How can you tell Paul Ryan is lying? The open mouth.

How can you tell Paul Ryan is lying? The open mouth.

Paul Ryan's speech last night was a veritable lollapalooza of lies , mostly about what President Obama has done and what his own policies and proposals will do.

But there's one lie that he's been using since he got the veep nod from Mitt Romney that is different. It's different because it's about an action that had the potential to do real damage to the U.S. and because Ryan is personally responsible for it. That's the Standard & Poors downgrading of the nation's credit rating as a result of the House Republicans' taking the debt ceiling hostage.

Last night, Ryan said that the Obama presidency "began with a perfect Triple-A credit rating for the United States; it ends with a downgraded America."

And here are the facts, from the actual statement from S&P at the time:



Compared with previous projections, our revised base case scenario now assumes that the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts, due to expire by the end of 2012, remain in place. We have changed our assumption on this because the majority of Republicans in Congress continue to resist any measure that would raise revenues, a position we believe Congress reinforced by passing the act. Key macroeconomic assumptions in the base case scenario include trend real GDP growth of 3% and consumer price inflation near 2% annually over the decade.

Ryan and his crew of nihilists in the House, with their absolute refusal to raise revenue, their absolute refusal to negotiate in good faith, caused the downgrade. S&P assumed that there was no way that the Bush tax cuts would be allowed to expire because of Ryan and his cohorts, and slammed them and the nation's credit rating for it, probably in hopes that it would wake them up to the danger they were posing to the economy. Those warnings certainly fell on deaf ears. The fact that Ryan was openly flirting with the idea of actually letting the country default for “a day or two or three or four" demonstrates just how futile that effort was.

Ryan isn't just a liar, he's a dangerous ideologue, and in this case the lie exposes the true nature of the man who speaks it.