I really want to like Paul Ryan. He’s clearly a formidable candidate, extremely bright, a superb communicator, and at least moderately charismatic. I listened to his speech at the Republican National Convention last night. Sure, it was a biting, red-meat kind of speech, and I disagreed with his take on various things. But it seemed to me like a very good speech for the audience and the context–just what the Romney campaign needed.

But today, fact-checkers are having a heyday. It’s clear that Paul Ryan, at least in this speech, showed little regard for the truth. Many lies and distortions have been identified (ones I didn’t notice, as a typical viewer).

This disappoints me. Please don’t tell me that Obama and Biden are just as bad. I realize they tell lies, too, and I hope the fact-checkers are fully alert during their speeches at the Democratic convention.

But I’m always hopeful for a “different” kind of politician–the kind Obama presented himself to be in 2008, and which I believe he tried to be for at least the first year or two before giving it up in frustration. I hoped Ryan was different.

But, as has been shown in various outlets (even on FoxNews this morning), Ryan is just your normal lying politician. And that really does disappoint me. I was drawn somewhat to the Republican ticket. No more.

This Salon article gives a good rundown of the lies and distortions in Ryan’s speech. There are many good links off of that article, including this one about Ryan and the stimulus. Both the BBC and the Guardian in Britain highlighted the factual errors in Ryan’s speech. So did Slate. You would expected the Huffington Post to spotlight his lies, and maybe ABCNews, but even the Associated Press felt obligated to report on it. Then Glen Grunwald pumelled Ryan on the Swampland blog.

So, Congressman Ryan: congratulations on a speech that really rallied your base. And congratulations for turning me, once again, into a disillusioned and disappointed citizen, and for sacrificing your credibility in the process.

Rick Warren with John McCain and Barack Obama in 2008.

I really enjoyed the forum Rick Warren conducted in 2008 with John McCain and Barack Obama. I found it to be very informative about both candidates. It was a laid-back conversation, rather than a format with reporters asking confrontational or gotcha questions.

Warren planned to hold another during this campaign season. Both candidates, according to Warren, wanted to do it. The networks wanted to do it, since the previous one brought high ratings.

But Warren has pulled the plug, and I salute him for his reasons. He explained:

“We created the civil forums to promote civility and personal respect between people with major differences. The forums are meant to be a place where people of goodwill can seriously disagree on significant issues without being disagreeable or resorting to personal attack and name-calling. But that is not the climate of today’s campaign. I’ve never seen more irresponsible personal attacks, mean-spirited slander, and flat-out dishonest attack ads, and I don’t expect that tone to change before the election.

“It would be hypocritical to pretend civility for one evening only to have the name-calling return the next day.”

It goes along with what Michael Scherer suggested in one of my posts last week: “In the end, there is only one thing that will force these candidates, their campaigns and supporters to hue a straighter line: Their own constituencies must object.”

This may seem intellectually lame, but I’ve decided to pretty much ignore everything being said about Medicare. Both sides are demagoguing the issue, and lying about it, and the fixes both sides propose don’t happen until far down the road. I’ve decided it’s impossible for an ordinary person, like me, to understand what’s really happening–and that what actually happens probably won’t resemble what the candidates propose.

So I’m just gonna ignore it all. When I reach Medicare age (which isn’t all that far away), my attitude is: whatever it is, it is. Both parties will probably use “Mediscare” tactics for the rest of my life. So, Mitt and Barack, talk about Medicare all you want. But I’m tuning you out.

Politifact has covered statements about Medicare rather extensively. Here’s a collection of statements made by both sides, and Politifact’s determination of their truthfulness (or lack thereof).

Domain names for sale, according to GoDaddy:

• mitchromney.com ($9000)
• obamasfauxpas.com ($12)
• unicornsforromney.com ($800)
• romney4cannibas.com ($100)
• romneyrocks ($600)
• nutsforobama.com ($9)
• obamaisnuts.com ($200)
• romneyscandals.com ($999)
• obamacalifragilisticexpialidocious.com ($50)

Well, we have a couple more Nazi sightings.

Marisha Agana, a Republican running for Congress in Ohio, tweeted on August 5, “History has a way of repeating itself: Stalin, Hitler, Mao Tse Tung, and now Obama!!!”

Then there is Dave Mustaine, frontman for Megadeth. After telling a Singapore crowd that President Obama staged the movie theater and Sikh temple shootings in an effort to ban guns, he said, “I don’t know where I’m gonna live if America keeps going the way it’s going because it looks like it’s turning into Nazi America.”

A couple years ago, the term “fascist” was getting thrown at President Obama with reckless abandon. Other labels were popular, too–communist, socialist, Islamicist–and they would sometimes get combined by the clueless fringe in comical ways–like Obama is a fascist communist intent on instituting Sharia law. Nonsense like that. Nazi comparisons were especially popular at Tea Party gatherings. People have backed off somewhat, but Nazi metaphors still get thrown around too easily.

