  The Week  The VP nominee's big speech at the Republican
National Convention set off alarm bells at fact-checking
operations nationwide. What was he thinking?  The news media was
unusually aggressive in pointing out the, um, "factual
shortcuts" in Republican vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan's
convention speech on Wednesday. But that's because while his
speech was "well-written, well-delivered, and well-received," it
was also brazenly and "profoundly dishonest in ways large and
small," says James Fallows at The Atlantic. Among Ryan's most
prominent distortions: Knocking Obama for a GM plant closure
that happened on George W. Bush's watch, slamming Obama for
Medicare budget reductions that Ryan has also included in his
spending plan, and working the partisan crowd into a lather by
talking up a debt commission report that Ryan himself voted
against. (Read a more thorough rundown of Ryan's prevarications
here, and some conservative pushback here.) How is it that Ryan
"convinced himself it was OK to say things