There’s something just so weird about Ryan’s super-masculine reg’lar guy routine (from the Hugh Hewitt marathon interview):
HH: I got so much email when I referred to it as Miami University of Ohio, and you know, I’ve got ties to Miami University, but they wanted me to call it The Miami University. You’re Delta Tau Delta, right?
PR: Right, right.
HH: All right, now I spent a few nights in the rack room at the Pike House in the 70s, and you guys had some fun at Miami. Do we have to worry about any stories coming out of Oxford?
PR: No, no, normal clean-cut college fun. You know, the rack room that I had slept in is about, I don’t know, you could hit it with a hard ball from the Pike rack room. It’s maybe a hundred yards.
schrodinger's cat
I have no idea what this means.
Gin & Tonic
DTD. That explains a lot.
Bulworth
@schrodinger’s cat: Good, it’s not just me then.
taylormattd
This is the beginning of all gay porns, btw.
Poopyman
Now, I was in school at Enormous State U about a dozen years before Little Paulie was at MoO, but IIRC the frat guys were all douchebags. Just sayin’.
schrodinger's cat
Ryan is a bs artist, he is even worse than Romney, Romney lies out of political expediency, Ryan lies about things that nobody really cares about, like his personal best marathon time.
Ash Can
@schrodinger’s cat: Me neither.
dr. bloor
“Rack room?” Does this mean “clean-cut college fun” is code for “we wore tighty-whities?”
Jim, Foolish Literalist
I was thinking yesterday that the person to compare Ryan to isn’t Palin, it’s McCain. Both of them carefully crafted a fraudlent media image, and both of them have absolutely persuaded themselves that that image is the reality. McCain sees himself as a soldier-statesmen who stepped out the pages of Tacitus by way of the Philadelphia 1775-89. Ryan is the boy next door, star quarterback, class president and national honor society all grown up. McCain’s image survived Palin because of daddy issues, I think Ryan may not survive the glare of the spotlight, even though David Gregory will always fantasize about conducting an interview while they grunt and sweat through a PXwhateverthefuck work out together.
Laura
Everything about him is so boring he couldn’t even go to an interesting frat.
Tractarian
This is brilliant actually. It makes absolutely no sense, so it’s impossible to verify. Take that, fact-checkers!
Omnes Omnibus
@Gin & Tonic: No, it does not. Henry Wallace, William Brennan, Peter Buck, and Dalton Trumbo were Delts. Okay, so was Breitbart, but still….
Dennis SGMM
@schrodinger’s cat:
Considering that Ryan comes from the cohort that characterized the things that went on at Abu Ghraib as not rising above the level of fraternity hazing, Ryan’s college days may be one of the many subjects that the Republicans should leave unvisited.
redshirt
It’s a frat. So “rack room” = “Room where we engage in clandestine homosexual acts laced with violence”.
Zifnab
@Poopyman: Meh. The frat guys at my Uni weren’t any worse than anyone else. They were a little more clichish, but not shockingly so.
It’s not the frats you have to worry about generally, it’s any given entitled assholes. The handful of frat guys I hung out with tended to be too laid-back to bother anyone.
Raven
The google is your friend:
MattF
We’re going from ‘less than meets the eye’ to ‘flash in the pan’. Pretty soon, ‘over the railing and into the ditch.’
TooManyJens
Since the marathon thing didn’t work out, Paul Ryan is falling back on casually suggesting that he can throw a baseball further than most people? Whatever. Pretty pathetic.
Violet
Is a “rack room” where they put new recruits on the rack as part of hazing? What is a rack room?
JGabriel
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Good column from Gail Collins today:
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Hey, look, there’s that 27% again. John Rodgers & Tyrone are still fucking geniuses. Plus, the kitten snark is pretty good.
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Suffern ACE
Why does he feel the need to distance himself from the Pike Rack Room? Why did they make him sleep 100 yards away from it?
