It's not often when Markos "kos" Moulitsas, founder and publisher of Daily Kos, comes out into public view to issue a personal comment, but he did so today and he had extremely unkind things to say about Rep. Paul Ryan, the Wisconsin Republican who is Mitt Romney's running mate.
The concluding comments from Kos in his blog post:
Ryan did nothing to try and stop the closing of a major employer in his town, one that supposedly employed a bunch of his friends. That's called being a dick.
The fact that he then tries to pin the blame on Obama just confirms that he's a big one.
The "major employer" was General Motors, which ran a once rather large automobile plant in Ryan's home base of Janesville. But in 2008, the automaker announced it would shut the plant down. And it did, hurting the city badly as 5,000 well-paying jobs abruptly disappeared.
History shows that after the GM announcement, Ryan -- who by then was against federal budget earmarks -- did nothing to try to keep the plant around, or to get federal funds to help the community through a post-GM transition. This was all recently documented in a long New Yorker article on Ryan, entitled "Fussbudget."
Yet now, campaigning on the GOP ticket, Ryan is busy telling voters in other parts of the US that the loss of General Motors in Janesville was all Barack Obama's fault -- even though Obama wasn't sworn in as president until the year following the GM plant's closing.
Meanwhile, Mitt Romney has complained that Obama targeted federal funds that saved Chrysler and GM from bankruptcy, along with millions of US jobs. The loss of the GM plant in Janesville was followed by the national rescue of the two domestic automakers. Interestingly, while Romney criticizes that successful rescue effort by the Obama administration, Ryan actually voted in favor of it. Too bad he couldn't have been as thoughtful about the endangered auto plant in his own district.
In a sidelong irony, the New Yorker article also notes that Ryan's family made its fortune in the Janesville area by building public highways funded by government money.
But never mind. The Ryan historical revision machine has been chugging away, leading to this on the campaign trail, according to an earlier DailyKos blog:
Ryan told a crowd in North Canton, Ohio yesterday that the president's energy policies had led to the [GM] factory's closure in 2009. Ryan delivered the attack in personal terms, saying he had high school buddies who worked at the factory. "A lot of my high school buddies worked at that GM plant," Ryan said. "One of the reasons that plant got shut down is $4 gasoline. You see, this costs jobs. The president's terrible energy policies are costing us jobs."
That president being Bush, rather than Obama, as Ryan insists. In 2008, gasoline prices indeed were higher than they are today. The blog continues:
But despite Ryan's emotional story, GM announced the plant's closure in June of 2008. In October of 2008, the date was accelerated from 2010 to the end of the year. And on December 23, 2008 the last SUV rolled off the line... .
And as we've noted, Obama took over the White House a full month later. The blog:
Bottom line: Without the benefit of facts, Ryan's story sounded compelling, but once you learn what really happened, you quickly realize Ryan was telling a tall tale that was just too perfect to be true. And with that kind of thing starting to become a pattern with Ryan, it's no wonder that Mitt Romney likes him so much.
As for poor Janesville, the area's unemployment rate remains just under 10 percent — several percentage points higher than Wisconsin or the average across the nation. No wonder Ryan would like to blame his Democratic opponent for something that happened under the administration of George W. Bush -- and Ryan's own watch.
Now, it may be impolite of Kos to react to all of this by calling Ryan a "dick." But that's his right as an American using the First Amendment. You might want to call Ryan something else. But what it is easy to call him is a liar and a deceiver, blaming his opponents for something that happened under his own party's regime.
Even counting Medicare and the flap over Ryan's erroneous insistence that he never sought Obama recovery act money for his district, the lies on the 2012 political campaign trail don't get much bigger than this one. So watch your local news media to see if they share any of this with their readers.