Thank goodness the Republican convention will be over soon so we can all get down to the serious business of saving the Republic from the Republicans.  But one has to say something about Ryan's speech

  Paul Ryan  was up there yesterday and he got a much better response then Christie.  Why?  With Ryan the delegates could reminisce about their golden age--the 1980s with Yuppies driving German luxury cars, watching Rambo movies, and watching the greatest philosopher of the age, Milton Friedman on Public Television. 

 Ryan really has the look of a callow Yuppie, a junior Congressman from Wisconsin who hob nobs with Paul Gigot, Editorial page director of the  Wall Street Journal,  the U.S. capitalist class and its fan base's equivalent of L'Osservatore Romano, the mouthpiece of the Vatican. Ryan is their idea of an "intellectual," which shouldn't surprise anyone because Ronald Reagan was their idea of a great actor. 

Even though Ryan has the look and the sound of a 1980s Yuppie, yes man, organization man, there is a bit a Richard Nixon in his style. Which is why I used the title above, an allusion to the Democrats informal 1960 slogan against Nixon, "would you buy a used car from this man."?  I never would myself

   And  Ryan even reminds me a bit  that "stalwart" of  rightwing Republican Wisconsin politics, Joseph McCarthy. Both McCarthy and Nixon, whom Adlai Stevenson famously called a "white collar McCarthy" (when there were hipsters, not hippies, and organization men, not yuppies)  made their "message" out of two "great" propaganda/advertising strategies of modern history, the Big Lie, and the Multiple Untruth.   Both were on display in Ryan's speech and in the convention itself.

The "big lie" works this way--you say something truly absurd, say it over and over again, have media repeat it over and over again, have people with influence  repeat it over and over again, and people not only come to accept it but believe it.  T

here are many examples of the big lie in modern history ; for Hitler, Germany lost WWI and all of its problems stemmed from a Jewish-Bolshevik-inferior races conspiracy; for McCarthy and Nixon, all the wars and revolutions after WWII stemmed from a Soviet directed world Communist conspiracy;for George W. Bush, Iraq, Iran, North Korea were part of an interchangeable Axis of Evil connected to an international terrorist conspiracy aided and abbetted by liberals. 

 For Ryan et al, government spending, regulations, welfare, unions  and most of all taxes are responsible for plant closings, unemployment, low wages,  everythng that harms American families. 

After the big lie, you have the multiple untruths.  McCarthy was specially good at that(in fact the journalist and student of McCarthy Richard Rovere coined the term to explain his actions) that is, keep on throwing "facts," statistics, data at your enemy to support your points, and it doesn't matter that the "facts" are distortions, outright lies, supported by nothing real. 

But the idea is to keep them coming.  So for McCarthy  there are 205, 81, 57 you name Communists who are Soviet spies in the Stater Department are responsible for the Soviet revolution.  So, for Ryan, the Obama administration will run Medicare into the ground even though it is Ryan who has advocated "restructuring" Medicare and Social Security with "vouchers" which would add hugely to the out of pocket expenses of senior citizens

It is  Obama who "rejected" the recommendations of the Federal Debt Commission(would that he really had) even though Ryan as a member of the panel  and the ranking Republican on the House Budget Committee opposed the recommendations because they would raise taxes and not  take more away from Social Security and Medicare.

It was  Obama was  was responsible for the downgrading of the U.S. credit rating even through Standard and Poors(for which for some is as holy an instrument as the Wall Street journal) claimed that the downgrading was the result of the debt deadlock which Ryan and his fellow Republicans largely created. 

 Then come the numbers.  Not 205 Soviet agents in the state department but 786 billion(or some other figure tomorrow)  robbed from Medicare to pay for "Obamacare" 

And of course  to put it down to the human level,  Obama's responsibility for closing that GM plant in Wisconsin which was closed under the Bush administration(and, for good or ill, it was Obama who bailed out GM)  And when Ryan was called  on that, his response was to blame Obama for not re-opening the plant, and walk away.  Now that was vintage Nixon. 

But the problem with the combination of the Big Lie and the Multiple Untruth is that the reactionary and in the European past fascist politicians are never fazed by those who show that their facts are wrong and their general theories fantastic. Exposing them is only the beginning to defeating these tactics 

Thanks to Citizens United the Republicans will be bombarding the people with their Big Lie that the Obama administration and the federal government created the economic crisis and has failed to overcome it through its social spending, taxation, and regulation of business--that Medicare and Social Security are endangered by the federal government, not the Wall Street loving privatizers. That there was full employment under George W. Bush and double digit unemployment under Obama(I am not saying that they are saying that yet, but I would not put it past them)  There will be non facts and non figures all over radio, TV, the internet in the months to come.

What we can do,  person to person, socialnetwork to  social network, door to door, social event to social event from now to election day fight the Republican Big Lie-Multiple Untruth campaign with real facts about the effects of Reagan-Bush tax cuts, union busting, disenvestment in education and infrastructure and non fossil fuel energy, along with rewards to  those who outsourced millions of jobs from the country and brought about the real estate Wall Street collapse of 2008 and its fall out. 

And then we can after the elections  tell Romney and Ryan to go back to their time, Romney's in reality, Ryan in his dreams, to  the 1980s, and work on a remake of Oliver Stone's Wall Street, the film that centered around the machinations of their real role model and hero leader--not Ronald Reagan but Gordon Gekko.