Raven
They can be some nasty fuckers. Friend of mine’s wife defended a guy in Berkeley that got jumped by a bunch of Cal rats and killed one with a knife. He’s in for 25 or so.
AliceBlue
At my alma mater, everyone referred to DTD as the Down Town Drunks.
Southern Beale
Oh gawd and now there’s the whole BS “I climbed 40 Colorado mountains” shtick, and the Romney campaign having to clarify that he meant he “made close to 40 climbs,” not that he scaled close to 40 mountains and what’s the fucking difference anyway?
Raven
Another:
Our rack room was on the third floor of our house, and had the rows of racks (beds) and a bathroom. The gigantic exhaust fans made great noise, and it was quiet 24 hours a day (unless a fraternity did a Rack Raid, but that’s another story…), so I loved to go up there and nap between classes. I had my room downstairs that I shared with two other girls, and it had our sofa, desks, dressers, closets, etc. Then each girl had a rack upstairs–most were bunk beds, but a row in the middle had no bunks above them. Those were coveted and willed to younger sisters at Senior Wills.
We all had our alarm clocks next to our beds or somewhere at the foot or head of them (the cords could be very hazardous). Strangely, you only heard your own alarm clock every morning–I have no idea how I tuned the rest out, but I did. You were only allowed to push snooze one time out of courtesy for your neighbors (The fraternities had their pledges do “wakes”–they had a list of what time to come wake up the actives, which was pretty interesting if a girl was shacking with them.). Also, it was chilly up there in the winter because we always had one window cracked (to keep the air flowing supposedly), and “warmish” in the fall. People were actually sick less frequently by using the rack room than they were if they shared a sleeping room with a roommate–it seemed like the whole air-flow thing may actually have had a purpose.
To answer the other question–when you shacked at a fraternity (since no guy ever would shack at a sorority!!), you either stayed downstairs in his room or he would put up blankets and sheets around his rack for a little extra privacy.
JustMe
No, no, normal clean-cut college fun. You know, the rack room that I had slept in is about, I don’t know, you could hit it with a hard ball from the Pike rack room. It’s maybe a hundred yards.
Normal people who had normal fun in college don’t talk like this. He is talking like how he thinks a “regular, fun-loving guy” in college talks about his days as an undergrad.
Richard
I’m guessing that Ryan has told a lot more exaggerations and tall tales about himself than just that marathon story. I’ll bet his stories about hunting are puffed up too.
Sly
Delta Tau Delta: Come for the shitty parties, stay for the date rape.
someofparts
JC Christian having fun with Lyin’ Ryan – http://patriotboy.blogspot.com/
beltane
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: But McCain really was a POW in Vietnam. Paul Ryan maybe once saw a movie about POWs. That is the difference and it is a very big one.
Mudge
I wonder if Ryan’s hero (Ayn Rand is his heroine, and maybe his heroin) is Benjamin Harrison, ranked 33rd best president ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_rankings_of_Presidents_of_the_United_States) and Miami Univerity graduate. He is ranked one above George W. Bush (34th).
Turgidson
So I’ll go ahead and assume that the accurate distance between these two points is maybe a hundred miles.
schrodinger's cat
@Richard: And his fish stories are fishy!
Jim C
It’s probably because I was in a fraternity in the 80s, but I understood what they were talking about.*
“Clean-Cut College Fun,” though … you say you ran a sub-3 hour marathon? Um, sure Paul Ryan, you certainly have never given any reason to doubt this description. No, sir.
*A rack room was a sleeping room in a fraternity house. It was a large room filled with bunks, usually.
catatonia
Followup questions for Lyin’:
“What kind of balls do you mean? Brass balls? Did it take a number of brass balls to hit the rack room? Were you throwing the brass balls, if indeed brass balls they were, from the Pike rack room or toward the Pike rack room?”
And so on. I wonder how many times it’d take before the fair-haired phony got it.
