"Don't worry, I got this!"
I thought it proved useful to summarize the bi-partisan, pundit consensus as to
the existential threat posed by the Republican party. In a similar vein, with it looking increasingly likely that
Paul Ryan will seek to be the new House Speaker, and with much
fawning press coverage over Mr. Ryan, I thought it useful to note that Mr. Ryan's unique blend of duplicity and incompetence has already been extensively discussed:
As Vice Presidential Candidate, Paul Ryan is widely credited with making the most dishonest convention speech ever:
I’d like to talk, instead, about what Ryan actually said—not because I find Ryan’s ideas objectionable, although I do, but because I thought he was so brazenly willing to twist the truth.
At least five times, Ryan misrepresented the facts. And while none of the statements were new, the context was. It’s one thing to hear them on a thirty-second television spot or even in a stump speech before a small crowd. It’s something else entirely to hear them in prime time address, as a vice presidential nominee is accepting his party’s nomination and speaking to the entire country.
Paul Krugman, who has written repeatedly and scathingly about Paul Ryan, memorably called him
"The Flimflam Man":
The Washington Post put a glowing profile of Mr. Ryan on its front page, portraying him as the G.O.P.’s fiscal conscience. He’s often described with phrases like “intellectually audacious.”
But it’s the audacity of dopes. Mr. Ryan isn’t offering fresh food for thought; he’s serving up leftovers from the 1990s, drenched in flimflam sauce. . . .
So why have so many in Washington, especially in the news media, been taken in by this flimflam? It’s not just inability to do the math, although that’s part of it. There’s also the unwillingness of self-styled centrists to face up to the realities of the modern Republican Party; they want to pretend, in the teeth of overwhelming evidence, that there are still people in the G.O.P. making sense. And last but not least, there’s deference to power — the G.O.P. is a resurgent political force, so one mustn’t point out that its intellectual heroes have no clothes.
But they don’t. The Ryan plan is a fraud that makes no useful contribution to the debate over America’s fiscal future.
Steve Benen recently noted:
Look, among prominent, national political figures, Paul Ryan is one of the most far-right officials in recent memory. The reason he’s seen as a potentially unifying force among House Republicans is that Ryan is conservative on practically everything – he’s a far-right culture warrior who worked with Todd Akin to redefine “rape” and he’s the architect of a ridiculous budget plan that scraps Medicare while cutting taxes for the wealthiest of the wealthy.
Jonathan Chait:
The thing about Ryan is that he has always resided in a counter-factual universe. He is a product of the hermetically sealed right-wing subculture. Many of the facts taken for granted by mainstream economists have never penetrated his brain. Ryan burst onto the national scene with a dense, fact-laden attack on the financing of Obama’s health-care bill that was essentially a series of hallucinations, pseudo-facts cooked up and recirculated by conservative apparatchiks who didn’t know what they were talking about or didn’t care. His big-think speeches reflect the influence of fact-free conservatives and collapse under scrutiny.
and:
Ryan is specific about two policies: massive cuts to income-tax rates, and very large cuts to government programs that aid the poor and medically vulnerable. You could call all this a “deficit-reduction plan,” but it would be more accurate to call it “a plan to cut tax rates and spending on the poor and sick.” Aside from a handful of exasperated commentators, like Paul Krugman, nobody does.
The persistent belief in the existence of an authentic, deficit hawk Ryan not only sweeps aside the ugly particulars of his agenda, it also ignores, well, pretty much everything he has done in his entire career, and pretty much everything he has said until about two years ago.
Joan Walsh points out:
But there’s one final reason that Paul Ryan’s hailing a “culture of work” and stigmatizing government assistance is particularly offensive. This is the same Paul Ryan whose family’s construction firm fattened itself on government contracts; who received Social Security survivor benefits after his father died and used that public money to put himself through college; who then went on the government payroll and has never done anything other than attack poor people while on the government’s dime; who makes $174,000 a year in taxpayer dollars while keeping himself camera-ready with his PDX90 routine (Paul Ryan shirtless is still one of the top prompts on Google); who enjoys $350 bottles of wine thanks to lobbyists; and then dumps on the lazy, immoral inner-city poor with gambling addict and fellow government assistance recipient Bill Bennett.
Former Reagan economist
Bruce Bartlett:
Distributionally, the Ryan plan is a monstrosity. The rich would receive huge tax cuts while the social safety net would be shredded to pay for them. Even as an opening bid to begin budget negotiations with the Democrats, the Ryan plan cannot be taken seriously. It is less of a wish list than a fairy tale utterly disconnected from the real world, backed up by make-believe numbers and unreasonable assumptions. Ryan’s plan isn’t even an act of courage; it’s just pandering to the Tea Party.
Kevin Drum:
Ryan isn't a wonk. He's a marketing weenie. And here's a pro tip from a fellow member of the tribe: When you see a PowerPoint presentation, usually the first thing you should do is put your hand on your wallet. I think that's good advice in Ryan's case too. He's not wonking out, he's trying to sell you something.
Matt Taibbi is particularly, and uniquely, unimpressed:
Paul Ryan, the Republican Party’s latest entrant in the seemingly endless series of young, prickish, over-coiffed, anal-retentive deficit Robespierres they’ve sent to the political center stage in the last decade or so, has come out with his new budget plan. All of these smug little jerks look alike to me – from Ralph Reed to Eric Cantor to Jeb Hensarling to Rand Paul and now to Ryan, they all look like overgrown kids who got nipple-twisted in the halls in high school, worked as Applebee’s shift managers in college, and are now taking revenge on the world as grownups by defunding hospice care and student loans and Sesame Street. They all look like they sleep with their ties on, and keep their feet in dress socks when doing their bi-monthly duty with their wives.
Lastly, Andrew Sullivan on
"The Lies and Lies and Lies of Paul Ryan":
And so you have an alternative empirical universe in which a deeply radical platform that would transform Medicare for the young, while retaining it in full for the biggest generation, and increase the debt for two more decades, is portrayed as a multicultural rescue of Medicare and the economy. Even Fox News tackled Ryan's "blatant lies and misrepresentations." . . . . When a Randian is speaking of a priority for the poor and weak, you know you have a world-class bullshitter.
In sum:
Hold on to your seats, folks! Contrary to the lazy and craven reporting of Chuck Todd and his ilk, Paul Ryan is not some statesman-like figure who is going to bring veracity and moderation to the Republican House. BTW: Jon Perr also covered this subject very well and in more detail in his DKos piece titled
"The Comical Cult of Paul Ryan." It is worth a full read.