Journalism

See, all it takes is a reporter willing to ask an obvious question, and the whole R/R/R* lie machine breaks down. Sadly, the reporter was interviewing Eric Cantor, and the publication is a magazine no one reads. Still, it was like shooting ducks in a barn door:

FORTUNE -- House Majority Leader Eric Cantor is promoting the Romney-Ryan ticket as a team offering a credible, detailed plan for turning the country around. But some of those details proved troublesome in a sit-down interview with Fortune on Thursday.

The Virginia Republican said his party is laying out a path to salvage the long-term solvency of Medicare. And he took on President Obama for engaging in "scare tactics" over those entitlement reforms in the Ryan-authored House GOP budget. "At the same time, he is the one who is taking massive amounts of cash out of very popular programs like Medicare Advantage and the prescription drug program," Cantor said. "This directly impacts seniors."

It's a point that Ryan himself made in his speech accepting the vice presidential nod on Wednesday night. Attacking Obama's health care reform law, Ryan said its "biggest, coldest power play of all" targeted seniors for $716 billion in cuts. But Ryan's own budget counted on those same savings, which in fact would be squeezed from reimbursement payments to hospitals and insurers. Asked about the inconsistency of Ryan attacking cuts his own plan embraced, Cantor begged off. "The assumption was that, um, the, the, ah, again — I probably can't speak to that in an exact way so I better just not," he said...

In the same vein, the impossibility of Romney's budget-balance promise (and by "impossibility" I mean "out and out lie") has been pointed out, easily; but in the so-called mainstream media? Virtual silence:

The cuts Romney says he’ll make during his presidency come largely from non-military, non-entitlement spending, which accounts for about one-fifth of the federal budget. Those savings would come from slashing Medicaid and other programs for low-income people, although the campaign has been light on details.

Parsing his domestic cuts with his deficit-raising policies on health care, taxes and the military — all of which are central to his case against a second term for Obama — it’s unclear that Romney would be able to make strides toward a balanced budget during his presidency. If the Republican nominee enacts the budget policies he has specified, the federal deficit is likely to surge, not diminish, while he’s in office.

A Romney spokesperson did not immediately return a request for comment.

And there it is: if people who plan to vote for The Rominee got news from sources other than Fox and the rest of the RWS™, the lies and contradictions would get a little play. But that also assumes the legitimate media (oxymoron alert) had reporters willing to ask questions like the Fortune person did, or point out the obvious like TPM did. Which, mostly, they don't. So people like a recent commenter will continue to think Mitt Romney is "squeaky clean" and Paul Ryan makes sense when he speaks.

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*Amusingly, around here, R/R/R are the ones who remove the garbage.