Violet
@Southern Beale: Oh, good! I’d been wondering when the “40 fourteeners” thing would be checked out to see if it was a lie.
Citizen_X
This shit drives me nuts. Administrations–at “The” University of Ohio, and “The” Univerasity of Texas, as well–can demand that their rebranding efforts trump common English usage, but they can go piss up a rope. But now alums (or, the Fox News-watching ones, at least) are demanding the same? Fuck off, please.
danah gaz
@schrodinger’s cat: Seconded.
Paul Ryan and Hugh Hewwit are speaking gibberish.
This FP post by extension, is gibberish.
I don’t know why it deserves screen real-estate.
/head-scratching
jl
Using the most rigorous AP fact check standards, these claims are easy to fact check, even if their meaning is impossible to decipher.
Ryan lied about a 20 year old marathon time, and Romney once tied his dog to roof of a car on a trip and the dog shat all over the place.
So, FALSE, exploding pants and fifty Pinocchios!
Gin & Tonic
@Omnes Omnibus: Every Delt I knew was an asshole.
? Martin
@Southern Beale:
We covered this yesterday, actually. There’s a huge difference in difficulty among the 14ers. CO has 54 of them, so climbing 40 means you’ve really covered the bulk of them – including the more technical climbs. Some are really quite easy and safe to climb and you can easily drive to them – others are backcountry hikes with relatively technical climbs and claim lives every year.
I would have no problem doing Longs Peak 40 times. Most people of average fitness could as well. You can drive to the trailhead at about 9500 feet and there’s a good trail to the summit that will have hundreds of people on it. Other peaks require hiking miles to the base of the mountain, and there’s no maintained trail and require climbing gear to summit. Entirely different ballgame.
Dennis SGMM
File under shameless ball-licking, John Andrews in the Denver Post:
Here’s a link for those with their gag reflex under control.
Violet
Ryan admits he made up his marathon time. First he says he thought that was his time:
Then he admits he made it up:
It’s not good enough for him to just say he forgot his time. He has to make up something. What else has he or will he just make up?
Lest we forget, in the original interview, he was pretty adamant that he was fast.
Note Ryan lies, doubles down and then boasts. This is not a casual lie. In his most recent statements he’s lying about his lies. Lying liar, Paul Ryan.
piratedan
@AliceBlue: aye, we were known as such at Carolina… but you guys have to understand, Fraternities are usually not a one size fits all and house chapters vary from campus to campus, just like anything else. Yeah we all have our stereotypes that we have to live down, but in between some incredibly awesome parties, we did the odd bit of community service now and then (hungover as hell, but we did it all the same).
Omnes Omnibus
@Gin & Tonic: Only a few in my house were assholes. YMMV.
jimmiraybob
At least he didn’t reference swinging the ole man python. Which, of course, leads me to think he’s faking the manly thing.
Jewish Steel
Put me down as baffled too.
? Martin
@Raven:
Huh. Maybe that’s what worked for me. I pretty much lived in the girls dorm my last two years in college. The guys were all assholes, but it was really nice over in the girls dorms. They were very, er, accommodating and stuff.
Dennis SGMM
@Violet:
I was a runner for a long time until I hyper-extended a knee.
That was more than twenty years ago and I still can recall every run I was in and the time I set running it. Ryan is so full of shit that he can no longer differentiate shit from sandwich spread.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Violet: another point
“I had a…” makes it sound like he ran a few marathons, as does the phrase “personal best”. He only ran one. I can’t run more than a few yards at a time, but I’m pretty sure people know if they’ve run (completed) four marathons, or one marathon and a few 10K’s, even twenty years ago.
He’s a very deliberate fraud.
jl
@? Martin: Agreed. If Ryan is lying or being misleading here, it is indication of a pathological liar, dedicated con man, or a delusional fantasist.
Climbing highest peak in CA, Mt. Whitney, is long day hike on a maintained trail with pit toilies. You want to do North Palisade, that is real rock climbing. Totally different.
