Fascinating talk from last week’s ‘Quest for Growth’ conference at the London Stock Exchange. Opens with a good Bill Clinton joke.

Thoughtful post by Jack Shafer. Includes this:

You might as well fact-check a sermon as fact-check a campaign speech. Neither are exercises in finding the truth. That doesn’t mean we can excuse political lies. Please take a mallet to Romney’s fallacious assertion that Obama ended work requirements for welfare and to the Obama campaign’s ad that misstated Romney’s views on abortion. I pair these two fact checks not just to declare moral equivalence between the two parties or candidates but to demonstrate that the mutual-aggression pacts that govern politics make futile the fact-checking machinations of journalists. Give them a million billion Pinocchios and they’ll still not behave.

Sad but true. “I suppose”, concludes Shafer,

fact-checking would matter more to voters if they expected honesty from their politicians. But most don’t. Instead of vetted policy lectures, voters crave rhetoric that stirs their unfact-checked hearts. As long as the deception is honest, pointing in the direction they want to go, they’re all rght with it.

Americans (and we) get the politicians we deserve.

Paul Krugman’s summary.

The GOP campaign is based on five main themes, three negative and two positive.

Negative:

The claim that Obama denigrated businessmen, saying that they didn’t build their own firms — which isn’t true.

The claim that Obama has gutted Medicare to pay for the expansion of health insurance — which isn’t true.

The claim that Obama has eliminated the work requirement for welfare — which isn’t true.

Positive:

The claim that Ryan has a plan to balance the budget — which isn’t true.

The claim that Romney has a plan for economic recovery — which isn’t true. (The Economist: “The Romney Programme for Economic Recovery, Growth and Jobs” is like “Fifty Shades of Grey” without the sex).

It seems to me that there’s a pattern here, but I can’t quit figure it out.

Terrific piece by David Brooks in today’s NYTimes. Sample:

Romney is also a passionately devoted family man. After streamlining his wife’s pregnancies down to six months each, Mitt helped Ann raise five perfect sons — Bip, Chip, Rip, Skip and Dip — who married identically tanned wives. Some have said that Romney’s lifestyle is overly privileged, pointing to the fact that he has an elevator for his cars in the garage of his San Diego home. This is not entirely fair. Romney owns many homes without garage elevators and the cars have to take the stairs.

After a successful stint at Bain, Romney was lured away to run the Winter Olympics, the second most Caucasian institution on earth, after the G.O.P. He then decided to run for governor of Massachusetts. His campaign slogan, “Vote Romney: More Impressive Than You’ll Ever Be,” was not a hit, but Romney won the race anyway on an environmental platform, promising to make the state safe for steeplechase.

After his governorship, Romney suffered through a midlife crisis, during which he became a social conservative. This prepared the way for his presidential run

Well worth reading in full.

For more background see Robert Reich on how Romney made his money. Or, even better, Dave Winer on Romney’s political philosophy.

Lovely dissection of Paul Ryan by Leon Wieseltier.

Then there is the matter of Ryan’s intellectualism. His promoters have made much of it. “He’s a guy who, unlike 98 percent of members of Congress, can sit in a conference or around the dinner table with six or ten people from think tanks and magazines and more than hold his own in a discussion,” said William Kristol, thereby establishing the definition of the intellectual as a person who knows how to talk to William Kristol. A close look at Ryan’s writings, however, shows an intellectual style that is amateurish and parochial. His thought is just a package. The distinction between an analysis and a manifesto is lost on him. He gets his big ideas second-hand, from ideological feeders: when he cites John Locke, it is John Locke that he found in Michael Novak (who erroneously believes that strawberries appear in the philosopher’s account of the creation of property by the mixing of labor with nature). Irving Kristol and Charles Murray are Ryan’s other authorities; and of course Rand, who was a graphomaniacal demagogue with the answers to all of life’s questions. His picture of the New Deal and the Depression is taken from—where else?—Amity Shlaes. When Ryan cites Tocqueville, it is as “Alexis-Charles-Henri Clerel de Tocqueville,” and when he cites Sorel it is as “Georges Eugene Sorèl,” which is the Wikipedia usage (except for the misplaced accent, which is Ryan’s contribution). When he cites Sorel, he seems unaware that he is appealing to a thinker who admired Lenin and Mussolini and advocated the use of violence by striking unions. (Scott Walker has no greater enemy than Georges Sorel.) Similarly, Ryan cites an encomium to the United States by “Alexandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn” without any apparent awareness that three years later the Russian writer issued a virulent denunciation of America and its “decadence.”