![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Paul Ryan is a liar.
Sep. 6th, 2012 12:44 pmThis isn’t really news, but it ought to be. I am not saying he’s a liar in the way we, cynically, accuse all politicians of being liars (by which we mean, to our discredit, they don’t deliver on the promises we demand of them when they are running for office, but I digress).
Lies, real lies, in politics are a big deal. Real lies usually get the person who made them kicked out of office, because the people they represent don’t want someone they can’t trust in office. But Ryan’s lies are those sorts of lies. They are worse. Ryan lies the way Bush lied; about himself.
We have a problematic form of government. We ask other people to represent us. We hand our proxy over to them, and trust them to do a combination of what we want, and what is best. Often doing what it best will lead to someone else getting elected, because the people don’t like being told they can’t have what they want. It takes a person of strong character to take that sort of risk.
We also suffer from having one person represent too many people. Almost everywhere in the US we vote for people we have never heard of, and ask them to keep our personal interests foremost in their minds. So we vote for the candidate who best convinces us they both share our views and are trustworthy.
Which is where the lies of Ryan come in. He’s made two claims which I didn’t believe when he made them; one has been proven false, and the other is still hard to believe. It’s all the harder to believe because of the first lie (which was really two lies, but the second one wasn’t so unbelievable, and so it slipped past most people, even the ones who balked at the parent lie. He said he had run marathons, plural).
He has never run a marathon in less than three hours. I knew that the moment I read the transcript because I used to be, “a runner”. When I was in the Army I was part of a run-team. We did a race, every month. It was a bit more than two miles, and it was brutal. Best we ever did when I was on the team was a finish at 11:55. My personal best, for a two-mile run is 11:31 (I was timed at 10:50 once, but I think the scorekeeper dropped a lap, so I don’t count it: there is no way I went from an 11:31 at sea-level: sucking wind and barely able to stand to a 10:50 at 5,000 feet. Since I’d not been training it’s even less believable, but I digress). Personal bests are memorable.
Here is what Ryan said in his interview with Hugh Hewitt:
HH: Are you still running?
PR: Yeah, I hurt a disc in my back, so I don’t run marathons anymore. I just run ten miles or yes.
HH: But you did run marathons at some point?
PR: Yeah, but I can’t do it anymore, because my back is just not that great.
HH: I’ve just gotta ask, what’s your personal best?
PR: Under three, high twos. I had a two hour and fifty-something.
A “two hour fifty something” is world class. It’s in the top two percent of marathon runners, ever. It’s not something one doesn’t remember. The same way I remember my 11:31, or my the 10K Mud Run I did at Cp. Pendleton in 56 minutes with a banged up knee (I should have quit, but I was younger, and less experienced then... too proud to say, “I’m hurt”, and not willing to let the team down... if I’d dropped out, we’d not have gotten a team score. That’s the Army mindset in a nutshell) he ought to be able to remember a two-fifty.
Even more since it turns out the marathons he “did run at some point” add up to one. That’s even more remarkable. I’ve never run a marathon. I was never bitten by the bug. But I know marathoners. They train. Our trainer, when I was doing those monthly races was a kid named Beck. He had the marathon bug. He ran, and ran, and ran. He also trained us as if we were doing half-marathons. We trained five times a week, and it was a total of about eight hours. You don’t do a sub-four without that level of training. A sub three... that’s a lot more.
That’s one lie. The other is the claim to have bagged a peak above 14,000 feet more than 40 times. He has clarified the implication in the way he said it (which made it seem he had bagged 40 different peaks of more than 14,000ft). That’s also dedication. I’ve been to 13,002 (according to the GPS I was carrying). There’s no air up there. All I had on was some clothes. We had staged to 11,500 and walked up from there. I don’t know that I could have made it to 14,000. The mountains went up. I didn’t. We sent one of our party back down to the staging area, because his nose was bleeding.
I was in pretty good shape when I did that. I’d spent a fair bit of time hiking above 6,000 feet, with a pack. It still kicked my ass.
Paul Ryan claims to have made such an ascent 40 times, of just a few peaks. One has to wonder why? Which mountain in Colorado is so transcendent that he has to keep climbing it? When does he find the time to train?
He’s been in Congress since 1999. Did he do all of this peak-bagging before he joined the house (which he did at 29. He’s always been a political animal). Maybe he’s taken a couple of weeks in the summer hiatus, each year, and climbed a couple of really swell mountains, rather than go back to his district and see what the people there want?
Who knows?
What I do know is I find it hard to credit. I find it harder to credit in light of his ridiculous lie about the marathon.
Why does it matter? Because he is telling these lies with a purpose. That purpose is to convince us that he is fit to be the vice president. That’s why it matters. He is telling whoppers, whoppers he doesn’t need to tell. If he’d climbed one, “fourteener” I’d be impressed. That he ran a marathon is nothing to sneeze at. The truth would have sufficed.
But he didn’t do that. He had to over-egg the pudding. He seems to have thought no one would care. He seems to be trying to be both everyman, and superman, and that the public will be stupid enough to accept this at face value.
He thinks the rules don’t apply to him.
That’s what matters. I don’t know Paul Ryan. I have two things on which to judge him: his record (which I think is awful), and his public persona (about which I had no real opinion, before this).
Would I have voted for him? Probably not. His politics and mine are so at odds it’s really hard to see him as being less bad than the other guy (which is what he would have to convince me of). But that’s not really the issue. If I’d been inclined to vote for him, I’d be much less inclined now.
This is about how he sees his constituents. He sees them as a group to be buffaloed. The plain truth wasn’t good enough. Ok, when else will the plain truth not be good enough? When will he next decide that his agenda is more important than the truth? He is telling us that his agenda matters more than the truth.