I have done Mt. Whitney, and I can guarantee you that means nothing about climbing some of the other high peaks in CA.
Captain Haddock
I have no idea what any of that means.
Mandalay
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Maybe so, but the only interesting thing in this otherwise vile puff piece on Paul Ryan is that in high school he was also voted Biggest “Brown-noser”!
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2187217/Paul-Ryan-How-Mitt-Romneys-choice-went-high-school-geek-vice-presidential-candidate.html?ITO=1490
Surprise, surprise.
Dennis SGMM
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Ha! Great minds.
piratedan
@Omnes Omnibus: true, was my experience as well as a Delt, some were awesome, some good people and always a few folks that made you wonder why they were there. Knew that there were some folks that hated the “greek experience” others who simply dealt with it on a case by case basis. There are some incredible chapters and some that are quite less than… and to sly…. I don’t doubt there there were folks who would do some terrible and desperate things in order to get into some girl’s pants, but you didn’t have to be a greek or a fratboy to be that kind of asshole.
Violet
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Yes, his phrasing of “I had a” makes it sound like it’s one of many. Not, “my one marathon, my time was in the ___ range”.
Ryan is a facile liar but has never been called on it much before this. That’s allowed him to continue to lie with abandon about anything he wants. If the Romney campaign is spending time “clarifying” Ryan’s lies, that is not good for them. And habitual lying is not the kind of thing Ryan can change overnight. It’s ingrained. Now that the press is tuned in to the fun game of checking Ryan’s lies, with the help of outraged runners, climbers, whoever, his lies are going to undergo much more scrutiny. I can’t wait to see how he does in the debate with Biden. I wouldn’t be surprised if Biden has, “You are lying, Mr. Ryan” or something like that up his rhetorical sleeve.
rlrr
@? Martin:
They were very, er, accommodating and stuff.
Dear Penthouse…
TooManyJens
He’s trying to connect with the interviewer, who says that he visited this particular frat house in the 70s, by saying “oh really, I lived right near that house you visited.” Throwing in the gratuitous “I can throw a baseball 100 yards (which not many people can do)” subtext was probably just a reflex for a guy who is always trying to impress people with how athletic he is.
AliceBlue
@piratedan:
Totally understood. I never assumed that ALL Delts were drunks–just ours.
GxB
@Dennis SGMM: Case of Laxatone to the Denver Post stat.
SatanicPanic
@Southern Beale: I don’t buy that story at all. Besides, he’s supposed to be mister numbers man, but he can’t give us an exact count? Any normal person would be keeping a list. Mountain wonk he is not.
Omnes Omnibus
@AliceBlue: Oh, drunks, sure – except for the 4 or 5 guys who didn’t drink at all, but not assholes.
SatanicPanic
@jl: Have you seen the mountains he claims as his favorite? Pyramid Peak and Capitol Peak. Those are class 4’s and the routes look scary. Someone on the climber website that James Fallows linked to pointed out that he’s got to have summit pics. If he can’t produce pics for a couple he is lying.
Violet
@SatanicPanic: My take is, he went to Colorado in the summer as a kid, like lots of families do on vacation. He hiked a couple of the easier fourteeners, some of them more than once. He’s gone back as an adult and also with his own family.
At some point he may have climbed some of the slightly harder ones, but not technical climbs. Just ones that take a bit more effort and aren’t a simple day hike. So, add in 1-3 of those. Then back to the easier fourteeners, like the kind you can drive all the way up or most of the way up.
He figures he’s “climbed”one or two of the fourteeners a year…that makes “almost 40” since he’s been going to Colorado for 20 years. That’s how he got that number. Sheer pulling it out of his ass.
SatanicPanic
@Violet: Sure, I don’t doubt that he’s hiked a few, maybe even a couple dozen. That’s cool. I wish I had. Why he feels the need to exaggerate is what gets me.
jl
@SatanicPanic:
I am a hiker and a camper, not a climber. A couple of my Rocky Mountain relatives introduced me to rock climbing on some learner routes in the Tetons, and it was interesting to learn the basics, but I enjoyed it but totally not interested in taking it up beyond an intro.
