Flem72, on 2012-October-14, 10:34, said:
I declared Friday "Joe Biden Appreciation Day" -- take it as you like it.
First, such antics are a version of the ad hominem -- the last refuge of an advocate lacking even a minimally substantive response.
Second, do you feel like providing examples of "making stuff up"? I'm not saying everthing Ryan said is unadorned fact, but I really can't abide this kind of ad hominem either. There's far too much of it in the arena as it is.
And re: the Libya question: Did Happy Joe ever even address Libya in his answer ? -- but, oh yes, we got Bin Laden.
Here's some examples "making stuff up." Obviously the site has a liberal bias, but they have
a lot of examples and they have links to further analysis backing up their claim that these are not facts.
Anyway, an
ad hominem attack is defined as "an attempt to negate the truth of a claim by pointing out a negative characteristic or unrelated belief of the person supporting it." In fact the Vice President's responses included quite a lot of factual content and
most of his facts were rated as true (non-partisan source this time). Even the statements that could be characterized as attacks were mostly on target.
There is a great degree of hypocrisy in Paul Ryan (and Mitt Romney) and honestly it is rather humorous. To give some examples:
(1) They complain about the stimulus "not creating jobs" yet Ryan requested stimulus funds for his district making claims about the job creating benefits.
(2) They complain that the president has "no plan to create jobs" but Ryan voted down the president's "jobs act" (i.e. plan to create jobs).
(3) They complain that the president didn't embrace Simpson-Bowles, but Ryan was on the commission and voted against it.
(4) They complain that the president doesn't negotiate with Republicans, but he formed a "grand bargain" with Republican Speaker Boehner to reduce the deficit by trillions and Ryan (and his Republican colleagues in Congress) voted it down.
(5) They tout Ryan's budget as a "serious" path to deficit reduction, but it doesn't actually come close to balancing the budget for decades even if you believe his own "cooked" numbers.
(6) They claim to want to "reduce waste and inefficiency" and "reform medicare for the long haul" yet when the president did exactly that and saved some $716B (that Ryan also had
in his own budget) they attacked him for it.
(7) They supported "regime change" in Iraq that cost thousands of American lives (and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives) and billions of dollars, yet when the president had a much more successful "regime change" intervention in Libya they attacked him for it, yet now they are attacking him for
not getting involved in regime change in Syria.
(8) They complained about lack of embassy security in Libya, yet Republicans insisted on cutting the spending for exactly such security below what the administration proposed.
(9) For months Romney has had a plan to increase military spending to a fixed percentage of GDP which would amount to a $2 trillion increase over a decade; it's on his website and less than a week before the VP debate he even touted his plan to increase the number of US navy ships in a major foreign policy speech. Yet Ryan claimed no such plan existed and they only wanted to restore funding "cut by the Obama administration."
(10) They attack the president for cuts to military spending from the sequester, when the entire sequester idea was forced by Republican refusal to raise the debt ceiling (which was raised many times without complaint under Bush and Reagan), and when Ryan voted for the sequester in congress.
(11) They attack "Obamacare" when it is virtually identical a plan designed by the conservative Heritage Foundation, proposed by Bob Dole as a conservative alternative to single-payer, and implemented by Mitt Romney when he was governor of Massachusetts.
I'm sure I could come up with more examples if I spend more than a few minutes.
Adam W. Meyerson
a.k.a. Appeal Without Merit