You make it difficult to not be personal when you so blithely (or blindly) overlook the entire conversation and make it about something else entirely.

Obama promised to keep it open. It closed while he was President. Those are facts.

Where did he promise to keep that particular plant open? I can see he said 'plants like' Janesville. I can see that nearly a year before he cam to office he was saying that the government could help (but as he was not President until January 2009, it was not his place until then to deliver such help, while a lot was happening in the economy).

danivon wrote:Where did he promise to keep that particular plant open? I can see he said 'plants like' Janesville. I can see that nearly a year before he cam to office he was saying that the government could help (but as he was not President until January 2009, it was not his place until then to deliver such help, while a lot was happening in the economy).

Seriously? You must be too busy reading Ezra Klein prevaricate to use google:

1. On February 13, 2008 Obama said in Janesville : “I believe that if our government is there to support you, and give you the assistance you need to re-tool and make this transition, that this plant will be here for another hundred years.”

2. In June 2008 GM announced that the Janesville plant would stop production of medium-duty trucks by the end of 2009, and stop production of large SUVs in 2010 or sooner.

3. In October 2008 Obama doubled down on his promise to keep Janesville plant open: “As president, I will lead an effort to retool plants like the GM facility in Janesville so we can build the fuel-efficient cars of tomorrow and create good-paying jobs in Wisconsin and all across America.”

4. In December 2008 GM idled production of GM SUVs at the Janesville plant. Medium-duty truck assembly continued.

5. In April 2009, four months after Obama was inaugurated, GM idled production of medium-duty trucks.

6. In September 2011, more than two years after Obama was inaugurated, GM reiterates that Janesville plant is on “stand by status.” Auto industry observer David Cole, tells the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel it would be premature to say the Janesville plant will never reopen.

6. Today the GM facility in Janesville still has not been retooled “so we can build the fuel-efficient cars of tomorrow and create good-paying jobs,” as Obama promised.

Now, Klein, Carney, Plouffe, and other professional liars might look at #3 and say, "Well, Obama didn't specifically say he would save Janesville. He said 'like the GM facility in Janesville,' not necessarily that plant."

Don't waste the energy. No one believes that, not even those who say it.

Well, yes, that is what he said:

In October 2008 Obama doubled down on his promise to keep Janesville plant open: “As president, I will lead an effort to retool plants like the GM facility in Janesville so we can build the fuel-efficient cars of tomorrow and create good-paying jobs in Wisconsin and all across America.”

And no, that's not a specific promise to save Janesville. Ryan is closer to truth than you are, in that the impression and expectation may have been created. But you are reading between lines instead of the actual words.

danivon wrote:Well, yes, that is what he said:

In October 2008 Obama doubled down on his promise to keep Janesville plant open: “As president, I will lead an effort to retool plants like the GM facility in Janesville so we can build the fuel-efficient cars of tomorrow and create good-paying jobs in Wisconsin and all across America.”

And no, that's not a specific promise to save Janesville. Ryan is closer to truth than you are, in that the impression and expectation may have been created. But you are reading between lines instead of the actual words.

Okay, so you're saying Obama is just a failure as a leader. I can live with that.

Yes, quite. He failed to keep a promise he didn't actually make. He failed to invest in Janesville while he was not President. He failed to predict the Sep 2008 crash (like most people did, or it would not have happened).

Check the dates. You're wrong again.

In October he would have been well aware of what took place in September.

Step your game up!

I'm struggling to believe that this non-story is still getting so much traction. From what I've read it does look like Ryan tried to blame Obama for something that wasn't his responsibility, but really who cares ? Politicians do that kind of thing approximately all the time, especially in the runup to elections.

Whoever is running with this particular line of attack against Ryan is probably making a mistake. He's hardly the first politician to take liberties with the strict truth and he certainly won't be the last. Voters don't require political candidates to be paragons of truth and virtue, and they've forgiven far graver lies than anything Ryan is being accused of. By focusing on this kind of trivia all it does is allow the agenda to be dominated by nothing stories, and I suspect most voters will just shrug it off and say 'is this all they've got on him ?'. I'm willing to bet the Republicans would far rather spend the rest of the campaign batting away stories like this than have to give any concrete answers to where the cuts in Ryan's budget will fall.

Actually, Obama would rather talk about anything than his record and the economy.

So Sass we should the follow the example of John Kerry in 2004 and not aggressively counter-attack against the Swift Boat nuts? They took a strength of John Kerry (his service in Vietnam when he opposed the war) and a weakness of GW (who supported the war and then went AWOL from his National Guard unit) and made it into a a weakness for John Kerry.

This is a very similar in a way to the Swift Boat attacks. Obama bailed out the auto industry and saved a lot of jobs; Romney opposed the bail-out. So this is a weakness for Romney. So clearly Romney would like to lie about that in order to get voters confused about it. And Ryan is serving as his front-man. So these lies are not innocuous and they must be exposed so that the public sees them as what they are--lies.

Obama said he would do something to help the auto industry--and he did. The bail-out money for the auto companies saved many American jobs. Romney opposed that plan. If you were honest you would just say, well, while Obama's bail-out plan saved American auto companies and many American jobs I still stick to my free-market principles. But, no, Romeny-Ryan are not satisfied with that, and they want to imply that Obama betrayed his promise to American workers (as exemplified by this one plant).

The fact is the majority of the plant was closed by the time Obama took office. That is undisputed. It it also undisputed that Obama never promised to keep that particular plant open. Saying "I believe that if our government is there to support you, and give you the assistance you need to retool plant like the GM facility in Jonesville:" and saying "I will lead efforts to retook plants like the GM facility" do not constitute a promise to keep that particular plant open. Why? Because GM is a private entity and GM decided to close most of the plant before Obama became president. There is no facts to indicate that Obama would not give support to keep the plant open if that support was requested. GM is a private company and Obama promised to give government support to keep the auto industry going-which he made good on. But he certainly did not ever support promise to get in the way of a private company deciding which plants it wanted to close.

Ryan's speech was a dishonest attempt to get blue-collar workers in swing states (like Wisconsin and MIchigan) to believe that Obama did not follow through on this promises to the auto industry. That's a lie. The idea that he promised to keep that particular plant open is a lie (look at the language carefully).

I don't know what's worse--the lies by Ryan or the lies by Republicans trying to justify his lies.

Only true if you don't believe reality. Obama bailed out the unions. He hosed bond holders. He pushed through an arranged bankruptcy, which is what Romney called for. The main difference is that Obama broke the law.

If you want to talk about lies, maybe you could at least try to get the story right.

Yeah, well, apparently Romney was not thrilled with your response to Obama bailing out the auto companies and saving American jobs. I am guessing that going to blue-collar towns and saying we should have put the American auto companies through bankruptcy so that we could gut the medical coverage and pension plans would not go over well with voters in those towns. Think Romney-Ryan thought let's just go with the big lie and say that Obama did not really bail you the auto industry (or at least if he did it did not work since after all this plant he was talking about got closed) I don't agree with your response DF but at least it's a principled argument unlike Ryan's attempt to deceive and confuse voters.

You're making up the "big lie," so that seems ironic.

And, I don't know, but it sure sounds like you're picking up the Goebbels argument.

If so, that's shameful..

Uh nice try DF. Your guy is making up lies that Obama did not deliver with regard to promises he made about an auto plant You have to be a politically naive not to realize that the purpose of that lie was to deceive voters into thinking that Obama did not help out auto workers in a larger sense.. So why don't you explain what Ryan was trying to do there other than deceive people instead of making your usual baseless personal attacks.