So, I have no idea how to judge the difficulty of a peak, except that if it is anything beyond a rock scramble, I will never do it. I took North Palisades as an example since I heard a climber talking about it once.
SatanicPanic
@jl: Me too, just a camper and hiker, but I was curious so I read up on mountains. Check out the pic at the bottom of the wiki entry- that’s the easiest route–
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitol_Peak_(Colorado)
? Martin
@Dennis SGMM: Yay! So as someone who has climbed 14ers, I’m a mountain man, backbone under pressure, conquerer of worlds! Pff.
A few months ago I got an email from my aunt. It was a photo of my 10 year old cousin once removed (I think, I forget how those things work) summating his first 14er, led by his 62 year old, moderately arthritic schoolteacher grandmother.
There’s a gift shop and parking lot at the summit of Pikes Peak where they sell all kinds of rugged individualist, mountain men pens and coffee mugs.
We need a bit more detail before we can declare Ryan as the second coming of Jedediah Smith.
Suffern ACE
@TooManyJens: Or someone who just isn’t that good at actually reckoning…he probably throws the ball 30 yards and thinks its 100. Just like he reckons he’s balanced the budget when he’s cut taxes by levels greater than than total of any spending cuts he’s proposed. He throws thirty years, misses by a mile.
Woodrowfan
yeah, frats vary by campus and chapter. Mine was full of theater majors and some stoners so it was pretty laid back. Always thought the frats at Miami were douchbags though…
TooManyJens
@Suffern ACE: That can happen when you don’t really care about whether what you’re saying is true.
Another Halocene Human
@Mudge: wow, I forgot Benjamin Harrison even existed.
MoeLarryAndJesus
When I was in college Delta Tau was known as the frat for hard-drinking jocks, and for one other nauseating anecdote.
One of Delta’s initiation rituals involved a group of pledges forming a circle around a cracker and masturbating. They were supposed to aim for the cracker at their moment of Rafalca.
And the guy who finished last was supposed to eat the cracker.
I’m not saying Paul Ryan ate the cracker, but maybe his pro-life views come from a very strange place.
MoeLarryAndJesus
Oh, and Paul Ryan climbs mountains the way he used to walk to school – uphill both ways.
Another Halocene Human
@piratedan: Yeah, but if you aren’t in the frat (or on the football team) that at least takes “brass ones” to go off and date rape solo. Being a rapist in a frat means having 20-100 “Bros” to back your cowardly ass up, spiking drinks, covering it up, intimidating witnesses, and assuaging any sudden bursts of conscience later.
Hoodie
Soon we’ll learn he ate the liver of an injun he kilt. Or maybe it was a leg. Or some pemmican.
Another Halocene Human
@MoeLarryAndJesus: Why haven’t all those anthropologists studying adolescent initiation rituals on fellowships in Papua New Guinea turned their hand-held tape recorders to studying this fascinating primitive culture?
Sounds like a few doctoral theses in there and you wouldn’t even have to pack water purification tablets. (Note: make friends with the frat house chef.)
LanceThruster
@Violet:
“You are lying again, Mr. Ryan” could be the next, “There you go again.”
