, explains why he feels comfortable extracting his budget figures from another part of his anatomy.
Foreign policy expert
Even though Ryan has been well-known for years as a budget wonk, today he insists that he's a foreign policy expert too.
Ryan insisted that he had more foreign policy experience than Obama, telling O’Donnell, “I’ve been in Congress for 14 years. He was in the Senate for far, far less time than that.” Ryan said he’d visited Iraq and Afghanistan, talked to war widows and soldiers, and has been taking foreign policy seriously for 14 years.So his foreign policy experience is similar to my weightlifting experience. Years ago a fitness trainer at my gym told me that 100% percent of weightlifting is mental.
Armed with this information, I quit my membership and radically changed my fitness regimen to only thinking about lifting weights. I am proud to say I am now up to 300 reps of thinking about weightlifting this year. I think it's 300 reps. It could be less. I often make honest mistakes that make me look better than I actually am.
Ryan's defensive response to the foreign policy experience question exposes a trait that is unbecoming of a person who is potentially next in line for the Presidency.
Rather than talking about his foreign policy experience and why voters should feel reassured by his judgement, he pivots to the President.
He does this when talking about his crappy budget too. He never sells us on his vision. He tries to unsell us on President Obama. That works for his base I suppose but at some point he must sell the rest of us on Paul Ryan.
Interestingly, when this foreign policy experience question comes up he never talks about Joe Biden's experience--the guy he's supposed to be the equivalent of and the guy he will be debating one-on-one. I wonder why that is?
Also, he never talks about what foreign policy legislation Senator Barack Obama co-sponsored or proposed compared to Representative Paul Ryan.
When Barack Obama was a Senator, he chaired the United States Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on European Affairs. In his two years in that chamber, he was more substantively involved in foreign affairs than Ryan was during his 14 years of crunching numbers and lording over women's reproductive rights:
Obama took fact-finding trip to former USSR to examine WMD stockpiles. In 2005, in his first foreign trip as a U.S. senator, Obama traveled to Russia, Ukraine and Azerbaijan with Sen. Richard Lugar (R-IN), then-chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee. The purpose of the trip was to examine facilities for the storage and destruction of conventional, biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons. Obama and Lugar subsequently co-wrote a December 2005 Washington Post op-ed on the issue and appeared together in a discussion at the Council on Foreign Relations on "Challenges Ahead For Cooperative Threat Reduction," in which Obama detailed ways to improve the U.S. program to control, secure, and dismantle weapons of mass destruction in the former Soviet Union.http://mediamatters.org/...With Lugar, Obama co-authored non-proliferation initiative signed into law by President Bush. Obama and Lugar co-authored the "Lugar-Obama non-proliferation initiative," which "enhances U.S. efforts to destroy conventional weapons stockpiles and to detect and interdict weapons and materials of mass destruction throughout the world." The legislation was signed into law by President Bush in January 2007. According to a June 28, 2007, press release from Lugar, he and Obama subsequently secured "$36 million for programs to destroy heavy conventional weapons, $10 million for efforts to intercept weapons and materials of mass destruction, and $2 million for rapid response to proliferation detection and interdiction emergencies."[...]
Obama introduced Nuclear Weapons Threat Reduction Act of 2007. Obama introduced the Nuclear Weapons Threat Reduction Act of 2007 (S.1977), with then-Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-NE) as an original co-sponsor, which would "provide for sustained United States leadership in a cooperative global effort to prevent nuclear terrorism, reduce global nuclear arsenals, stop the spread of nuclear weapons and related material and technology, and support the responsible and peaceful use of nuclear technology."
Obama interest in nuclear policy predates his Senate career. Obama reportedly authored his college thesis on "Soviet nuclear disarmament." Moreover, Washington Monthly reported in September 2006: "On the campaign trail in 2004, Obama spoke passionately about the dangers of loose nukes and the legacy of the Nunn-Lugar nonproliferation program, a framework created by a 1991 law to provide the former Soviet republics assistance in securing and deactivating nuclear weapons. Lugar took note, as 'nonproliferation' is about as common a campaign sound-bite for aspiring senators as 'exchange-rate policy' or 'export-import bank oversight.'"
To review: Ryan's foreign policy experience?
Ryan said he’d visited Iraq and Afghanistan, talked to war widows and soldiers, and has been taking foreign policy seriously for 14 years.http://www.latimes.com/...
Paul Ryan also seems to be running against his running mate Mitt Romney. For instance, Ryan would like to completely get rid of Obamacare.
Repeal of ObamaCare Key to Ryan Budget PlanLink to the hacktastic Real Clear Politics.
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/...
But we found out today that his boss wants to keep parts of Obamacare. Which leads voters to ask: who's running this ticket?
Ryan's boss also criticized Ryan and all Republicans that agreed to the deal that included automatic cuts to defense spending in order to raise the debt ceiling.
Ryan's answer to that? 'Just because I am on record voting for it, doesn't mean I voted for it.'
Behold this exchange with Norah O'Donnell:
When asked about that vote by O’Donnell, he replied: “No, no, I have to correct you on this Norah. I voted for a mechanism that says a sequester would occur if we don’t cut $1.2 trillion in spending in government. We passed, in the House, a bill to prevent those devastating defense cuts by cutting spending elsewhere.”http://www.latimes.com/...He then delved into a bit more wonkiness. “So the problem, Norah, is, we’ve led.… And the president hasn’t fulfilled his end of that bipartisan agreement,” he said. [Editor's Note: while talking about his vote, Paul Ryan's pivots to the President.]
O’Donnell pressed Ryan on the issue, reminding him that the Budget Control Act, which he supported, included a trillion dollars in spending cuts, including defense cuts. He even put out a statement calling the vote a “victory,” she said. Which led to this baffling exchange:
“And you also voted for those, and now you’re saying that you didn’t vote for them?” O’Donnell said.
“I voted for the Budget Control Act. But the Obama administration proposed $478 billion in defense cuts. We don’t agree with that, our budget rejected that,” Ryan answered.
“Right, it’s a trillion dollars in defense spending and you voted for it,” she said.
“No, Norah,” he said.
“You voted for it,” she said.
“I voted for the Budget Control Act,” he said. “Norah, you’re mistaken.”
This is the guy the Tea Party demanded be put on the ticket?
Paul Ryan is not and may never be ready for prime time. He is a terrible candidate, an uncareful liar, and a terrible policymaker, which makes him a perfect running mate for Mitt Romney but presents a terrible risk for the rest of us.
We're apparently doing very well right now post-convention. But we have to get out the vote and we have to win, up and down ticket. This terrible, lying disaster must never make it to the White House.