Paul Ryan Medicare Remarks Edited Out Of ’60 Minutes’ Interview

Paul Ryan’s mother lives in Florida and is on Medicare, but you wouldn’t know that from the 60Minutes interview last night.

Did CBS censor the broadcast version of the interview to further an ideological agenda?

Paul Ryan, the GOP vice presidential candidate, and Gov. Mitt Romney, the presidential nominee, appeared together on 60 Minutes last night from High Point, North Carolina, to give their first joint interview as running mates.

However, 60 Minutes engaged in some very curious editing of the interview conducted by Bob Schieffer by removing a key section of the discussion on Medicare, as HotAir.com revealed.

The Democrats (with the enthusiastic help of the mainstream media) are trying to demonize Rep. Ryan’s actual position on Medicare in connection with the Ryan budget. In the portion of the CBS interview that was aired on CBS, he and the former Massachusetts governor responded to the critics (see clip below).

If you watched the 60 Minutes broadcast, however, here is what you didn’t see:

Ryan added, “My mom is a Medicare senior in Florida. Our point is we need to preserve their benefits, because government made promises to them that they’ve organized their retirements around. In order to make sure we can do that, you must reform it for those of us who are younger. And we think these reforms are good reforms. That have bipartisan origins. They started from the Clinton commission in the late ’90s.”

This is part of the transcript of the 60 Minutes interview with Paul Ryan, but was not broadcast on nationwide television. CBS owes the American people an explanation as to why this key point of the interview was left on the cutting room floor.

Medicare could be one of the key issues in the campaign. That being said, another strange aspect of the presentation of the Romney-Ryan interview is that the entire Medicare discussion is posted separately (and thus making it harder to find) on the CBS 60 Minuteswebsite that purports to contain the full transcript of the interview.

As previously noted, the mainstream media will compliantly run with any negative information or “opposition research”–even if it is irrelevant to the 2012 presidential election–about the Republican ticket that is fed to them by the Democrats. Moreover, Ryan has probably been vetted more closely by the media in the past 48 hours than either Obama or Biden were in the entire 2008 campaign.

Here is the Medicare discussion video from the Ryan-Romney interview on 60 Minutes, minus of course the key section about Ryan’s mother and Ryan’s promise to seniors to preserve the existing system: