Paul Ryan’s pants are on fire

If you were to ask a marathon runner their last time, they could tell you in an instant without hesitation. For these elite athletes that spend countless hours training for this monumental task, running a marathon is their Super Bowl. So when Paul Ryan told his audience in Tampa a few weeks ago that he ran his marathon an hour shorter than his actual time, it showcased his true character as a liar.

As a Vice Presidential candidate, Congressman Ryan has already displayed his tendency to tell the most outrageous lies. His speech in Tampa was misleading to say the least. It seems that Mr. Ryan lacks integrity, something essential to a leader, especially one vying for one of the highest positions in the nation.

The lies began when Ryan blamed President Obama for the closing of an auto plant in Ryan’s hometown of Janesville, Wisconsin. This just isn’t true at all. The plant was already set to shut down before Obama was even President, while Bush was still in office. At this point, a small flame started to burn at the bottom of Ryan’s pants.

This wasn’t the end of the flame, however, as it spread up Ryan’s pants when he told the nation that the Affordable Care Act increases “new taxes on nearly a million small businesses.” Honestly Mr. Ryan, when you have almost the entire country watching this speech, do you actually think you can get away with this fiction? The actual number of small businesses that would have a tax increase is around 5,000, so for those of you doing the math, about .005 percent of these enterprises. Once again, nice try.

If you look at the history of liars in American politics, one name stands above them all: Richard Nixon. Now, in no way are these two men being compared, but when one has a tendency to lie, these lies start to become a habit and can spiral out of control throughout the entire campaign. Without integrity in the White House, America will suffer.

What put me over the edge on this address was when Ryan declared that President Obama’s stimulus was “a case of political patronage, corporate welfare, and cronyism at their worst.” Mr. Ryan’s claim that this bill is full of “political patronage” is an outrageous and fictitious statement. Michael Grunwald, a TIME Magazine national correspondent revealed after much research that in the whole bill, only around 0.0001 percent of the money was squandered on fraud. By now, the flames that had once begun near Ryan’s ankles has turned into a full-fledged fire spanning the length of his pants.

So maybe all of these are just cases of misspeaking, or a lack of fact-checking, although with such a bright man like Congressman Ryan, I doubt this is true. Even Sally Kohn, a Fox News contributor, writing on the network’s blog page claimed Ryan’s RNC speech last week was “an apparent attempt to set the world record for the greatest number of blatant lies and misrepresentations slipped into a single political speech.”

It seems that Ryan’s strategy is to lie to the American people, and encourage his fellow countrymen and women to rise up against the allegedly terrible President Barack Obama. When a candidate shows this lack of character and integrity, should we want him anywhere near the White House? Absolutely not.

So if a marathon runner accidentally misquoted their time, it would be no big deal. And according to his spokesperson, Mr. Ryan’s marathon fib was an “honest mistake,” but personally, I refuse to utter the words ‘honest’ and “Paul Ryan’ in the same sentence.

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