The Weekly Sift

This week everybody was still talking about Paul Ryan, and the Romney campaign tried to muddy the waters by arguing that President Obama — and not Paul Ryan — is the real threat to Medicare.

If you’re not plugged in to the world of untraceable viral emails and fake people calling in to talk-radio shows, you might not realize just how involved the Romney Medicare deception is or how effective it could be. It’s a real lesson in propaganda that I’ll try to unravel in “How Lies Work”.

This week’s other main article is a follow-up to last week’s I Read Everything About Paul Ryan So You Don’t Have To, which became the second most popular Sift post of 2012. In capturing the buzz about Ryan, I followed the mainstream pundits into a trap: I ignored Ryan’s record as a radical culture warrior.

That’s the mistake the public made with the Tea Party in 2010; we bought their “Taxed Enough Already” schtick and were surprised when their vision of “small government” included forced transvaginal ultrasounds. So like The Who, I’m praying we don’t get fooled again. That’s why this week’s other main article is “Paul Ryan: Veteran of the War on Women”.

The Ryan article should be up in a few minutes, but “How Lies Work” will take a little bit longer.