Wash Post Rips Ryan For "Lazy Mendacity," Phony Speaking

Read Greg Sargent's take down in The Washington Post of the supposedly bright and serious Paul Ryan after the Wisconsin Congressman and House Budget chair told a famously phony anecdote to the CPAC audience at the high-profile DC conference: 

The Post’s Glenn Kessler has checked out the anecdote Paul Ryan offered at CPAC yesterday, which was the perfect distillation of what you might call theHammock Theory of Poverty. In case you missed it, Ryan opined that the left is offering people “a full stomach and an empty soul,” and referenced an anecdote supposedly passed along to him by a Wisconsin public official...

Now Kessler finds that the anecdote is fiction — the creation of a misstatement by the official who originally offered it.

...the failure to vet it before presenting it to a national audience seems like more of the “lazy mendacity” Jonathan Bernstein talks about. Lawmakers get so used to saying whatever they want unchallenged inside the Conservative Media Entertainment Complex that claims go increasingly un-vetted...

At the same time, Ryan has embarked on a campaign to prove the GOP cares deeply about poverty. The only way to make all of this work is to argue that slashing programs for the poor is the way to help them — hence anecdotes like the one above that are designed to give that notion a philosophical gloss.

...he is still basically functioning in a media environment where he is greeted great deference as a serious wonk, even as the truly draconian nature of his fiscal vision and its fundamentally absurd pretentions to caring about poverty — not to mention its violence to mathematical reality — escape serious press scrutiny.