Paul Ryan's truthiness problem

The teleprompter must be lying. Yeah, that's the ticket. In a larger story about Paul Ryan's experience of being vaulted to national attention by his selection as Mitt Romney's running mate, the New York Times' reporter Trip Gabriel homes in the emerging narrative that Ryan's not so big on getting his facts straight. The story is framed the questions swirling around whether Ryan's claim that he's made 40 climbs of Colorado's 'Fourteeners," the peaks over 14,000. The story begins with him and his brother scrutinizing the list.

It was not an idle pursuit. After Mr. Ryan walked back a claim to have run an exceptionally fast marathon, scrutiny has fallen on his other sporting pursuits, including whether he might have exaggerated his mountain climbing prowess. In this case, the brothers figured that over two decades of visits to Colorado, he had climbed above 14,000 feet 'probably 38, 39 times''potential ammunition against the doubters.

Four weeks ago, no one would have questioned such a detail of Mr. Ryan's résumé. But since he joined the Republican ticket, every scintilla of his life, every statement he has uttered has been open to inspection. His marathon claim was debunked by Runner's World, hardly known for political investigations.

His marathon claim, and this mountain climbing one (revised now to "nearly 40 climbs on 28 different peaks") are the tip of the iceburg, and compared to the whoppers he and Romney both tell about President Obama'gutting welfare reform, raiding Medicare, closing GM plants'they aren't politically that important. What does it say about Ryan that he's been pretty quick to come clean on the lies about his personal accomplishments, but refuses to stop lying about the big stuff? Ryan seems to care more about his personal image than how he's representing his party at the top of the ticket.

The campaign rejected the notion that Mr. Ryan's backtracking some details is evidence of a pattern of inaccuracies, which some independent fact-checkers and the Obama campaign seized on after Mr. Ryan's convention speech. This week, Mr. Ryan emphatically denied that he had misled with statements about Medicare, the auto plant or a bipartisan debt commission.

Those lies, Ryan and Romney insistently demand, aren't lies. The facts be damned. Big lies or little lies, it all adds up to Romney and Ryan not being fit to lead.