That, in my opinion, disqualifies him from office.
Lies, real lies, in politics are a big deal. Real lies usually get the person who made them kicked out of office, because the people they represent don’t want someone they can’t trust in office. But Ryan’s lies are those sorts of lies. They are worse. Ryan lies the way Bush lied; about himself.
We have a problematic form of government. We ask other people to represent us. We hand our proxy over to them, and trust them to do a combination of what we want, and what is best. Often doing what it best will lead to someone else getting elected, because the people don’t like being told they can’t have what they want. It takes a person of strong character to take that sort of risk.
We also suffer from having one person represent too many people. Almost everywhere in the US we vote for people we have never heard of, and ask them to keep our personal interests foremost in their minds. So we vote for the candidate who best convinces us they both share our views and are trustworthy.
Which is where the lies of Ryan come in. He’s made two claims which I didn’t believe when he made them; one has been proven false, and the other is still hard to believe. It’s all the harder to believe because of the first lie (which was really two lies, but the second one wasn’t so unbelievable, and so it slipped past most people, even the ones who balked at the parent lie. He said he had run marathons, plural).
He has never run a marathon in less than three hours. I knew that the moment I read the transcript because I used to be, “a runner”. When I was in the Army I was part of a run-team. We did a race, every month. It was a bit more than two miles, and it was brutal. Best we ever did when I was on the team was a finish at 11:55. My personal best, for a two-mile run is 11:31 (I was timed at 10:50 once, but I think the scorekeeper dropped a lap, so I don’t count it: there is no way I went from an 11:31 at sea-level: sucking wind and barely able to stand to a 10:50 at 5,000 feet. Since I’d not been training it’s even less believable, but I digress). Personal bests are memorable.
Here is what Ryan said in his interview with Hugh Hewitt:
HH: Are you still running?
PR: Yeah, I hurt a disc in my back, so I don’t run marathons anymore. I just run ten miles or yes.
HH: But you did run marathons at some point?
PR: Yeah, but I can’t do it anymore, because my back is just not that great.
HH: I’ve just gotta ask, what’s your personal best?
PR: Under three, high twos. I had a two hour and fifty-something.
A “two hour fifty something” is world class. It’s in the top two percent of marathon runners, ever. It’s not something one doesn’t remember. The same way I remember my 11:31, or my the 10K Mud Run I did at Cp. Pendleton in 56 minutes with a banged up knee (I should have quit, but I was younger, and less experienced then... too proud to say, “I’m hurt”, and not willing to let the team down... if I’d dropped out, we’d not have gotten a team score. That’s the Army mindset in a nutshell) he ought to be able to remember a two-fifty.
Even more since it turns out the marathons he “did run at some point” add up to one. That’s even more remarkable. I’ve never run a marathon. I was never bitten by the bug. But I know marathoners. They train. Our trainer, when I was doing those monthly races was a kid named Beck. He had the marathon bug. He ran, and ran, and ran. He also trained us as if we were doing half-marathons. We trained five times a week, and it was a total of about eight hours. You don’t do a sub-four without that level of training. A sub three... that’s a lot more.
That’s one lie. The other is the claim to have bagged a peak above 14,000 feet more than 40 times. He has clarified the implication in the way he said it (which made it seem he had bagged 40 different peaks of more than 14,000ft). That’s also dedication. I’ve been to 13,002 (according to the GPS I was carrying). There’s no air up there. All I had on was some clothes. We had staged to 11,500 and walked up from there. I don’t know that I could have made it to 14,000. The mountains went up. I didn’t. We sent one of our party back down to the staging area, because his nose was bleeding.
I was in pretty good shape when I did that. I’d spent a fair bit of time hiking above 6,000 feet, with a pack. It still kicked my ass.
Paul Ryan claims to have made such an ascent 40 times, of just a few peaks. One has to wonder why? Which mountain in Colorado is so transcendent that he has to keep climbing it? When does he find the time to train?
He’s been in Congress since 1999. Did he do all of this peak-bagging before he joined the house (which he did at 29. He’s always been a political animal). Maybe he’s taken a couple of weeks in the summer hiatus, each year, and climbed a couple of really swell mountains, rather than go back to his district and see what the people there want?
Who knows?
What I do know is I find it hard to credit. I find it harder to credit in light of his ridiculous lie about the marathon.
Why does it matter? Because he is telling these lies with a purpose. That purpose is to convince us that he is fit to be the vice president. That’s why it matters. He is telling whoppers, whoppers he doesn’t need to tell. If he’d climbed one, “fourteener” I’d be impressed. That he ran a marathon is nothing to sneeze at. The truth would have sufficed.
But he didn’t do that. He had to over-egg the pudding. He seems to have thought no one would care. He seems to be trying to be both everyman, and superman, and that the public will be stupid enough to accept this at face value.
He thinks the rules don’t apply to him.
That’s what matters. I don’t know Paul Ryan. I have two things on which to judge him: his record (which I think is awful), and his public persona (about which I had no real opinion, before this).
Would I have voted for him? Probably not. His politics and mine are so at odds it’s really hard to see him as being less bad than the other guy (which is what he would have to convince me of). But that’s not really the issue. If I’d been inclined to vote for him, I’d be much less inclined now.
This is about how he sees his constituents. He sees them as a group to be buffaloed. The plain truth wasn’t good enough. Ok, when else will the plain truth not be good enough? When will he next decide that his agenda is more important than the truth? He is telling us that his agenda matters more than the truth.
That, in my opinion, disqualifies him from office.