SteveM
What’s especially fascinating about this is that he does this act and then goes and campaigns with Romney, and every time he does, he and Romney gaze longingly at one another as if they’re going to hump in the limo even before they get to the hotel.
muddy
When I first went to college, I was not familiar with the Greek tradition. Had grown up overseas maybe why. Anyway the first week I was down there, some guy comes up and asks if I am Greek. I was puzzled because I am very fair and freckled. I said, No, I’m Irish. Then we were both really confused, and we both sort of retreated in confusion. The girls from my suite got a good laugh at lunch when I started talking about this witless guy, what a bizarre choice of remark, who would think that, duh…
daverave
@Gin & Tonic:
Every Delt I knew was a total stoner with lots of experimentation higher up the drug scale.
piratedan
@Another Halocene Human: not sure how that scenario is different from any other group that is subject to peer pressure. Does the Frat scenario exist, hell yeah.. just like it does on the band bus or in the Army platoon or even in your own family. Does that mean that I condone it or the vast majority of the solid folks that I know that were in the fraternal system would condone it. No. I would like to think that most of us would condemn or stop any of that if you knew it was going on but I never witnessed it or experienced it so I never had to deal with it up close and personally and you can’t make that call unless you’re there.
piratedan
@Another Halocene Human: not sure how that scenario is different from any other group that is subject to peer pressure. Does the Frat scenario exist, hell yeah.. just like it does on the band bus or in the Army platoon or even in your own family. Does that mean that I condone it or the vast majority of the solid folks that I know that were in the fraternal system would condone it. No. I would like to think that most of us would condemn or stop any of that if you knew it was going on but I never witnessed it or experienced it so I never had to deal with it up close and personally and you can’t make that call unless you’re there.
Another Halocene Human
@piratedan: You’re spinning pretty fast there, buddy.
Nobody is required to go into a frat or a sorority or the military. It attracts a certain kind of person. I knew very well as a young person where there would be hazing and where there wouldn’t. I wasn’t that desperate for friends/identity to do that kind of stuff. I guess Ryan was.
J.D. Rhoades
@Omnes Omnibus:
I, too, was a Delt. Make of it what you will.
J.D. Rhoades
@daverave:
You didn’t happen to go to UNC Chapel Hill, did you?
AA+ Bonds
Both New York Times liberals and Randian Republicans have no idea how Greek life has dwindled on campus even at top schools
Julie
@Raven: I loved ours, too. (Though out west we called them ‘sleeping porches’ instead of ‘rack rooms’ — which is sort of charming and old time-y.) We did ‘wakes’ just like the guys, so no danger of alarm clocks going off, etc. It was seriously some of the best sleep I’ve ever had. Moving into a loud, crappy apartment senior year to make room for the new pledges was a bit of an unpleasant shock.
Also- re: Ryan’s marathon ‘PR’… I keep seeing people on my largely non-political FB feed saying things like, “Don’t fuck with runners, dude. Seriously, just don’t.” Granted, I live in Portland (aka, The Town That Nike Built), so we’re dealing with a population that’s more sophisticated about distance running, but still… people don’t like that story at all, and are calling BS.
J.D. Rhoades
@piratedan:
Have we met, piratedan? Gamma Omega, class of ’84.
AA+ Bonds
@Another Halocene Human:
Most such studies are done by sociologists, cultural anthropologists or a few social psychologists investigating agentic state theory, and are focused on rape and hazing
AA+ Bonds
I mean y’all may have had a lot of fun at your frats etc. but realize that the national organizations are pretty much central funding for rape clubs
Just because you were pegged early as a “woman” and excluded from gang rape activities doesn’t really absolve you if you continue to pay money into organizations that facilitate rape
Mike S.
@Raven,
I followed that trial closely and had I been on the jury I’d have voted for acquittal.
xian
@JustMe: it’s like how Steve Carrell describes sex in the 40 Year-old Virgin
Alex Milstein
So where Ryan slept was about 100 yards from where Hewitt slept, but one could hit it with a hard ball? Is Ryan now saying he can throw a baseball 300 feet? Or hit a baseball 300 feet? If so, that puts him Major League Baseball territory. What a man. Is there any physical feat beyond his ability?
John M. Burt
@MattF: And wind up setting a new record by using up his fifteen minutes in 9:43?
piratedan
@J.D. Rhoades: hell yes Dusty, we’ve met, we’ve even shared beers together. Gamma Omega ’83, left school unfinished, so you can connect those dots :-)