Thursday night on Comedy Central’s “The Colbert Report,” host Stephen Colbert discussed one of the hottest political news topics of the 2012 Republican National Convention, the steaming pile of lies in vice presidential nominee Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI)’s speech from Wednesday. Ryan, known — like Newt Gingrich — as a Republican “ideas guy,” took the mic on Wednesday night to thunderous applause from the delegates in attendance. It’s too bad that, as Colbert said, the biggest idea in Ryan’s speech was “Lying is handy.” One of Ryan’s jobs, said Colbert, is to make the Republican ticket appeal to younger voters. To that end, Ryan announced that his iPod is a little different from presidential nominee Gov. Mitt Romney (R-MA)’s. “My playlist starts with AC/DC and ends with Led Zeppelin.”
Of course he likes Zep, Colbert noted, he “comes from the land of the ice and snow!” (i.e., Wisconsin)
“But the real game changer was when Ryan brought the hurt-stick to Obama,” said Colbert, cueing up the part of the speech where Ryan talked about the now-infamous GM auto plant in Janesville, Wisconsin that closed before President Barack Obama took office, but which the GOP is currently trying to blame Obama for, in spite of the fact that the Janesville canard has been debunked again and again.
“It’s a shame that factory couldn’t have lasted another year,” Colbert said. “It would have still been open when Obama took office.”
The host blamed the “Lamestream nit-pick patrol” for casting a pall on Ryan’s brilliant crowd-pleaser of a speech.
“Here’s where they say he was lying,” said Colbert, re-starting the speech. “Right…there when he starts moving his lips!”
Even Sally Kohn at Fox News wrote of the speech, “Ryan’s speech was an apparent attempt to set the world record for the greatest number of blatant lies and misrepresentations slipped into a single political speech.”
“Thank god the Romney/Ryan ticket isn’t grabbing its ankles for reality,” Colbert said, which falls right in with campaign pollster Neil Newhouse’s assertion, “We’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact checkers.”
Ryan’s defenders in the media like CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, Erin Burnett and David Gergen said that while there may be some dispute about the factual nature of Ryan’s assertions, they felt the speech was a success in that it got people motivated and that, in spite of the falsehoods, it was about “big ideas.”
“Yes!” agreed Colbert, “HUGE ideas! Ideas like ‘Lying is handy!’”
Watch the video, embedded via Comedy Central, below:
