August 15, 2012 05:22 PM UTC

The Full Measure of Hypocrisy

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• by: Colorado Pols

ABC News reports:

The Romney-Ryan campaign in its latest TV ad assails Obama for approving the cuts in 2010. “Obama has cut $716 billion dollars from Medicare,” says the narrator. “The money you paid for your guaranteed health care…is going to a massive new government program that’s not for you.”

Voters might be left with the impression that Romney and Ryan have both opposed the cuts. The truth is that Ryan himself endorses them in his signature budget plan – the same plan Romney has said he would sign as president if it reached his desk. [Pols emphasis]

Those Medicare savings – achieved through reduced provider reimbursements and curbed waste, fraud and abuse, not benefit cuts – appear in the House Republicans’ FY 2013 budget, which Ryan authored…

As the ad suggests, they don’t want the money to underwrite Obamacare, but for deficit reduction or other spending instead.

“We’re the ones who are not raiding Medicare to pay for Obamacare,” Ryan said tonight in his first solo interview with Fox News Channel’s Brit Hume.

As ABC’s Jake Tapper summarizes, Rep. Paul Ryan’s budget plan, the same one supported by Colorado’s Republican congressional delegation, fully repeals the Affordable Care Act (a.k.a. Obamacare), but keeps these same “cuts” from Medicare–not to pay for health care reform, but “deficit reduction.” As we’ve pointed out repeatedly in this space, the claim that Obamacare “cuts” Medicare at all has been regularly debunked by the principal media fact-checking sites. The problem with Ryan’s budget plan is not these waste-cutting and provider-side savings from Medicare that everyone seems to agree on—it’s Ryan’s proposal to privatize Medicare.

Folks, the compounded level of mendacity evident in this line of attack is difficult to adequately relay to anyone who doesn’t understand these details. For those who do, between the mutually-agreed nature of the “cuts” in question, the facts of the Ryan budget’s privatization of Medicare, and differences in what these supposed “cuts” would be used for–more health care vs. “deficit reduction”–we’re talking about deception at a truly astonishing level in the ad you see above.

Having said that, we’ve seen the Obama campaign’s response ad, and we’re not sure it’s sufficient to respond to the complex and interlocking falsehoods in play here. It seems to us something more is needed, and probably needs to come from media outlets raking in the campaign cash to run these ads. This is more than the usual back-and-forth about not being truthful in a campaign ad. This deserves, perhaps requires, nonpartisan repudiation.