• Rush Limbaugh said, “Adolf Hitler, like Barack Obama, also ruled by dictate,” and spoke of Obama “sending out his brown shirts,” and that Obama’s healthcare plan “mirrors Nazi Germany’s.”
• When NPR fired Juan Williams, FoxNews chief Roger Ailes said of NPR execs, “They are, of course, Nazis. They have a kind of Nazi attitude. They are the left wing of Nazism.”
• Glenn Beck compared auto bailouts to “the early days of Adolf Hitler,” compared TARP to “what happened to the lead-up with Hitler,” likened White House criticism of FoxNews to persecution of Jews during the Holocaust, and said Obama’s desire to expand the Peace Corps and Americorps was “what Hitler did with the SS.”
• Newt Gingrich said Obama was threatening America as much as “Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union once did.”
• Bill O’Reilly compared gun control advocates to Hitler, accused the Huffington Post of using Nazi tactics to demonize people (“I don’t see any difference between [Arianna] Huffington and the Nazis”), accused the media of using the tactics of Josef Goebbels, described the Daily Kos blog as “like the Nazi Party. There’s no difference here,” and described Michael Moore’s power as “what happened in Nazi Germany.”
• Sean Hannity said using a Quran for a Congressman’s swearing-in was like using Mein Kampf.
• Ann Coulter called websites like Media Matters “little Nazi block watchers” that “tattle on their parents, turn them in to the Nazis,” and described Obama’s autobiography as a “dime store Mein Kampf.”
• Mark Levin described Obamacare as “Hitleresque.”
• Cal Thomas said Obamacare would lead down the same path that produced Hitler’s 1933 Sterilization Law.

It goes on and on.

The same thing happened during the Bush years, when idiots on the left regularly attached “Nazi” to him. Photos of George Bush in Nazi contexts abound (often the same photos now being used with Obama’s likeness). The website “The Right Perspective” published “A Short History of Liberals Using the Nazi Card.”

The words of Inigo Montoya from Princess Bride apply here: “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”

So what exactly is fascism?

I did some searching (thank you, Google) and came up with these characteristics.

• Fascism is an ill-defined political ideology that is both authoritarian and nationalist.
• Fascism emphasizes the right of the chosen people to dominate everyone else.
• Fascists believe everyone should serve the nation-state as the embodiment of the popular will.
• Fascism usually arises after a period of political polarization and legislative deadlock.
• Fascism arises from the middle classes, typically accompanied by economic instability which is more threatening to the middle class.
• Fascism mobilizes people through discipline, indoctrination, and physical training.
• Fascists favor eugenics.
• Fascists try to eradicate perceived foreign influences.
• Fascists promote the rule of people deemed innately superior, and purge society of people deemed inferior.
• Fascism emphasizes personal responsibility to the group over individual rights.
• Fascism emphasizes victimhood, and justifies action without constraint against the victimizers.
• Fascists, compared to the general population, tend to be younger and better educated–the type of people more likely to have opportunities blocked by economic instability.
• Fascists use the police and military to enforce order.
• Fascists, using perceived threats to the nation, approve of ignoring human rights and committing torture, executions, assassination, long incarcerations, etc.
• Fascists don’t “seize” power, but once in office they consolidate and expand their power through technically legal means.
• Fascists purge ideas, people, and forces deemed to cause decadence and degeneration.
• Fascism promotes political violence and war to promote national rejuvenation, spirit, and vitality.
• Fascists use paramilitary organizations to commit or threaten violence against opponents.
• Fascists claim their ideology transcends all classes.
• Fascists glamorize the military, and give the military a disproportionate amount of funding.
• Fascists are expansionist, looking to spread their power beyond their own borders.
• Fascists advocate a state-controlled and regulated mixed economy.
• Fascist governments are mostly male-dominated, and traditional gender roles are made more rigid.
• Fascists censor the media to protect the nation state.
• Fascist governments use fear as a motivational tool to control the masses.
• Fascists are hostile to financial capital, plutocracy, and the power of money.
• Fascists criminalize employee strikes and lockouts by employers, and otherwise suppress or eliminate unions.
• Fascists tend to be socially conservative.
• Fascists have a disdain for intellectuals, science, the arts, and academia.
• Fascists often give a national police force almost unlimited power, which people accept in the name of patriotism.
• Fascists make a fetish out of flags and other nationalistic paraphernalia.
• Fascists don’t tolerate dissent.
• Fascism is neither a right or left ideology.

As you can see, fascism can’t be tied to either the Republican or Democratic party. Some characteristics seem to fit more with either liberal or conservative ideology; you could go through each characteristic and say, “This is more likely with conservatives” and “This one is more likely with liberals.” But the whole package doesn’t fit anything in the American political scene.

Godwin’s Law, also known as Godwin’s Law of Nazi Analogies, states that, given enough time, in any online discussion—regardless of topic or scope—someone inevitably makes a comparison to Hitler and the Nazis. But Godwin’s Law also applies to political discourse in other areas–on the floor of Congress, on news channels, on radio, in newspapers, on Facebook, and at the office water cooler. To press their point, people can’t help themselves–they just have to make a comparison to Hitler as the ultimate evil.

In so doing, they trivialize what the Nazis did. And they make themselves look stupid.